According to the Mail on Sunday, the COVID dashboard posted on the UK government website has given the public a glimpse of the state of the UK coronavirus epidemic, displaying daily COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths both nationally and regionally since April. 2020 year.
But now that nearly eight out of ten Britons are protected from serious illness thanks to the vaccine, are daily COVID statistics still needed, the Mail on Sunday wonders. After all, as British Health Minister Sajid Javid said of the coronavirus earlier this summer, “We cannot eradicate it, instead we must learn to live with it.”
Experts are increasingly concerned that the endless numbers on COVID are doing more harm than good. Some have declared counting daily coronavirus infections “completely meaningless.”
“It really doesn’t matter how many people get the virus – as long as they are protected,” says Professor Jackie Cassell, a public health expert at the Brighton and Sussex School of Medicine.
Other scientists have warned of the psychological impact of constant reminders of how many people are still getting the coronavirus.
“There are concerns that we are distressing people disproportionately by trying to release these daily updates,” said Professor Robert Dingwall, a sociologist at Nottingham Trent University and a former science adviser to the British government. – People see surges in data, and this often becomes a cause of intense anxiety, which can cause them to unnecessarily limit their daily activities. This makes it difficult for people to adapt to the post-vaccination world for which vaccinations were intended. And if you look more broadly, you find that most infections occur in younger age groups and do not reach vulnerable or older people. ”
Some experts argue that the constant obsession with the numbers for COVID dwarfs the record high demands on the National Health System.
Experts warned last week that the ever-increasing number of diabetes cases in the UK could soon bankrupt the National Health System after official figures showed it was spending more than £ 1 billion a year on treating the disease – a quarter more in five years.
“For some time, I have been concerned that while there has been a lot of focus on COVID numbers, a huge number of hospitalizations for other serious illnesses have passed people by because the data is difficult to obtain,” says Dr. Ron Daniels, intensive care consultant. and CEO of The UK Sepsis Trust. “It’s important to remind people that there are many other critical conditions besides COVID.”
Prof Cassell agrees: “With so many vaccinated and therefore protected from COVID, we need to start looking at the data in the broader context of disease in general.”
So how do you compare the threat of COVID with the threat of the most common and deadly diseases in the country? To answer that question, the Mail on Sunday has begun creating its own dashboard that will display the latest data on some of the UK’s biggest killers, which the newspaper plans to compare with current COVID statistics.
This turned out to be quite a challenge. It quickly became clear that the same level of transparency regarding COVID was not being provided for other diseases.
First, the Mail on Sunday authors note, they needed to decide which diseases to compare COVID with. Some suggested taking other respiratory diseases that are also spreading rapidly, including respiratory syncytial virus.
“There has been a lot of buzz lately about the number of children in hospital with COVID. But anyone who looks at the numbers will see that this number is nothing compared to the number obtained from the respiratory syncytial virus, ”says Professor Cassell.
The number of children under the age of five being admitted to hospital with respiratory syncytial virus is nearly ten times the number of young children admitted to hospital with COVID, according to Health England figures released last week. While the level of respiratory syncytial virus is certainly on the rise and can be dangerous for young children, it does not lead to the massive loss of life that COVID does.
In the end, Mail on Sunday reporters chose the UK’s “biggest killers” for the year according to the Office for National Statistics: dementia and Alzheimer’s, cancer, heart disease and stroke.
The list also included influenza and pneumonia, given that before the coronavirus pandemic, it was these respiratory viruses that claimed the most lives.
The authors then proceeded to search for monthly mortality figures for their selected top five diseases. After consulting the statisticians, it was advised to choose the month before the pandemic so that the data represent the average month on average for the year. But it turned out that this data was never released before COVID. The Office for National Statistics released a monthly report on the top 10 causes of death in England and Wales in July 2020 to provide the context for the impact of COVID on the country. With this in mind, the Mail on Sunday authors decided to use the July 2021 death data to present a direct recent comparison to COVID.
Then there was a problem with hospitalization statistics. NHS Digital publishes the number of hospitalizations for each month, but this data does not provide details of which patients were hospitalized. NHS Digital said that if monthly data are required, a “special request” will have to be made, which can take a month to complete. Instead, reporters found previously published data on total hospital admissions for each month between 2015 and 2020 for all conditions they selected.
The monthly average for July was then calculated based on hospitalizations in July each year since 2015. It has proven even more difficult to quantify the number of Britons diagnosed with potentially life-threatening conditions.
Discussing the imperfection of their information due to the lack of complete statistics, the authors of the publication in the Mail on Sunday write: “The most striking finding is that, despite the overwhelming attention to the dangers of COVID, this disease kills very few people compared to other deadly diseases.
COVID has claimed just over 1,000 lives, while dementia and Alzheimer’s, cancer and heart disease have killed four times as many. Even before the introduction of the vaccine, less than one percent of people infected with COVID have died. Now scientists say that this figure is ten times less.
In comparison, even cancers with good survival rates, such as breast cancer, still have a 25 percent chance of dying.
Dementia is ultimately a death sentence, as the average patient lives no more than ten years after diagnosis.
COVID is currently the ninth largest killer in the UK, but at the peak of the second wave, from November 2020 to February 2021, COVID was the leading cause of death in the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics.
If in July 1,002 people died from COVID, then in January 1,820 people were registered in the UK in one day.
It is also believed that the total number of reported deaths is likely to be an underestimate given that thousands of people died at home during the first wave when tests were not available.
However, scientists now argue that the success of vaccine introduction in the UK has irreversibly reversed this dynamic.
Professor Lawrence Young, a virus expert at the University of Warwick, said: “Thanks to vaccines, we are now in incredibly good health. Obviously, they will never be 100 percent effective, but they are currently preventing a significant number of deaths. ”
But can COVID climb the mortality scale? Experts say many of the thousands of patients hospitalized with COVID will not be as sick as patients with other illnesses.
Prof Young says: “Hospitals are now mostly serving healthier young people who are either not vaccinated or partially vaccinated. This means that doctors are more likely to treat minor breathing problems rather than send patients to intensive care. These patients are usually discharged from the hospital within a few days, although, of course, some do not. “
Meanwhile, according to the British Heart Foundation, stroke or heart attack patients can stay in the hospital for up to five days and are much more likely to go to intensive care.
What cannot be denied is that there are a lot of hospitalizations for coronavirus. More people with COVID were hospitalized in July than those with stroke, heart disease, or the flu, on average in July before the COVID pandemic.
According to hospital data since 2015, only cancer and dementia have led to an increase in monthly hospitalizations. On average, in July, about 7,000 people are admitted to hospitals for heart disease and 8,000 people suffer strokes. Last month in 2021, twice as many people were hospitalized with COVID.
While over a million people contracted COVID in July, roughly 30,000 people were diagnosed with cancer in the last month, and about 17,500 were diagnosed with dementia. But because COVID is contagious, keeping numbers low is key to limiting the spread to others.
Likewise, cancer and dementia cannot be passed on to other people, and it is unlikely that rates will suddenly spike, creating an emergency for the National Health Service.
And that is why, despite the relatively low mortality rate, some experts advocate the daily recording of statistics on COVID.
“The main difference from other conditions is the speed at which things change,” says Professor Oliver Johnson, director of the Institute for Statistical Sciences at the University of Bristol. “There is real value in the daily COVID data because the numbers can and do go up or down by 40-50 percent in a week, while the number of strokes would be much more stable and predictable.”
There is a general consensus that COVID statistics should not be abandoned.
“The COVID dashboard should set the standard for the future,” says Professor David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge.
“It is imperative that health authorities demonstrate their credibility, and one of the main ways to do this is to ensure transparency of the information underlying policy decisions,” agrees Professor Jackie Cassell. – It is becoming increasingly clear that the impact of this pandemic cannot be judged solely by COVID cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Mental health hospitalizations, waiting times for vital cardiac and cancer care, and waiting times for radical surgeries such as hip replacement have had a huge impact. As we strive to recover from COVID, we must keep track of these numbers as well. This way people will be able to understand what is at stake. “
Read also: New study reveals the danger associated with the coronavirus “Delta”
.