Shmmeee, whoever brought up the original comparison with Italy was wrong, this isn’t some kind of competition. The fact that it’s consistently brought up every time there is bad news about the UK figures is just as bad though in my book.
The fact is all countries will end up suffering badly from this, possibly at different times (different waves etc). If asked though, would I rather be here than Italy, Spain, France etc (as it keeps being sarcastically mentioned by various posters - appreciate this is probably aimed at whoever made the comparison to start with) my answer would be yes. Both for fact that we have remained within our hospital bed and ICU capacities (so far) and the lockdown, which whilst difficult, is no doubt more relaxed than various other countries which will have ultimately have benefited the wider population in unquantifiable ways. In addition I am hoping the furlough scheme will save many businesses from going bust and many hundreds of thousands losing their jobs. Fingers crossed anyway.
Yes, we might have higher spikes of case and death figures but until we know the proportions of the populations that’s had it, whether it can be caught again and until the virus has been dealt with (or better controlled internationally), comparisons are almost irrelevant.
Have we breached ICU capacities which would have caused additional unnecessary deaths ? no. In actual fact we’ve run at a high spare capacity throughout and there are plenty of countries/regions that haven’t been as lucky (outside of Europe I’ve read of japan turning patients away and New York has consistently reached if not breached, capacity)
Finally, and in answer to the earlier, ‘look how bad our actual deaths are’ post, people are forgetting that this is likely to be the same problem across pretty much every badly hit country ie figures will be initially understated everywhere. An example of this was reflected in the WSJ earlier in the month. I didn’t feel it was appropriate to post at the time for the reasons given above but as there appears to be more focus on our inaccurate (understated) numbers I thought it would be useful to share something to show that every badly hit country will be facing exactly the same problem as ourselves.
Italy’s Coronavirus Death Toll Is Far Higher Than Reported
Anyway, this isn’t a ‘look at how great we are’ post, more a ‘we’re all in this same shit situation together’. We know there have been many issues and challenges, some of which we have not dealt with well, however, this is the early stages of a worldwide pandemic of a totally new virus and I expect a majority of countries will unfortunately have similar challenges/issues either now or in the future. Let’s just hope we can find a vaccine or at least all find a way to deal with it as well as possible
ps I hope everyone can enjoy at least some of the last good weather for a few days (suppose were were due some dodgy days). It’s certainly kept the spirits up over the last few weeks
