A really excellent post from FT Alphaville trying to understand the lockdown.
They point to analysis by Sir David Spiegelhalter, former president of the Royal Statistical Society and co-chair of the Society’s Covid-19 task force.
He produced the pictured chart.
“The pattern shows Covid deaths increase exponentially with age … this follows the pattern of normal risk. Whatever risks you’ve got, this just seems to exaggerate them — pump them up and pack a year’s worth of risk into a few weeks. Covid deaths are a fixed proportion of the people dying . ..”
Two extra points added to this are those exposed to excessive viral loads (healthcare workers) and the 10s of thousands of unnecessary deaths from less emergency care.
Moving away from the numbers – the moral discussion at the end is the most interesting part.
