Fear Part 1: Death by Lockdown

Fear Part 1: Death by Lockdown

The Covid-19 Coronavirus has officially played a role in over forty thousand deaths in the UK so far. In the latest Office of National Statistics release, measuring death registrations between 7^th of March to 1^st of May, ‘between 7 March and 1 May 2020, a total of 130,009 deaths were registered across England and Wales; this represents an excess of 46,380 death registrations compared to the five-year average, and 12,900 of these deaths (27.8%) did not involve the coronavirus (COVID-19).’

An ONS spokesman, as reported in yesterday’s FT, said that higher number was probably due to  undiagnosed cases, i.e. that the forty thousand Covid-19 fatalities is an under-count. However, he also said that ‘there was some evidence of displacement of deaths from hospitals to people’s homes’. In fact, the ONS report states, ‘over 8,000 fewer deaths were registered in hospitals than in the corresponding period in the weekly average’, while ‘almost 11,000 more deaths were registered in care homes, an increase of 60.5%, and over 8,000 more deaths were registered in private homes in this period’. It wouldn't stretch credibility to say that the mantra ‘Stay at home. Protect the NHS’ has caused people to die. How many more died because they went to hospital reluctantly and too late? Hospitals were reportedly running under capacity. Certainly it seems the pop-up ‘Nightingale’ hospitals were an utter waste of resource. Was ‘Stay at Home!’ actually responsible for more fatalities than Covid-19 itself? Death by lockdown.

Fear. Many people are downright scared. Professional footballers complain of being treated as ‘guinea pigs’ because they are being asked to go back to work – news flash, if they were builders or plumbers or even decorators, they might never have stopped working. Those on ‘pay as you play’ contracts, if you like. Going to the shop, you can never literally adhere to the ‘two-metre’ rule 100% of the time, and there is always a feeling that someone is going to glare or hiss at any encroacher.

But forty thousand people represents 0.06% of the UK population (or, say, fifty thousand is c. 0.08%, if you prefer the logic of the ONS statement). Covid-19 is not all that deadly, however heartless a statement that may seem to those who have lost as a consequence of it. The correlation between GDP and life expectancy is too great to dismiss. Fear kills, whether it be the cause of people staying at home when they should be in hospital, or whether it be the cause of government policy that destroys economies, livelihoods and, ultimately, more lives.