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Vaccine
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JohnnyMalaria:

--- Quote from: tom66 on March 21, 2021, 08:40:09 pm ---Why did we decide to assign such a drastic cost to COVID that we did not assume to other diseases?

--- End quote ---

Because it was new and there was no effective treatment. The primary purpose of the "interventions" was to slow down the spread so as to not overwhelm the healthcare infrastructure until such time that treatment/vaccines were able to limit the number of serious infections such that the healthcare system can cope.

Left unchecked, hospital ICUs would have been swamped for much longer than has been the case and more people in need of intensive care with other diseases would have died.

Regarding those poor buggers who only have "around 10 years of quality life remaining" - they've paid into the system through their NI contributions for care and are entitled to receive it.
tom66:
Completely agree that the initial lockdown for a novel disease was justified but once we realised that this virus was essentially a very serious flu - with a fatality rate about 5-10x worse than a typical winter flu and principally affecting the same demographics - then interventions would have been more appropriately targeted at those at risk.  Isolating the whole population beyond the period necessary to evaluate the virus spread and mortality was unjustified, and it also means we need to vaccinate more people.

Also, as a side note, whilst a common belief, NI contributions aren't specifically for the NHS - they go into the general taxation pot.  The number of NI contributions determines your eligibility to a full state pension, but most pensioners today will draw more from this pot than they contributed through NI.
Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: tom66 on March 21, 2021, 09:00:43 pm ---Completely agree that the initial lockdown for a novel disease was justified but once we realised that this virus was essentially a very serious flu - with a fatality rate about 5-10x worse than a typical winter flu and principally affecting the same demographics - then interventions would have been more appropriately targeted at those at risk.  Isolating the whole population beyond the period necessary to evaluate the virus spread and mortality was unjustified, and it also means we need to vaccinate more people.

Also, as a side note, whilst a common belief, NI contributions aren't specifically for the NHS - they go into the general taxation pot.  The number of NI contributions determines your eligibility to a full state pension, but most pensioners today will draw more from this pot than they contributed through NI.

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It's not just the fatality rate, but also how infectuous it is. At some point you start overwhelming the health care system and the number of entirely preventable deaths skyrocket. It's not a linear problem and not even exponential. That's why there were attempts to intervene before the fatal threshold was reached.
coppice:

--- Quote from: tom66 on March 21, 2021, 08:40:09 pm ---Why did we decide to assign such a drastic cost to COVID that we did not assume to other diseases?

--- End quote ---
Look how much the health service has saved in the last year, by not treating huge numbers of people with cancer and other expensive diseases. Nobody will suffer for the premature deaths they have caused there, as it would be extremely difficult to isolate them in the statistics.
Zero999:

--- Quote from: tom66 on March 21, 2021, 08:40:09 pm ---COVID-19 has an IFR of approximately ~0.4% [1] in England.   So, if we take base case assumptions, at a 100% infection rate (more realistic would be 75-85%) and 56 million in England, we'd expect to see cca ~224,000 deaths in England.  Instead, we have seen about 85,000 in England.

So, interventions have potentially saved ~139,000 lives -- although the true figure may only be known by the end of the year once vaccinations are complete and this pessimistically assumes that behaviour wouldn't change at all with COVID present.

The question is was the cost of the interventions worth the numbers saved? At first glance it seems so,  but I would argue it is more difficult to say. The NHS typically spends around £30,000 per person-year saved, and the average COVID patient who dies has around 10 years of quality life remaining.   This seems cold, but every healthcare system, public or private, has to determine whether the cost of an intervention is proportionate to its benefit.   So the maths is fairly simple: £300,000 (total cost of typical intervention for 10 years gained) * 139,000 = £41.7 billion.

The actual cost spent is closer to £300 bn in direct Treasury costs, plus around 4% in GDP loss after the pandemic's effects are over [2],  plus additional unknown costs in the form of permanently lost jobs and social development.   Ignoring the last term as it is impractical to assign a direct cost to it, but we have easily spent around £400 bn on COVID - ten times what we would spend on, for instance, lung cancer, or heart disease.

Why did we decide to assign such a drastic cost to COVID that we did not assume to other diseases?

[1] https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/estimating-the-infection-fatality-ratio-in-england/
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8866/

--- End quote ---
The exact IFR for COVID 19 is unknown because the number of cases is inexact. 0.4% is towards the lower bound of estimates for the UK. It would mean that just over half of the population have been exposed to this date, which is unlikely. The true IFR is likely to be double that.
https://fullfact.org/health/toby-young-ifr-tweet/
https://www.edgehealth.co.uk/post/as-many-as-1-in-5-people-in-england-have-had-the-covid-19-disease

The IFR depends on the quality of care available. Had the health system been overwhelmed, it would have been several times higher and included many more in their 50s.

It's actually impossible to know how many lives COVID-19 has really cost in the UK, at the moment. There's the collateral, due to people not receiving treatment, both due to not seeking it through anxiety of getting the virus and cancelled treatments/appointments.

If we look at the excess deaths, one might think it would paint a more accurate picture, but some people would have just died a year or so early. We will only know for sure, when herd immunity has reached the point to which COVID-19 is no longer causing severe disease and death. Then, number of excess deaths could fall below the long term average, as there will be fewer frail around to die of other causes. Looking at the total excess deaths between March 2020 and March 2025, vs the long term five year average, will probably give us more realistic number lives lost due to COVID-19.

I honestly don't know if the government have done the right thing with lockdown. My opinion has changed from one extreme to the other, throughout the last year. I think we could have kept a lot of things open: shops, hairdressers and beauty salons probably didn't need to close, as with suitable PPE the risk is minimal, but it was definitely right to close restaurants, nightclubs, bars etc. when it became apparent cases were out of control. On the other hand closing more down than necessary might have made people take it more seriously and many businesses would have struggled anyway, as people stayed in more, even if they weren't forced to. Many other countries have done a similar thing, so we're hardly unique.
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