The vast majority of those being over 80 and from care home settings. The care home deaths were a scandal and should never have happened. But of those 46,000 how many were outside care home settings? Not very many. But if you ask the UK population you get a reaction as if the 46,000 were spread evenly across the population. Its simply not true. And thats before you factor in the its now been admitted that death numbers were over inflated due to reporting errors.
At the height of the pandemic wave in the UK twice as many people were dying every day compared to normal. This sort of thing underpins the contempt I have for people expressing the sorts of opinions you have been of late. We have to go back to the start of January 1970 to find so many people dying on a single day, most other days since those records started dont come close, with the exception of a couple of nasty flu epidemics. And that 1970 horrible death rate was the result of another pandemic, albeit an influenza one. And all those other rates were in situations where they didnt take such drastic action to try to do something about the epidemics/pandemics, we'll never quite know what rates we would have seen in 2020 if lockdown and other measures never happened.
The idea of deaths having been overestimated applies to one set of figures, and I could tell the opposite story with other data. The sort of story that is the reason why the likes of the Financial Times analysed excess mortality instead of just deaths ascribed to Covid-19. The sort of undercounting that shows up in graphs like this one where the bump in 'Deaths not involving Covid-19' shows the typical signs of deaths that were Covid-related not being counted as such. The same pattern of undercounting is seen in most respiratory viral epidemics and pandemics so we know this happens even when there is not a situation that people could blame on 'deaths related to lockdown'.
As of the most recent ONS report, 3,248 men and 1,698 women aged between 45 and 64 died.
There were 32,783 deaths in hospitals, 15,344 in care homes, 2,429 in private homes, 733 in hospices, 233 in other communal establishemnts and 198 elsewhere.
(from
Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics )
The deaths all matter to me. All of my opinions about how things should be handled in this phase, which are utterly at odds with your stance, are based on an understanding of what proportion of deaths occured in what age groups and in which settings, not the incorrect assumptions about age spread that you suggest are responsible for a public reaction that you otherwise apparently cant understand.
People do dismiss deaths routinely all the time in the manner you are doing, and those sorts of attitudes contribute towards many needless deaths every year. I was pleased to see that this pandemic has ended up being treated with the level of seriousness that it deserves. There will come a point at which this will change, whether by vaccination or greater understanding of where we are at and what the future with this virus means for future deaths rate etc. But now is certainly not the time to leap to the position you've taken, a position which is reckless and that most governments and public health authorities are not going to take until there are actually reasons to have some confidence that such a stance wont end in another mountain of death.
We've had the very occasional idiot here in the past whose confidence that strong measures that affect the whole population were not needed quickly blew up in their face. They were taking the same stance as you before the wave of death arrived in full. First they hung their stance on the idea it was mostly smokers who were at risk, then they moved on and declared that shielding the vulnerable would be a success and all that was really needed. That didnt go very well. After that fiasco they moved on to trying to demonstrate that the wave of death wasnt halted by lockdown, but would have peaked in the same way anyway. They are long gone now. I'm certainly glad I didnt have to waste my time on more of that sort of thing.
If/when the time comes that we really can afford to be more blasé about this virus, I will be there, I will move with the times as appropriate. But I'll never downplay death to do it, and now is most certainly not the time to plan and act based on optimism about the months ahead. If we get through a fair chunk of winter without obvious signs that we are having to battle very hard to prevent grim death rates and hospitalisations then that will be the first sensible opportunity to have a reality check and potential rethink.