PICTURE OF THE DAY
Maybe 50 or so people would be alive today with better planning
THE testimony from Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnson’s former right-hand man and main adviser, was explosive last week.
It seems that some of the 127,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the UK were avoidable. Not all of the deaths, that would have been impossible, but some.
And we know that most of the deaths happened in the second wave. That second wave we knew was likely to come.
The Government just didn’t prepare properly for this, and then it hit us.
A lot of ordinary people thought that a second wave would come, and it did. Grim, wasn’t it? Eat Out to Help Out probably helped spread the virus.
For Bristol, we had maybe 530 or so deaths in the second wave if the deaths were pro-rata to population. If just 10% of those deaths were actually avoidable, that means maybe 50 or so people would be alive today with better preparation and planning.
For the country as a whole, maybe 8,000 people died who needn’t have died. And if the “avoidable deaths” were more than 10%, say 15%, then it’s even higher at 12,000 people. And 75 or so for Bristol.
Fingers crossed the vaccines work against the new variant which is circulating. It seems they do, and the clever scientists will be working round the clock to develop new vaccine tweaks against the pesky little critter.
Ten thousand or so of the virus, by the way, could fit onto the full stop at the end of this sentence – that’s how small it is. But what harm it can cause.
That a thing so small can stop the world economy in its tracks and kill three million people is a clear warning of the awesome power of tiny things.
John Prentice Bristol