COVID-19: UK tops 150,000 coronavirus-related deaths since start of pandemic after recorded 313 in last 24 hours
The UK's first reported COVID death was on 5 March 2020, less than three weeks before the country went into its first lockdown. The woman, in her 70s, was admitted to the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading and tested positive for COVID-19.
One hugely disappointing aspect of the pandemic has been the unreliability of the numbers. There have been many deaths, we know that, but we don't know how many were entirely due to the virus. It isn't 150,000 but there would be a substantial grey area around any number, a morass of caveats and uncertainties.
Was it all worth it in a cost benefit sense though? We do know the answer that one - no. The overall cost has been too high, both economically and politically. Politically in that the flaky nature of our democracy is now out in the open and the governing classes have a clear idea of what they can do and how to do it without much opposition.
Yet whatever I tell myself and write here about the leadership of Boris Johnson, I'm pretty sure that the Labour party under Keir Starmer would have been even worse. A kind of bad cop worse cop scenario. Looking to the future, that is the real toll.
4 comments:
You could argue that the political toll could have been much worse. Egged on by 'experts' the Government feared television showing two victims to a mattress filling hospital corridors.
Instead the Government funded lockdown(s), Nightingale Wards (a better name than Plague Wards), production of ventilators, daily broadcasts, kickstarted vaccine development and arranged for provision of face masks and hand gel etc. And every step of the way they were criticised by people who knew little and whose reputations were not on the line.
Was the initial response over the top? Maybe yes, maybe no, but we'll not know for years.
Sky News continues the idiocy/lies/propaganda by using the expression "coronavirus-related deaths". The data on these, of course is of no value whatever when the PTB conflate "with" and 2of" every day.bb
Another revelation is the potential for polarisation and entrenched positions throughout society. It seems like a sizeable minority of the people I know are convinced that Covid was a scam and that some kind of conspiracy is the best explanation; they get quite angry about this. Another, larger group seem to think we are all going to die of Covid, and we should blame the other group for this. As previously noted, this division does not seem to map onto other ideological fault-lines.
DJ - I think we already know it was over the top, but politically it wasn't because without being highly proactive, the Tories could have been destroyed for years whatever the outcome. A crazy situation but this is where we are.
Jannie - it seems possible that collateral health damage alone made it all pointless, but that will never be admitted until it doesn't matter.
Sam - yes there is a division which seems quite fundamental. As if habitual scepticism is as unacceptable today as it was in Socrates' day. I wonder what hemlock tastes like?
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