What are your chances of dying from covid?

Data is not the plural of stories you hear on social media.

It may surprise you, or even offend you, but it is a statistical fact that in 2020 Britain had its twelfth lowest mortality rate of all time:

From the UK Office of National Statistics

Adjusted for age and population, 2020 was the same as 2008, and if you take 2019 and 2020 as a pair, the two years together had a very low death rate. (A low death rate in 2019 meant there were more vulnerable in 2020.) Even if you do not adjust for age, which you should, no year before 2004 had such a low death rate as 2020.

Denying treatment for cancer and heart patients for much of the year and leaving the elderly alone in their panic in nursing homes, pushing more and more into dementia, probably added to the death rate quite significantly too.

This British NGO probably said it most poignantly in relation to the above:

To put these figures into context, in 2020 there were 9,189,000 people aged 70 years and over in the UK, and 412,408 of them, 4.48 per cent, died of causes not attributed to COVID-19. 0.7 per cent of them officially died of COVID-19. It wouldn’t take much to push a population of such elderly and frail people into a life-threatening situation. Lock them up for months on end. Deny them human contact on pain of arrest and fines they couldn’t hope to pay. Withdraw medical treatment. Quarantine their carers. Terrorise them with propaganda about a civilisation-ending disease. Order them to stay at home and avoid the contact of other people like the plague. Tell them hospitals standing empty are on the verge of being overwhelmed. Turn medical centres into places to fear, the breeding grounds of a deadly new disease. That should be more than enough. It has been more than enough.

So much for the UK. What about the other high-death-rate western nation, the US?

There the Centre for Disease Control has released the following statistics on the fatality rates per age for covid, for healthy people and for unhealthy people.

(I received them in table form via the fascinating journalist El Gato Malo. The original source data can be found here.)

American stats are useful because they have quite bad death rates. So no country is going to be much worse than this.

For all Americans, unhealthy and healthy alike, these are the rates, in percentage form, for catching covid and dying from it over the last six months:

For the elderly, around 4 in a 1000 get covid and die. For those under 75, the risk is very low.

What about the folk who are in good health?

Healthy elderly people have the same risk as middle-aged people overall!

Here’s the important slide - the death rate of the sick:

As can be seen, deaths are heavily driven by poor health. This poor health is almost entirely made up of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

If you are not old and unhealthy, you still in a time of unprecedented low death rates.

Yet, we do not complain about the unhealthy people taking up hospital spaces. You can have all the hospital time you want, even if you ignored decades of advice to stop eating food drowned engine oil and sugar.

(I am not advocating we should not treat these people - just as I believe sexually promiscuous HIV patients should receive treatment. But by the vaccine logic of today, such people should not be treated!)

Instead of addressing the terrifying obesity and diet crisis, we want to destroy all our freedoms to force everybody who is sceptical of the authorities who funded the Wuhan lab to inject themselves with a therapy which does not even break the chain of transmission. Much of the world even requires proof of jab to get inside a gym.

Of course there are some healthy, younger people who have died. One of them dies and their story spreads to a 100 000 people. But clearly there are not nearly enough of them to worry about from a policy point of view. Sorry to say, but policy has never till now focused on the exceptions. Otherwise swimming pools and cars would be banned immediately.

And even if masks and lockdowns did help, they are WRONG. Faces equal common humanity. Lockdowns have caused needless death. Starvation and alcoholism has gone through the roof.

Anybody who defends masks and lockdowns is a fanatic who has lost all common sense. And if my kids keep on having to wear masks, such people will sadly soon become my enemies.

In short, the sick and old and fat can get the jab. And then the risks, according to the authorities, plunge down even further. And thus this entire charade should be declared over.

Nations can be like the US in Afghanistan can pretend they are achieving something for another 20 years and then leave an even more wrecked society behind - or they can declare victory now and leave our faces and our bodies and our kids alone.

Clearly, losing weight means covid poses barely any statistical risk to you, unless you are very, very unlucky. And that’s life, tragically. Around 6 million little children die every year of largely preventable disease. Sadly, around 4 million people have died with covid over the last two years. Yet how many people have got thinner over the last 500 days or so? I would guess most have not got healthier. Nor have they really been encouraged to.

Sadly, people die. Sometimes young people die. Somebody once sounded pretty harsh when he said, let the dead bury the dead. But the truth is we all die, and we all have but a brief time on this earth. I want to live.

For all this, however, I am extremely sceptical of us ever getting out of this new normal. Bureaucratic societies do not know how to change course. Regulations govern, not people.

The biomedical security state will not be easily dismantled.

I believe we will not see the lights of humane and ordered liberty aflame in the west for years. Perhaps decades.

Unless…