Each day, news of more deaths is a huge source of alarm to people across the country, as well as a tragedy for the families involved.
The death figures being reported daily are hospital cases where a person dies with the coronavirus contamination in their body because disease cases must be accounted for. But what the figures do not tell us is to what extent the virus is causing the death.
Many people could die
About 10% of individuals aged over 80 will die in the following year, Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, at the University of Cambridge, points out, and the danger of them dying if infected with coronavirus is actually the equivalent. That does not mean there will be no additional deaths. However, Sir David says, there will be a significant cover. Prof Neil Ferguson, the lead modeler at Imperial College London, has recommended it could be up to two-thirds. In any case, deaths without the virus would be spread through the span of a year, those with the virus could come rapidly and overwhelm the health service.
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Effectivity of lockdown
The most prompt approach to pass judgment on the present strategy is to check if the health service manages figures out how to adapt to the coronavirus cases it sees in the coming weeks. Beyond that, the key measure will be what is called excess deaths - the distinction between the expected number of deaths and actual deaths.
During late winters, there have been about 17,000 excess deaths from flu a year, Public Health England says. If it turns out to be five times more deadly than flu, the lockdown could confine coronavirus to 6,900 extra deaths - more than 60,000 less than under the past strategy.
In the meantime, the University of Bristol researchers say the advantage of a long-term lockdown in decreasing unexpected deaths could be outweighed by the lost life expectancy from a delayed economic dip. It would see a loss of three months of life on average across the population because of factors from declining living standards to poorer health care.
In the event that the coronavirus ends up being not any more lethal than flu, the lockdown could constrain the number of excess deaths to under 1,400, more than 12,000 less than would have occurred under the previous strategy of slowing its spread, before the decision was taken to move to lockdown.
The symptoms appear to begin with a fever, followed by a dry cough and then, after a week, leads to shortness of breath and few patients needed hospital treatments.
The virus will not simply have gone away and with a vaccine at least a year away, the challenge will be how to deal with the virus. A balance will need to be struck between keeping it under control and attempting to control its spread to avoid a second peak while allowing the country to return to normal.
