I just heard that a study showed that of 30k senior living center excess deaths in the UK (not sure in what timeframe) --
10k died of Covid.
20k died of isolation (couldn't get medical care, medicine etc) the quarantine killed them.
We should be ashamed of ourselves, and I include myself for not speaking up louder and educating more people.
Perhaps you could link your source? I have not myself heard what you are saying, and would think it unlikely. There have been a lot of people dying (of COVID) and because of no testing, and GPs certifying death having no information but what they are told by managers, whether COVID appears on the death certificate of those who die in homes of COVID is a bit hit or miss.
I have been interested (and appalled) by the UK situation. Care homes, with many elderly patients, have done particularly badly here because:
- Initially the political imperative was to prevent hospital over-run. We had not enough testing. patients were pushed back to care homes when clinical signs indicated there was no COVID but without explicit testing. It is not yet clear how significant this was, since the decisions were clinical, but we know COVID is good as asymptomatic transmission, and even hospitals had limited PPE, so anyone coming from hospital is a risk.
- Care homes have been under-resourced for decades, and many are very, very, under-resourced now. The poor ones (not enough private patients) had no PPE.
- Care homes, due to bad pay and conditions, have high staff turnover even without COVID, and rely on agency workers who move between homes. These workers were not tested and were a source of asymptomatic transmission. In some cases given that they are badly paid it is possible that they would not isolate given mild symptoms. In fact the UK advice on symptoms did not classify loss of smell and taste as a COVID symptom for 3 weeks after this was known to be a common and diagnostic symptom, so maybe they were following government advice not self-isolating! We had no testing for these people.
The UK is worst in the world for COVID deaths because:
- We let the epidemic tear through our care homes, and had not enough PPE or testing - the two tools that can help limit transmission in institutions.
- We were relatively slow to impose lockdown, initially thinking we would use an epidemic peak to establish herd immunity to case reduction is irrelevant.
- We let many asymptomatic cases from Italy and other places through without quarantine or meaningful checking long after this was known a high risk
Basically, we followed advice along the lines of those who suggest this is just like Flu, and we should let it run, until such time as this was shown to be disastrous. By that time we had a very high infection rate, and so a high overall rate of infections.
I'm still unsure why our death/infection rate has been so high - except maybe because of care home infection exposing old people. I think we can only make guesses now, but we will eventually know.
Now, coming out of lockdown, we are at high risk of a higher second peak:
- Track and Trace relies on private firms who have never done this before training new staff in call centres, and is centralised.
- Testing is still very flaky, with a target respose of 24 hours but rumoured typical response of 3-5 days. I'm not sure of the exact figures here, but 3-5 days is useless, and even 48 hours is bad, for effective contact tracing.
- We have got some 25K (new) contact tracers but the infection rate we have now needs much more than that
- Local public health officers (who have specialised knowledge) have not been consulted, are not integrated into track and trace
- The app is a UK special "better than other countries world beating system" which currently is too buggy to release. The UK went for a more risky centralised system after the other countries trying this abandoned it as too difficult.
- Scientists, not keen in the Uk to make these difficult decisions, are coming out warning they think our infection rate is now too high
- We have no sanctions on self-isolation relying on people's public spiritedness. However sick pay is not available to all and at very low levels, making this a tough decision. Dominic Cummings, clearly caught breaking regulations, unlike any other special advisor in this situation, has not resigned and he and the government have claimed he did no wrong. Everyone can see this is a political decision, and wrong, and it breaks the trust needed to get high compliance with difficult measures. In lockdown trust has been high, as we come out the message is much more difficult to make stick: don't be afraid, go to work, but self-isolate rigorously when somone asks you to do this. The Cummings fiasco just makes this difficult message even harder to make stick.
Sorry, but I'm pretty upset. We have had 3 years plus of disastrous political leadership in this country and look, coming out of lockdown, to have another 4 years of the same with no way to change government.