In early January, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, pointing to the potential dangers of new variants of COVID-19, again locked down the nation: “It is clear that we need to do more to bring this new variant under control. That means the government is once again instructing you to stay at home.”
Despite harsh lockdowns and massive vaccination campaigns, the World Socialist Web Site wrote on 22 February,
“The prolonged and deadlier second wave of the pandemic has had a catastrophic impact on care homes, with the UK’s overall death toll ballooning to almost 130,000 where COVID-19 is recorded on the death certificate. This is double the number of deaths in only three months since early November….
The true number of deaths in care settings, however, is now well over 50,000. Researchers at the University of Manchester have found that COVID-19 deaths were ‘hugely underestimated’ in the first wave, when 10,000 fatalities went unrecorded in England alone, due to the tardy introduction of mass testing.”
As we have been reporting, and absent in the mainstream news, according to the hard data, the elder population overall and particularly those residing in eldercare facilities make up a significantly large percentage of the COVID-19 deaths.
Indeed, back in April, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) released data showing: “The overall death rate from COVID-19 has been estimated at 0.66%, rising sharply to 7.8% in people aged over 80 and declining to 0.0016% in children aged 9 and under.”
Swedish Comparison
Unlike the U.K., where eldercare residents continue dying at increasing rates, Sweden, which never locked down nor issued any mandatory mask edicts, is doing considerably better than the U.K. regarding eldercare residents.
A BMJ report quoted Soren Riis Paludan, professor of biomedicine at Aarhus University in Denmark, who praised the Swedish results: “Now we don’t have to go into lockdown but know where to be more careful, particularly with the elderly.”
Learned from Mistakes
The BMJ report also included:
“Statistics show that 89% of Sweden’s COVID-19 deaths were in people over 69. During the first six months of 2020, over 2000 people died in nursing homes as a result of what Sweden’s Health and Social Care Inspectorate, Ivo, described as ‘serious failings,’ including a lack of protective equipment and inadequate access to doctors.”
Those failings, once understood, have been effectively addressed, as we reported in the Trends Journal:
Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven admitted in mid-June that where Sweden failed was not offering better protection in nursing homes and elderly at-home care, as over 70 percent of all coronavirus deaths came from those sectors. The prime minister stated, “It has to do with failings in society that we are correcting, including basic hygiene deficiencies in many care homes.”
(For more, see our 28 July article, “SWEDEN GOT IT RIGHT.”)
TREND FORECAST: As for the U.K., we had reported on 9 February, “Since the virus broke out last February, now, a year later, according to the U.K.’s National Health Service, only 388 people aged under 60 with no underlying health conditions have died from COVID. (See our article, “U.K.: LOCK DOWN OR OPEN UP.”)
As the data from Sweden verifies, some 90 percent of Sweden’s COVID deaths are people over 69 years of age.
On the home-front of reality, the hard number reinforces the pent-up demand for young people to break loose and ignite a “Roaring 2021” explosion. To them, COVID is an “old person’s disease.” Thus, never in recent history have there been unique marketing opportunities and new product sounds and styles that will present themselves in the Roaring 2021s and beyond.
