I have to ask, why are you only concerned with the financial outcome?
I'm not. But 40% of people who died lived in care homes.They have an average life expectancy of 9 months. They would all have been expected to be dead by the end of the year anyway!
The rest of the deaths are a mixed bunch. Average age is 82. Average Uk life expectancy is 81, so your average covid victim actually exceeded average life expectancy. Which isnt to say they ought to die at all, but it makes clear they were at an age where general infirmity makes them susceptible to many illnesses and if it had not been covid, something else was likely. It also isnt clear whether the people who are 82 but still vigorous and maybe the ones who might make 110, have a very much better chance against covid anyway. It is a disease which attacks the weak, so a strong 82 year old might with impunity carry on a normal life.
We have stats about the chances of dying, but they really only reflect the proportions of people ending up in hospital. We have no idea how many people have really had covid, the case numbers are simply minimums. We dont know how many people were immune before this began, so we also dont know how many have been exposed to covid but it simply didnt take because they already had immunity.
A simple explanation of the situation in the Uk right now, and indeed the rest of the world, is that this is pretty much a one wave epidemic. In the UK in the spring it reached most of those in the general population it was ever likely to. More recently there has been a new wave centred around children and young adults sent back to schools and universities, and then a certain amount of contacts from them. But this has simply not taken off. It didnt increase the transmission rate, just dumped a whole load of new cases into the system from these new people. It was evidence the epidemic is over because it did no take off.
The cost of this lockdown will be paid by everyone for decades to come. Part of that cost will be poverty and diseases of poverty which it is absolutely clear shorten lives. I think its about 10 years age difference at death in the Uk between rich and poor. If you really want to save some lives, forget about covid and solve the problem of poverty. Oh...but what we just did was worry about a few people at risk from covid at the great expense to the many who will have more poverty because of it. Poverty prematurely kills many more than covid, every single year.
Put your trillions spent on covid somewhere they would do more good.
