Death, like taxation and the sheer awfulness of Mrs Brown’s Boys, is something that cannot be avoided or denied and must be confronted by all of us in the end. When you bring a child into this world, you know that one dreadful day you will have to explain to it that he or she will in the end die. It is awful and unavoidable. We all die in the end.
There is data from the NHS which appears in today’s Daily Mail on how many folks with no other pre-existing conditions have, so far this year in Britain, died of Covid by age group. 0-19: 6, 20- 39: 44, 40-59: 338, 60-79: 821, 80+: 770. In total that is 1979. That is a shame and you feel for the families of all of those folks. The death of a loved one, whatever the cause and at whatever age, always causes pain.
The Government, and indeed almost the entire political and media classes, will shriek that this is why something must be done and we must all wear masks, self isolate and social distance. However, it still refuses to address the question of why we must continue to do such things when they have, clearly, failed to stop the “pandemic” so far.
But as the BBC – whose failure to hold our leaders to account is now the greatest reason why it should be defunded – reads out the ghastly roll call of death each night, it fails to put anything into context. Most of those who have died of Covid had other ailments which in a normal year would have seen them polished off by flu or perhaps just by those other ailments. The 1979 folks with no other diseases killed within 28 days of testing positive for Covid, so not necessarily by Covid, needs to be put into context. That is to say the c420,000 Brits who have died so far this year from all causes, like my father of cancer or of heart attacks or the c6,000 who have killed themselves.
And that puts the sheer scale of the excess Covid deaths into perspective. As things stand, UK life expectancy is 81.5 years. The average Covid fatality was at 82.4 years. This is a disease which almost entirely polishes off the old – who were close to meeting St Peter anyway – and the sick.
Yet in attempting to stop this, to save what will be very small numbers in the greater scheme of things, the political and media classes have pursued an approach which has caused the worst recession for 300 years, killing businesses, costing millions of jobs, causing untold misery, bumping up the suicide rate, storing up early cancer deaths as a result of missed tests for next year, and crushing our basic freedoms. When we look back on what was achieved for so little, surely Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock, Mark Drakeford, Piers Morgan, the BBC News Teams and other representatives of those who have failed us all so badly and are responsible for this insanity must face retribution?