A Sad Milestone

 I occasionally look at the worldwide Corona statistics online, because coverage of what is going on with this virus globally is so little covered on our national TV stations.  It is about a week since I last looked and somewhere in that week we have crossed the five million deaths marker.  The stats came from here: COVID Live Update: 247,557,359 Cases and 5,016,966 Deaths from the Coronavirus - Worldometer (worldometers.info)  

If you say that quickly it doesn't sound like much, so lets put it in perspective.

The population of the troublesome little province that I live in was about 1.9 million at the 2021 census, so you could wipe every single living being in this whole place off the map and still not even be half way towards that total!

The population in the republic was 4.995 million in 2020.  Yet again, if Dublin, Cork, Sligo, Galway, Limerick, etc. etc suddenly ceased to be, we would still not cover the carnage caused by Covid!

You could wipe Los Angeles (3.967 million) and San Francisco (874,961 in 2019), and again not reach the number of Covid deaths.

That is a shockingly large number of people, and of course it is still growing.  Globally, the death rate is around 2% although it is probably better in richer countries.  The UK has the 8th worst recorded Covid death rate worldwide (now over 140,000), a truly awful figure for a relatively small country. For a little while our media talked about excess deaths; a figure that included not just Covid deaths, but also those from diseases like Cancer that were going untreated because health resources were being used elsewhere.  I have not seen these figures for quite a while, they are probably too scary to be published to the general populace!

This graph comes from here: https://www.health.org.uk/.  It is a bit out of date, but you will get the point, i.e. that as well as direct Covid deaths there are also a large number of indirect deaths.  Our health service is still far from 100% functional, so these excess deaths are still ongoing too.


Be careful, the world may be opening up again, but it is still a damned dangerous place out there.

 


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