Coronavirus figures ‘need some perspective’

Death is a fact of life but, unfortunately, this is something that appears to have escaped the attention of those we elected as our leaders.

The authorities issue, on a daily basis, numbers regarding how many people have passed away after having previously been tested positive for coronavirus which can, taken at face value, seem quite scary.

However, our politicians and ‘the experts’ who advise them rarely, if ever, put them into any sort of perspective and, consequently, we all tend to get a very distorted picture of exactly what is going on.

For example, in the last week in August 139 people were reported to have died whilst infected with the virus. No one actually knows how many of their deaths were as a direct result of it, as opposed to them having had a heart attack or stroke, cancer, dementia or any one of the other causes that cause death but, even if we assume that every one of those deaths was a result of the virus, it was a very small number.

I am not being disrespectful by saying that, because I fully appreciate that each one was a sad loss for their family and friends, but I am simply trying to put the present situation into proportion.

I suspect that there will be very few people reading this letter who are aware of the fact that these 139 deaths made up just 1.5 per cent of the total of 9,392 people who died in our country during that week.

More locally, in our own area, the medical care of 450,000 people is in the hands of Worthing, Southlands and St Richard’s Hospitals. Out of that number the latest figure as I write for the number of folk who have passed away with the virus is 114. That works out at about 0.025 per cent which really is a minute figure.

I do not know what the Herald’s readership think about what I have written but it certainly gives comfort to me to know that the chances of any one of us passing away because of this virus are very, very small indeed.