786 dead today. 786 individual tragedies, people who died in the hands and in the company of our NHS staff. This is the reality of Covid-19. Families will have learned not in person, in a quiet room, but over the phone. The pain for both relatives and doctors must be all but unbearable. These are the darkest of times.
I know that individual numbers mean nothing in themselves. So, I have done a back of a fag packet – not that I smoke – calculation of what this number means when compared with the number of people who die every day. It’s quite startling.
More than half a million people die in Britain every year, so that works also something like 1400 people a day. Today, as the epidemic spreads throughout the land, 786 people lost their lives with Covid-19. Very roughly speaking, the daily death toll in Britain has increased by 50%.
For me, Covid-19 is very real and has been for a few weeks. My youngest son had it, I have friends who currently have it, including one who is currently in hospital, though not currently in the ICU and friends and friends of friends are suffering in varying degrees. (If you have ever been in or near an ICU, it is an experience you will never forget.)
Generally speaking, most of the media coverage is real, too. Some hospitals are being run at full capacity, others close to it. The Nightingale hospitals have not been set up ‘just in case’. We are not being kept in the dark about what is really happening. There are no conspiracies.
If there is any crumb of comfort to be taken from today’s figures – and I suppose we need to take whatever comfort we can – it is that new confirmed cases fell from 4,450 to 3,802 between Friday and Monday. And the rate of increase has halved in the past week. Whilst we need to be cautious, this could mean that there could be a slowing in critical-care admissions and eventually deaths.
However, things are still very bad and they are going to get even worse in the coming days and weeks. My thoughts and best wishes are with everyone who has this awful disease and that very much includes the prime minister Boris Johnson. In Johnson’s case, politics can wait. And for the rest of us, we need to do everything we can to save lives.
