No life is without risk. Everything has risk, and we accept the risk every day when we get out of bed.
We don’t take unnecessary risks, at least as we get older.
But are we now striving for minimising the risk too far? We all die: many of us have lived much longer than we could have expected to in past centuries: look at any old graveyard, look at the births and deaths of the artists and composers.
Covid 19 isn’t the plague. The mortality is about 1% with good hospital treatment, perhaps 3 or 4% without it. The social distancing we are doing won’t of itself change the numbers getting the disease in the longer term, not unless we create new treatments or vaccines, neither of which seems a prospect in the short term. Certainly social distancing slows down the progress of the disease through the population, and this has allowed health services to expand their capabilities.
But the cost is large. Churches are closed, as are all performances and gatherings. All except food shops are closed here. Outings are strictly limited to household groups.
It feels as though we are simply waiting for the grim reaper to get round to us.
Would it be better to confront death more directly, and simply accept that something between 1 and 4% of the population will die of this disease? Just let life (and death) continue? Take the risk, and live, rather than try to temporarily avoid the risk and exist in this miserable demi-monde!
Lestheprof's Blog 
April 4, 2020 at 10:25 pm |
In answer to my own question: delaying the peak of the epidemic (and flattening it) is likely to reduce the overall death rate perhaps by 1 or 2%: in Scotland that’s probably of the order of 60 to 100 thousand. But that has to be seen in the context of about 75 thousand deaths per year nationally (this figure is simply a population of 6 million divided by a mean lifespan of 80 years).