> Covid very rarely results in severe symptoms for middle aged adults
Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this:
"After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period.
Healthy children and young adults have been exposed to an extremely small risk during the peak of the epidemic, which would normally be deemed an acceptable part of life. Risks can be far higher for the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions."
"Data on deaths from covid-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” age-related risk of death from all other causes that we all face each year, says statistician David Spiegelhalter in The BMJ today.
His findings are based on analysis of death certificate data for England and Wales over a 16 week (112 day) period between 7 March and 26 June 2020."
If you're claiming that, for instance, those aged under 40 without any comorbidities were at significantly higher risk of dying due to the impact of Covid-19 I think it would be good to post a reference for that.
The CDC publishes data showing causes of death by age cohort[0], it's worth looking at for the year 2020. Apparently they're still working on the 2021 figures.
The short version: Covid-19 just isn't a random killer - and certainly not of otherwise healthy under 40s - that everyone thinks it is/thought it was.
These numbers show that the number of deaths observed is beyond the sum of reported covid deaths + expected deaths from all other sources. Which indicates either that many covid deaths were misclassified as something else, or that the strain on the health system caused by covid resulted in significantly more deaths. If deaths were misclassified, it is certainly possible that some percentage of people in their 40s or 50s died of Covid, with cause of death listed as something else.
It's even worse than that. Those numbers are for deaths "with" COVID, not "of COVID". At one point, the UK was recording any death where the person had a positive COVID test at any time prior. Cancer victims and car accidents where recorded as COVID deaths. So, the odds of dying after catching COVID where highly exaggerated.
In England, a new weekly set of figures will also be published, showing the number of deaths that occur within 60 days of a positive test. Deaths that occur after 60 days will also be added to this figure if COVID-19 appears on the death certificate. This will provide an additional measure of the impact of the disease over time.
This follows concerns raised by academics from the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine about the original measure, which counted anyone who had ever tested positive as a COVID-associated death. They called for the introduction of a 21-day measure in order to accurately assess the impact of the virus on mortality rates
Correct, but I don't recall this being the narrative the media were following in 2020, despite stuff like this:
"After nearly 45,000 Covid deaths in England and Wales, we can see that people of different ages have been exposed to dramatically differing risks. Fatalities among school-children have been remarkably low. Taking women aged 30–34 as an example, around 1 in 70,000 died from Covid over the 9 peak weeks of the epidemic. Since over 80% of these had pre-existing medical conditions, we estimate that a healthy women in this age-group had less than a 1 in 350,000 risk of dying from Covid, around 1/4 of the normal risk of an accidental death over this period.
Healthy children and young adults have been exposed to an extremely small risk during the peak of the epidemic, which would normally be deemed an acceptable part of life. Risks can be far higher for the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions."
https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...
"Data on deaths from covid-19 show an association with age that closely matches the “normal” age-related risk of death from all other causes that we all face each year, says statistician David Spiegelhalter in The BMJ today.
His findings are based on analysis of death certificate data for England and Wales over a 16 week (112 day) period between 7 March and 26 June 2020."
https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/covid-deaths-closely-ma...