The data does show an average admission rate of 1% or less, but it was higher early in the pandemic.
Yes, so the policies implemented by governments around the world were appropriate to the time.
At the beginning of the pandemic, once you had a case of COVID, the death rate in the 60s age group was 3.6%, in the 70s age group 8%, and in the 80s age group 14.8%. Ref: here.
So governments had to act on the basis of that death rate data at that time. Now we have the vaccines, the death rate is much lower.
At the beginning, nobody was quite sure of what to expect. Governments had to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. In the UK, in the worse case scenario, they were planning to use Hyde Park (a 350 acre green space in the centre of London) as a massive open air mortuary, if hundreds of thousands of bodies had to be dealt with all at once.
The UK government also opened up some makeshift hospitals in large venues in case there was an enormous wave of COVID cases. These were called Nightingale Hospitals, after Florence Nightingale.
Whilst some of the general public do nothing but bitch and moan about government actions, it was the government's role to try to consider all eventualities, and try to account for them in advance with strategic planing. Which they did, albeit with mistakes sometimes.
Now just because the Nightingale Hospitals thankfully never needed to be used, because the death level was less than the worst case scenario, that does not mean that the Nightingale Hospitals were not a good idea. The government has to prepare for the various possible outcomes.
Had there been a much larger wave of deaths, and the government had not prepared these Nightingale Hospitals in advance, there would have been criticism.
Some of the know-it-all general public are only smart by hindsight. But it was the government and their scientific advisors who had to try to be smart in advance, at the actual time, whilst only having limited data and knowledge, because many of the parameters of the pandemic were unknown at the beginning.
Once the vaccines came along, they reduced these death rates by about 20 times, so for example the 3.6% death rate goes down to 0.18%, once you divide the number by 20. That made the pandemic easier to cope with, so restrictions could be relaxed.
But even today, in the omicron era, there is still a high death rate if you are unvaccinated. This death rate data from Australia shows that for unvaccinated males of 70+ age, there were 362 deaths in each 10,000 COVID cases. That works out to a 3.62% death rate for unvaccinated over 70s.
Remember though that these figures are the case-fatality ratios (CFR). The infection-fatality ratios (IFR) are lower.
Edited by Hip, 13 January 2023 - 02:02 AM.
