I agree measuring excess deaths is wise, as it also measures those 'killed by the lock down' who couldn't get chemo etc. I am very pro lockdown, but that means we need the clear numbers all the more.
Sweden is currently seeing 20 to 25% more deaths in year that they would in a standard year. Though their covid deaths have slowed so that will likely be around 10 percent by the end of the year if they don't see further waves.
I agree, but realistically we need to use the blunt number of excess deaths, as each country is handling the tracking of covid deaths so differently. And it also helps show if the lockdown caused issues - by comparing against other causes of desth where countries have been tracking covid deaths in a meaningful and repeated way.
As I say, I believe lockdown, esp in the way that NZ/Australia/Vietnam/South Korea did - is the way forward - the more proof we have for that, the better.
I feel UK started too late, didn't put tracking in place, and gave very confused messaging. As an island nation, we should have had a head start in protecting our people but it feels like the economy was put first.
Australia is locking people in tower blocks without warning, including people who were only visiting and thus have nowhere to sleep, including people who have run out of food. Even friends trying to deliver food were turned away.
It's completely insane, unbelievably nasty, truly evil. The virus is not dangerous. I'll repeat: the virus is not dangerous. Excess deaths in the UK, relatively badly hit by a series of bad decisions, matches the famous plague of 1999/2000. You probably don't remember that one, because nothing happened.
NZ meanwhile is now terrified of re-opening their borders in the belief that this NOT DANGEROUS virus can be kept out forever. They have no plan for how to do this without going full-on North Korea. It's also incredibly self destructive. The Virus Is Not Dangerous.
Your post says your wife gets out of breath sometimes after a relatively mild COVID infection. That sucks and I'm sorry to hear it, but I'm not sure that rises to the level of dangerous, exactly. Lots of people end up out of breath just from obesity, which is I guess can be considered dangerous in some ways, but most people probably wouldn't actually describe it that way relative to many other medical ailments.
She is a healthy 40 yo who used to exercise far more than me and do yoga multiple times a week. She's fit healthy and active until she was infected with covid. The breathlessness (sometimes accompanied with massively increased heart rate) also registers as very low blood oxygen levels on her meter. This isn't sometimes, this is after any activity. This is also just one of the symptoms she's had - massive fatigue, numbness, migraines (never had them before) - it goes on.
For someone like her to be breathless - is certainly a sign that something serious can happen to those that catch covid. This, while not happening to everyone is getting more attention now: Coronavirus: Thousands say debilitating symptoms last 'for weeks' - BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53269391
The common theme on the Slack group she is on, is that these are younger and healthy people, and that their covid was not particularly severe.
She also struggles to concentrate for any length of time, even reading a kids book to the children can be too much for her. There is no way she could work right now, and can't even do much more than supervise the kids for short periods of time - I am very lucky to have a flexible employer.
This appears similar to post viral syndrome or ME - and is happening at far higher levels than seen with our more common viruses like the Cold or Flu - though was also seen in people who caught SARs - it was not questioned that a percentage of those who had SARs were ill n months later, I'm sure in time it won't be for covid too. Just in tne mean time it means people believe the only risk is of death and that it will only affect the old and infirm.
The problem is, and I know you will hate to hear this, is that these sorts of anecdotes may or may not mean anything. Symptoms like that have a long history of turning out to be false alarms. That's the reason medical trials have placebos: health is weird and people can cure themselves or make themselves sick from all kinds of ways that logic dictates shouldn't happen, like 'thinking' themselves into it, or just via random chance.
Does COVID-19 cause breathlessness in a tiny percentage of people who caught it? Possibly, it's a respiratory virus after all. Does it cause loss of concentration? Hmm, maybe, who knows. The body works in mysterious ways. But if it can cause that then more or less any symptom at all is fair game.
Seen another way, do people with wifi sensitivity truly feel headaches when wifi is turned on? They certainly believe they do, their suffering seems to be real, yet we know their self-diagnosis cannot possibly be correct ... at least not without significantly rewriting the laws of physics and biology as we know them.
It may be that your wife should lose the Slack group and see a doctor. The risk is that the collection of symptoms she's reporting (which have no known link with respiratory diseases) actually have another cause and COVID is a distraction. It could be an undiagnosed case of something else that needs attention. We know that COVID is being spuriously linked in the media to all kinds of random conditions and symptoms, and especially when in a community of other sufferers, it's possible for incorrect inferences to be made.
That isn't correct. JP Morgan and UBS both analysed this with public data and concluded there was no correlation between severity/length of lockdown and outcomes. Not sure where you got the idea that countries with early lockdowns at 'insignificant excess deaths' in general.
Bear in mind you don't know how many people died OF covid, only those who died WITH it at the time of death, which is a totally different thing. Cases where there are no other obvious causes of death (e.g. amongst the young) are vanishingly rare.
Sweden is currently seeing 20 to 25% more deaths in year that they would in a standard year. Though their covid deaths have slowed so that will likely be around 10 percent by the end of the year if they don't see further waves.