Quote Originally Posted by swaledale View Post
Much as I hate to say it, Tricky does have a point and its one I've made and was finally addressed by the BBC, the fact is coronavirus is not going to kill many more people than would have died anyway from a respiratory disease.

That figure is roughly 56,000 in the Uk alone each year, due to smoking, poor lifestyle, poverty, flu, pneumonia etc. A lot of these deaths could be averted if, people didn't smoke, air pollution was addressed and poverty was addressed so that people did not live in poor housing and have poor diets.

The issue with coronavirus is not the numbers, its been admitted by the experts that it probably won't result in many more deaths than usual, the issue is that the sheer number of cases could overwhelm the NHS or other countries health service, meaning that other people would die because the health service wont be able to treat them.

Which to be fair to the government has been explained, we are not going to stop it, just slow down the rate of transmission.
Well there’s an unholy alliance if ever there was one. Good though that people of such different persuasions can set aside such differences to occasionally agree.

I completely agree with your second paragraph but beyond that I’m puzzled.

Clearly you make a fair point about the impact on the NHS, but to suggest that ‘it probably won’t result in many more deaths than usual’ makes no sense at all to me, as the figures and scenes that have emerged from both Italy and Spain over just the last month or so would suggest.

You do actually ‘stop it’ by slowing down the ‘rate of transmission’ allowing time for a vaccine to be discovered and developed. The trick then is to make such a vaccine universally available rather than just another means to make a vast profit.

That last sentence may be naively idealistic on my part, but then I speak as one who believes that it shouldn’t take a crisis to bring about free on site parking for NHS workers, and is still coming to terms with the most right wing PM since Thatcher apparently embracing a philosophy more akin to Communism.