This is my mum some twenty years ago holding her grandson. This weekend you would have had her mentioned. Not by name but as one of the many who make up the statistics on those who were positive for Covid-19 and who died from it.
This is not a rant about numbers instead of people, it is about understanding what those statistics tell us. What I put above is factually true but it is not the whole truth.
My mum is around 70 in the picture above and she was 91 when she died. She has had a slow form of dementia which has slowly taken her from us for over a decade. She has been in a good nursing home for about two years because we were no longer able to look after her at home.
In the summer she started falling and was eventually fitted with a pacemaker and then in the early autumn she was admitted to hospital with a chest infection and while there fell and broke her hip. When she came out though she had a hip replacement she had forgotten how to walk and was very frail. The family at this point started a fight to stop further admittances to the hospital.
She was eventually put onto end of life care. We knew a chest infection would kill her. It would not have taken Covid-19 to do that, a common cold would probably have been as successful. In other words she was going to die anyway and we knew it.
Now when we compare ‘flu statistics with Covid-19 statistics we are not comparing like with like. The ‘flu statistics have cases like my mothers taken out, the covid-19 statistics do not. This means that the death rate for Covid-19 is inflated.
Do not get me wrong, not all deaths from Covid-19 are like my mums. That would be to jump from the heights of naivety to the depths of delusion. Some would, like my mum, have died anyway and some would not have died. If this pandemic is sorted by this time next year we will know how many extra deaths there were from Covid-19. However, my mum will not be one of them!