Originally Posted by
jon1959
If I understand you correctly, I don't understand you.
Everyone dies - most of us are agreed on that. Everyone dies just once - also generally agreed (not sure about Truthpaste!)
When a pandemic hits the excess death figures must be balanced at a later date by lower than normal death figures (allowing for the graph to adjust for changes to life expectancy etc). The impact of the pandemic when it comes to deaths is premature deaths.
I have no problem with the Covid death figures - where the measure is people who have died solely due to Covid (even then the actual cause of death will not be the virus) and those for whom underlying health factors were triggered by the virus bringing on severe illness and death that wouldn't have happened at that time.
Where excess deaths gets a bit difficult is where the 'collatoral damage' in a stressed health service leads to more deaths of people where the cause had nothing to do with Covid. Even then it is not a simple case of saying that Covid prevention measures and/or swamped hospitals caused those non-Covid deaths - in those cases where the Covid prevention measures didn't actually protect those vulnerable people.
As other posters have said the government could take other action to mitigate the impact - more/less restrictions, clearer advice and information, added screening capacity, having a pandemic emergency plan that was up to date and properly resourced, different budget choices.
I don't think there is any readily available data set for the UK that can separate those strands out. In the absence of that we get more circular arguments that go nowhere.
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