A comment on COVID-19 and individual and population risk from Prof David Spiegelhalter, based on an interview he gave on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme gives the surprising statistic that mortality risk follows the same trajectory for Covid-19 as normal mortality risk, but packed into a shorter time frame.
Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Chair, Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication, University of Cambridge, said:
“On average, if you contract COVID19 you have roughly the same risk of dying over the next few weeks as you normally have of dying over the next year. People who die almost always have accompanying health problems and the risk for healthy people is much lower. "
“So if you get the virus in the next couple of weeks you’re essentially going to cram in a year’s worth of background risk. On an individual level your risk might not be that big, but as a society it is significant – to have a whole year’s worth of death over just a few weeks or months would be huge. Just as having a month’s worth of rain in a day can cause huge floods. "
“The Imperial College London modelling suggests that if the virus was allowed to let rip and we did nothing to reduce its impact, around 80% of the population would be expected to get it and around half a million would die. So if everyone got it, around 600,000 would die – which is about the number of people who die each year in the UK. So if everyone got the virus we’d get a year’s worth of death all at once. Of course anything remotely near that would be catastrophic in terms of the stresses on society. This is why dampening down the curve is vital – because although the risks to an individual are low, when you multiply them up over vast numbers of people then the total impact on society is huge, especially when it comes all at once. "
"If the measures we’ve put in place for COVID-19 work, even if we do get up to having hundreds of deaths per day, then the total number of deaths over the whole population might not be much bigger than normal for the year. Because the people who will die with COVID-19 are mostly elderly and have other conditions, many of them are likely to have died within the near future, but COVID-19 is bringing their deaths forward. Many deaths labelled as COVID may normally have been allocated to another cause a few months later on. The degree of overlap is currently uncertain – we can’t know how many of these deaths would have happened anyway. "
“It’s important we act not because of an individual decision – my own individual risk is quite low, but it is not my risk to me, it is my risk to the people around me which is important, which is why we need social distancing.
More on the supporting data (with tables) can be found on the Professor's blog:
https://medium.com/wintoncentre/does-covid-raise-everyones-relative-risk-of-dying-by-a-similar-amount-more-evidence-e7d30abf6821
and his original analysis at:
It is worth noting that this is the risk of dying, but it is clear that in some cases the post-Covid effects in terms of damage to the body and possibly induced fatigue syndrome are also very serious.
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