From the BBC:
Thousands of people in the UK have now died with coronavirus, including doctors, nurses, surgeons and other NHS workers.
The government has said 19 NHS workers have died so far, with doctors who came out of retirement among those who have lost their lives...
----------------------------------------
In the general spirit of being factually correct yet controversial...
Total coronavirus-related deaths in the UK so far, 9,875.
About ninety per cent of deaths were people over retirement age, and ten per cent were people of working age (from here, other sources say much the same thing).
So we'd expect to have had about 988 deaths among working age population.
Total working age population (18 to 67) 42 million
988 deaths ÷ 42 million = 24 deaths per million.
Total number employed by NHS = 1.5 million
1.5 million x 23/million = 36.
We could adjust that up or down for various things, for example:
- Just because somebody in the NHS catches it, it doesn't mean they caught it "in the line of duty". They might have been infected by family or friends, caught it on public transport or from a colleague.
- We could refine the exercise by splitting the 24 deaths/million into "people with underlying health conditions" and "healthy", this would give a lower expected number of deaths for NHS workers (who we assume are "healthy").
- Even better, split the 24 into three categories - "people with underlying health conditions", "healthy and still going to work" and "healthy and staying at home". We would reasonably expect the number of cases and deaths per million in the second category to be higher than in the last one, pushing the number for NHS workers up again.
- Not all NHS staff are frontline (don't come into contact with patients or general public), so perhaps we should multiply by 1 million, not 1.5 million.
But this would all be guesswork, so let's leave our prediction at 36, which is twice as much as actual 19. If we made all the adjustments above, it might level the death rate for NHS workers with the rate for anybody else in the "healthy - still going to work" category. It would be interesting to know how many Tesco shop workers (or which there are a couple of hundred thousand) end up dying from it.
---------------------------------------
Clearly, the NHS senior people have failed their front line staff (and the general public) very badly. It appears that they never bothered with a contingency plan for such diseases, which come along every ten years or so. And every health minister for the past twenty years should be grilled on why they never thought to ask whether the NHS had such plans. The lot of them should be sent into exile. You can't just blame it all on the current incumbent.
The front line staff have my every sympathy and I do not envy them. But, they should be aware that the number of NHS people who have died with coronavirus (so far) is not surprisingly large and appears to be half that of the general working age population.
Debate Magazine
