Napkin morality math: UK’s COVID restriction end will prove vaccine prevents death but won’t be replicated in Australia

UK is currently having lots of infections but very few deaths. Looking at recent deaths (around 25 a day), and comparing it to infections two weeks ago (around 10,000 a day), this is quite a good outcome. Vaccines have turned COVID-19 from a high-probability to a low-probability of death from infection.

As UK ends restrictions, I think it is obvious that the infections will go up a lot. They are already at 25,000 infections a day and will continue its exponential rise.

I believe that it is reasonable to expect roughly 5% of people to be infected in a given year in a high-vaccination country with no restrictions.

What would that mean on current death rates?

UK has 67 million people, 5% infected = 3,350,000 infected per year.

If 25 in 10,000 die in any given COVID-19 infection, 3,350,000 infections x 25 deaths / 10,000 infections = 8,375 die from COVID-19 a year in the UK.

How does this compare to historical flu deaths in the UK? The UK typically had around 25,000–30,000 flu deaths per year prior to COVID-19 (see figure 3).

So that’s a win, right? We’ll do the same in Australia? Don’t be so sure.

UK numbers applied to Australia are 25,000,000 people* 0.05 infection rate* 25 deaths / 10,000 infections = 3,125 deaths per year in Australia. That’s four times the deaths that Victoria faced in its COVID-19 outbreak in 2020.

When ScoMo made a completely reasonable assessment that COVID-19 will only be about as dangerous as the flu and should be managed similarly, he was HOUNDED. Politicians (particularly of the Labor flavour) and senior public health officials have become extremely risk averse.

We don’t have an effective culture for dealing with shared risk and personal liberty tradeoffs. Humans aren’t good with dealing with risk in general. They are also pretty terrible with dealing with big numbers. Or comparing big numbers to small numbers.

I think that the US, in particular, completely overestimated how much they had to give up to save 600,000 of their fellow citizens.

On the flipside, Australia’s success makes us feel that any death is tragic. Which it is. But there are many other tragedies in this epidemic that do not involve death. There are tens of thousands of people stuck overseas, many of whom who will never get to see their grandparents again because of restrictions. With Sydney currently locked down there are babies being born without family to meet their newest member. Grandparents are dying without the comfort of their loved ones (literally thousands of them every week in Australia).

There are also things that we are missing more generally. Things that give our life meaning and make it worth living. School time with friends that will likely be missed because of lockdowns. Beers that will be drunk at home instead of with friends. Holidays that consist of the 4th watching of all of Rick and Morty instead of travel abroad (don’t judge me, ok, it’s a pandemic).

It sounds callous to compare having a beer with dying. But with the risk very low, we are comparing dying at 85 while getting to do lots of exciting things, vs dying at 87 but living in a form of home detention.

We have NEVER had that conversation openly about years of life traded for not partaking in enjoyable, but risky activities. And to complicate things further, the people we are putting at risk of death are old and have had their fun, while the ones that are missing out the most on their fun risky activities are the young. There isn’t actually a fair tradeoff here. You can’t balance 4 weeks of you visiting India and bringing back a strain of COVID-19 that kills someone else’s grandmother dying 1 or 2 years earlier. They aren’t comparable.

Whether you agree with my values or not, I think my political prediction will hold true. Australia will not emulate the UK open COVID policy, because what would normally be considered an acceptable level of death will quickly precipitate in UK before we finish our vaccine rollout. No Australian politician will be willing to be seen to allow a single death, especially in the lead up to the 2022 election. Our borders will stay closed and we will likely have lockdowns when deaths from COVID-19 reach 5 per day.