I think the intermediate measure of hospital admissions is a good one to consider too, it's clearly related to both more serious cases, and NHS capacity.
Yes - and it will come through faster than death figures.
Death rates won't spiral upwards though. The fear from covid is that it gets to the extremely vulnerable, which is why we've seen so many deaths in care homes. I'd like to think we've learned the lesson from that already, but nothing's certain with this government now - but if we have a peek here:
If this is indicating that approaching half of care homes have had covid already (this was from last month, so that percentage will have gone up, and doesn't take into account that some may have had covid but just the one case), then what do you think will happen if infection rates go up? Is covid going to kill everyone for a second time?
I don't think we can be confident that deaths won't follow infections. (Not the same as saying they definitely will).
As I recall although a lot of deaths (~ half?) were in care homes, an awful lot weren't. And I don't think we can assume that in each care home with cases, that means everyone has had it and either survived or not.
I do not think we are set up at the moment in the UK in a good enough way to protect the vulnurable, many of whom are not in care homes and some live with the non-vulnurable (to the extent you really can divide the population into two categories like that).
And as someone pointed out, we can't assume that protection lasts long enough that if we let the non-vulnurable catch it, we
will end up with herd immunity and the non-vulnurable can all come out.
@AdamWW's assumption (sigh?) is that an increase in infections will ultimately lead to more deaths. That's all it is, an assumption.
It might be that since the most vulnerable are already dead, the ratio of infections to hospital admissions and to deaths will decline. There's no evidence either way, so it would seem strange to assume that one outcome prediction is necessarily the correct one.
And if the level of hospital admissions remains within levels the NHS can cope with, we don't need further panic and bonkers regulations.
OK thanks - this is the sort of response I was looking for - here's a potential flaw in my reasoning.
You're right, it is an assumption, and I think the radio of infections to death
will drop to some extent due to 'harvesting' (i.e. a proportion of the most susceptible have already died). And we don't know how many people have had this - it my be a lot more than we think.
OK let's assume there is no evidence either way that increasing infections will lead to increasing deaths (I don't think that's true), then it still seems quite a gamble to assume that it
won't happen.
I would hope that scientists are indeed looking for evidence that for whatever reason (better treatment, fewer people still alive who are at risk, the virus mutating) that the death rate is dropping.
I'm not arguing that there definitely will be a "second wave" or that such a thing would cause a large number of deaths. But I think the likelihood is high enough that on the current evidence we shouldn't be risking it. There is no right or wrong answer and clearly carrying on as we are now has huge penalties too and there's no obvious answer to this.
But going back to the original statement, I was arguing against the logic "All we should care about is deaths and they are going down so there is no problem" which I think is false.
If you say "Deaths are going down and there is a good enough chance that if we let infections rise deaths won't rise significantly that we should risk it" - then the logic is fine.
It comes down to how likely you think it is that it will be OK and how you choose to trade that off against the penalties for doing what we're doing now.
I think on balance we should still be trying to contain it, but I don't insist that this is the only correct view.