MrFoolish wrote:I'd be rather cautious of these highlighted stories. You can find examples of pretty much anything if you go looking for them. It doesn't necessarily follow that they are statistically significant.
I wasn't claiming those stories were significant in themselves, I was merely using them as "colour" to illustrate what the statistics are telling us. There's been several weeks over the summer when there have been more Covid deaths in the under 65's than in the over 85's - for instance
the week ending 6 August saw 150 deaths under 65 and 133 over 85.
Compare that with w/e 12 February when the over 85's saw 3x the deaths versus the <65's, and
in June 2020 it was >150x as many.
So the average age of deaths is coming down, and that in turn means the argument about "Covid was just finishing off people who were at death's door anyway" has far less force. Hence the examples I picked out.
MrFoolish wrote:I'd also ask how many people have not received early diagnosis of cancer (for example) as the world concentrated on covid.
The general feeling seems to be that in general, that kind of stuff ended up being far less affected than it could have been (notwithstanding a lot of disruption in certain areas). But not without an awful lot of hard work and some squeaky bums at the worst times. Overall
cancer (LC02) mortality was flat in 2020 over 2019 in England & Wales, and eg 12% (45k) fewer started cancer treatment in the UK in the first year of the pandemic compared to the previous year, but eg
in England the numbers starting treatment in June 2021 were 14% up on June 2019.
Figueroa et al report that in NHS Lothian, numbers of referals of patients with breast cancer symptoms got back to normal within 6 weeks, whereas screening took 6 months to recover, and estimated that 6.3% and 22.3% additional deaths were predicted for 3 and 6-month disruptions respectively.