This graph comes with a couple of important health warnings - please see later in thread - but it's still instructive.
It shows (approximately) what % of all deaths that occurred in England involved COVID-19.
So for example, it was present in about 10% of all deaths age 35-39.
Now for the health warnings. Both relate to a lack of suitable data sources.
HEALTH WARNING 1
I had to use the combined figure for deaths in England AND Wales for 2019 as a baseline for all deaths.
This overcounts all deaths by about 30,000 out of 530,000 (5.6% overcount).
HEALTH WARNING 2
The deaths with COVID-19 cover the whole pandemic, not just a 1-year period. Approx 4,000 out of 128,000 deaths fall outside of 1 year (3.1% overcount).
Those two overcounts almost cancel each other out, so the end ratios should be a pretty close approximation.
Last time we hit 30,000 daily cases (mid-December) we were testing 325,000 people a day. Now, we're testing 1,000,000 people a day.
If COVID-19 is rampant in the community, 1,000,000 tests will turn up lots more cases than 325,000. And that will make the death rate "look lower".
Of course, more testing doesn't kill people! In fact, it can help to save them.
But if you're only comparing KNOWN cases with deaths, then if you find a lot more cases it will magically seem that the disease has become less deadly.
We can also look at the actual deaths.
Those are much lower now than back in December.
So the virus is less deadly now, because of the vaccine and better treatments.
But it may not be as "less deadly" as the headline stats indicate.
We sacrificed and socially distanced and masked and cancelled and stayed away and didn't see friends and family and gave up non-essential shopping and forewent events and films and concerts and trips, and so much more.
Boris Johnson will bin all that effort instantly on 19 July.
See, it doesn't matter how well we behaved, how many hardships we endured, how many sacrifices we made, when the new and improved strategy is "let the virus fall where it will". Because if Boris Johnson's wild eyes-shut bet is wrong, millions will catch it and many will die.
And nobody - not even the Tories - is pretending the situation is under control.
Far from it, in fact. They fully admit that cases could climb to 50,000 a day, even 100,000 a day - but that's ok because, well, it has to be ok. No logic, just empty circularity.
More hilarious Brexit verbal contortions in the Express...
Compare the headline - which a casual glance might suggest was about the UK - and the article itself, which is about how Brexit has benefitted IRELAND hugely (while hurting the UK).
Strange sort of "win".
Why do they write such misleading headlines?
Because they know many (most) of their website visitors won't read the article, but they'll see the capsule summary embedded in the sidebar on other pages.
And that looks like this... Propaganda achievement unlocked!
Here's another example.
Grossly misleading headline? Check.
Article that's the exact opposite of the headline? Check.
An average of 11 people died with COVID-19 every HOUR since Boris Johnson warned us on 12 March 2020 that "many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time".
Probably the most accurate statement ever made by a political leader.
11 people. Per hour.
That's a coach crash every 4 hours. An Iraq war every 16 hours. A plane crash every day. A Titanic sinking every 6 days.
And now he's giving up. Throwing every last scrap of mitigation in the bin, and betting everything on the vaccine.
It's like someone heading for Vegas and staking the deeds to their house on "00" on the roulette wheel.
The gamble *might* come off. But almost certainly we lose.
The problem with having fascists in power is that you have to gain power in order to remove them.
In the meantime, they have the full apparatus of state available to them to cement their own grip on power, and make a future defeat less and less likely.
That's why we have things coming up like...
- Draconian anti-protest laws (1+ person protests punishable by a year in jail or 10 years for defacing a statue)
- Mass voter suppression (voter IDs likely to disenfranchise over a million people)
- Sidelining of parliamentary scrutiny
- Boundary changes that favour the Tories
- Possible neutering of the Electoral Commission
- New curbs on online freedom, including (if the idiots have their way) removal of end-to-end encryption. Sure, that will destroy ecommerce and banking, but it will allow wiretapping, so...