Silent crisis of soaring excess deaths in Britain is only tip of the iceberg

Covid is low risk now, due to less lethal variants and immunity. It still kills people, typically unvaccinated, elderly and unwell. However, so does seasonal flu and bacterial pneumonia and yet, prior to covid, the hospital never required a negative flu or bacterial pneumonia test, generally didn't wear masks, allowed visitors and would see you in person rather than just a phone appointment.

It still remains to be seen how many people Covid will kill annually over the long term, but currently most of the people dying from Covid are the same people who would usually die of flu or other usually minor illnesses. Flu deaths have been significantly lower than typical, and until recently, we had negative excess deaths. It's now positive again, but as the article says, the current view is that's due to the medical backlog and not deaths from covid.

> because they're still dealing with COVID-19.

They're not really. My partner is an ICU nurse, and the nurses and doctors themselves largely don't think about it much now unless they're treating it, which isn't that common. Covid used to be something they'd be talking to me about every day, now I'm not sure they've mentioned it in the last month. Doctors and nurses are having work parties with none of them wearing masks. Only about 10 patients a day are admitted to the ICU due to covid across the whole country, and most of them are for reasons other than covid. Again, those are usually the patients who would be very ill from flu. Think 85 year olds with comorbidities.

They are still dealing with it in the sense that any time a patient tests positive for covid, they still send a bunch of the staff who had contact with them away for two weeks. Sometimes some of them end up very slightly ill with covid, and a few others test positive without symptoms. Which, again, nobody ever did for flu, despite it killing more than ten thousand people a year. Many of the staff think this is silly, but given the pressure they're working under due to staff shortages, few complain about two weeks off.

> We can do much better than this. Something like 80% of the population has been vaccinated, which is far lower than it could be,

Rising up to about 95% in vulnerable populations. It could always be theoretically better, but if the remaining people are unwilling to take the vaccine, then that's where it's going to stay. The covid vaccine uptake is approximately the same as the seasonal flu vaccine uptake overall, and by demographic, is higher. Overall uptake has wildly exceeded expectations.

If you just look at antibodies instead, 96% of people have detectable antibodies and 70% (likely more) have actually had covid already.

> we aren't giving regular booster doses like we do with the flu.

We don't give everyone the annual flu booster. Most healthy people of working age don't get the flu booster each year. So far, everyone has been offered the vaccination and one or two boosters.

We also currently have a new autumn booster programme being prepared for the Omicron variant.

That means that by the end of this year, Covid will have been around for three years, and vulnerable people who would be eligible for the annual flu vaccine would have been offered five Covid vaccinations.

I haven't had covid and don't want to get it.

Then I apologise

Between how widespread it is, how easily it transmits and how likely it is to seriously mess you up, it's not really low risk. Even if it was low risk, it would still mean that the underlying risk of infectious diseases in our society has gone up. Returning to our previous practices would require our risk tolerance to have gone up, not down.

> [We don't do that with the flu.]

I do think we've historically been too blasé about the flu. We ought to be treating it more seriously than we do -- a lot of those things you say we don't do with the flu are things we perhaps should be doing.

> We also currently have a new autumn booster programme being prepared for the Omicron variant.

It's only available for above-50s. We can do better than this.

Looking up in the thread, I see "Another is the massive. underfunding of the NHS over the last decade" in the first post and things like "No, it isn't due to lack of funding, that's a lie" in the replies.

That definitely sounds like the thread was talking about underfunding/lack of funding to me.

Also, for what it's worth, I think your use of "massively" carries an implication to the reader that funding has increased above and beyond maintenance levels (i.e. that it's gone up in real terms, compared to inflation and demographic changes), as I think most people wouldn't describe increases that are below the level needed to maintain service relative to costs as being "massive increases". You'd probably get less pushback if you described it as "increased in absolute terms", or specifically pointed out that the funding increases have been lower than the underlying cost increases.

I know you did eventually add the "in absolute terms" part, but perhaps consider starting with that next time.

Here's the post upthread I mean:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32540740

"I think your use of massively carries an implication to the reader that funding has increased above and beyond maintenance levels"

The word massive here just means a massive amount of money relative to other levels of government spending changes. From 2010-2020 most govt departments got budgets that went down (austerity), but the NHS was excluded and its funding continued to increase. The amount of money it got is truly massive even on the scale of government.

Trying to talk about "real terms" or "maintenance levels" with something like the NHS is impossible because demand for healthcare constantly increases even with a stable population demographic (some speculate that healthcare demand is actually infinite), as does demand for increased wages. History has shown that there is simply no level of funding increase that the NHS's supporters would ever consider sufficient because they can always claim that the system is strained, could use more people, better paid people, the latest treatments etc. So there's no fixed level that can be identified as maintenance, as one person's maintenance is another's underfunding, which is why all claims about underfunding are impossible to argue with - the statement is literally meaningless.

Related problem: enormous sums of money get allocated to it at a time when every other service gets cuts, explicitly earmarked for upgrades to capacity or buildings and it all gets immediately spent on pay rises in blatant defiance of direct government instructions. So service capacity doesn't change at all but govt can't do anything because too many voters worship the NHS and assume it's perfect except for lack of money.