Quote:
The average age of death caused by the Spanish flu was estimated at twenty-eight. Yes, twenty-eight.2 The average age of death caused by COVID19 is around eighty-one – in the UK.3
I feel that the fact [and unusually this fact is almost certainly true] that COVID19 almost exclusively kills the elderly, and almost always the elderly who have many other comorbidities, had to be taken into consideration. But it wasn’t.
Instead of a disease that can wipe out young healthy people, aged twenty-eight, we had a disease on our hands that primarily kills those close to the end of their lives. Children and young adults, even middle-aged adults, even nearly old adults, have been almost remarkably unaffected by COVID19. This was known very early on.
What are the actual figures here? Turning attention specifically to the UK, we have had, at the time of writing, around one hundred and fifty thousand COVID19 deaths. Defined as… those deaths with COVID19 mentioned on the death certificate [whatever this actually means – another whole can of worms].
On the other hand, the number of people under the age of sixty, who have died from COVID19, with no other disease mentioned on the death certificate, is five hundred and forty-two. That was, by the 1st of February 2022.4
This is slightly under one per day during the epidemic. Or, to frame it another way, the risk of dying, for a healthy (or at least believed to be healthy – who knows for sure if they are or not) person under the age of sixty has been one in 79,131. [UK pop < 60 = 42,869,306].5
This risk, however, has been over very nearly two years. So, the yearly risk of death from COVID19 per years is 1:158,263. Or ~ 0.0075% … for this population. Just to give a comparator. The risk of dying from a road traffic accident in the UK, per year, is around eight times higher 6.
1in 20,000 per year vs 1 in 160,000
Thus, for more than two thirds of the population, the risk of dying from COVID19 has been 0.0075%. Instead of one per cent… it has been seven thousandths of one per cent.