Thought Of The Day - April 15 - Don't Avoid Going To The Hospital

Hi All,

Unsurprisingly it is now coming to light that many countries are seeing a much larger number of deaths than normal for this time of year. The surprise is that these numbers are much higher than can be accounted for by “official” cases of Covid-19. As you have probably heard yesterday New York City added 3,700 fatalities to its Covid count, as “suspected” to be caused by Covid. Like most countries the US is finding their ability to test is not keeping up with the demand, and are not doing posthumous testing, so we can’t know for sure.

But this might be only part of the story.

In the UK for example, even removing the number of official deaths from Covid, they had over 6,000 more deaths in the week ending April 3rd than the average for the past five years. Of these about 3,500 were “suspected” cases of Covid. This still leaves over 2,000 unexplained excess deaths in this week in 2020 versus the last five years.

One strong possibility for this high rate of death is that people with other treatable ailments are avoiding seeking out medical support. Thus people are dying at home due to lack of medical intervention.

The reason for this this could be:

- fear of Covid infection spread at medical institutions;

- excessive messaging that the medical system is overwhelmed and so cannot provide care;

- belief that the current lockdown is coming to an end, thus people were just trying to hang on.

While the medical system in BC is preoccupied with Covid, by and large it is not overloaded. So while elective and non-critical interventions should not be pursued if you or any loved one has a serious medical condition do not hesitate to see medical attention; head to the hospital as you normally would. We do not want the measures designed to save lives to be the cause of more peoples’ demise.

Cheers

Cliff

P.S. I have looked around but cannot find where Canada publishes recent fatality data, if anyone knows I can look further into the situation here.