As a society, we are so divorced from the mechanisms of death that we are forgetting that the people dying of Covid are parents, siblings, grandparents. It is all too easy too look at statistics and be removed from the real lives that are cut short from this dreadful disease
A journalist has just deleted their tweet saying that the average age of those dying from Covid is 82, as if in some way that reduces the tragedy of that individual death.
And to refute the belief that it's 'only' old people - these are the people dying from Covid in the second wave (from @PHE_uk).
Over 1,000 70-somethings
Hundreds of 50-60 year olds and 60-70 year olds
Scores of 40-somethings
And those 82-year-olds mentioned by the journalist?
If they don't catch Covid, they can be expected to live until 90.
Let's take a little review of where we are with UK Covid restrictions.
It wasn't meant to be like this.
A Thread.
With apologies to Nandos.
It wasn't meant to be like this. Remember the Alert Levels (the 'Nandos chart')? The whole idea of that was to set some sort of policy - a roadmap if you will - of how we get out of a national lockdown.
The Sunday Times cover the first wave of the virius, up to May 2020. But the question remains - could it happen again? And what is the Government doing to prevent this?
Matt Hancock told the Commons today, placing Stoke, Coventry & Slough into Tier 2
"In all those areas, there are more than 100 positive cases per 100,000 people, cases are doubling approximately every fortnight and we are seeing a concerning increase in cases among the over-60s"
So, it appears that we now appear to have criteria for placing local authorities into Tier 2:
- more than 100 cases per 100,000 people
- cases doubling approximately every fortnight
- concerning increase in cases among the over-60s
100 cases per 100,000 seems arbitrary, especially considering it doubles the previous rate for interventions: