Thread by @danielgoyal

Some policy makers are using the “Flu” comparison to argue for doing less/nothing to control Covid.

Here I present an argument against such policies.

Understanding the risk of Covid is useful when deciding your own opinion about gov policy.

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[FYI ⬇️ - Flu vs Covid]

https://twitter.com/danielgoyal/status/1485911743142535168

Disclaimer: not a statistician. Clinical academic. This is my understanding of the current risks told plainly. Others better placed to comment further: @Kit_Yates_Maths @chrischirp @dgurdasani1 @JamesWard73 @jburnmurdoch @EricTopol @DrEricDing and others…

Risk to self: the actual risk of death from Omicron is less (vs Delta).

In crude terms, the risk of death from Flu is 0.05% (prob much less).

The current risk from Covid seems to be ~0.2% (vaccinated, confirm, ave)

This is a direct comparison. Real risk is very different.

In making your decision about what is acceptable, it is useful to think about your “walking about risk” is. That is, the real world risk.

Now, everyone will have different individual risk, but we know that high circulating virus means you have a higher chance of catching it…

Therefore your “walking about risk” is probably significantly higher than baseline Delta (Autumn) and much higher than the summer (suppression of Delta), just due to the higher risk of catching it.

But that is far from the whole story. An added risk (higher for some than Omicron) is the reduced access to healthcare.

By allowing Omicron to spread unmitigated the 15% additional inpatient burden, 1500-2000 daily admissions + all the primary care, ambulance and A&E time taken up by this NEW group of patients has led to a significantly more rationed healthcare service.

This is of course The Government’s choice. They have decided there is greater harm (albeit unquantified currently) in suppressing the virus than from the virus itself or the impact on healthcare provision.

Be clear, healthcare is always rationed, to some degree. But what we can see from the additional 15% inpatients and all the rest of the Covid pressures is that the restricted access to healthcare is really profound…