Just Collateral Covid Damage

All the talk of the last 18 months has been over the Covid-19 mortality rates in the UK ....

 

Non Covid Deaths Still Happening .....

.... which I understand from figures released over the last few months, had an average age of 83 years (The average age of death from Covid 19 in males is reported as 81 years and females 85 years), and which is actually higher than the normal median mortality age of 82 in the UK.

 

But while all this has been going on, there have also been the other non-Covid-19 deaths going on as normal, and which cause just as much distress as Covid-19 deaths, and many of these deaths may have occurred as a direct result of the NHS slowing or suspending treatment of other illnesses in favour of Covid-19 treatments.

 

Sadly as we have opened up again, I have been hearing that at least three of my acquaintances have died over the last 12 months. I won't mention names, but oddly none was from Covid-19. However rather tellingly, two of these deaths were reported as being from late diagnosed cancers (the other was simply 'old age' as far as I know). Now two of these deaths were were not from what might be considered as close friends, but although I saw them fairly frequently, they were just men with whom I had occasional chats in the pub, however they will still be missed by many of their friends and families ..... but the other death hit me unexpectedly hard. 

 

He was also a pub acquaintance, but one who I saw almost weekly, before the pubs were closed in March 2020, and with whom I nearly always spent an hour or so discussing local and political affairs with (he was, despite still working full time, active on a local action group). We never visited each others homes etc, but in a male bonding kind of way (that mystifies women), we were friends, and so when he was diagnosed with cancer during the lockdowns this year, I kept in regular touch via email as he went through the treatments. 

 

As this treatment progressed he believed that his cancer was treatable, and indeed that the treatment had gone very well ..... the last word I got from him was that he was going to see the specialist at the end of June as his chemotherapy and radiotherapy had finished. I emailed him in July to see how he had got on (expecting that he would have got good news), but I got no reply. However I assumed that he was now back on his work email, and so a week or so later in early August, I emailed again, copying in his work email, to update him on the pub situation.

Sadly that was when I found out that he had passed away in hospital in mid-July. It appears that his meeting with the specialist must have uncovered that his lung cancer had not, responded to the dual, treatments of Chemotherapy and Radiotherapy, and he may even have gone straight into hospital at that meeting, certainly it was obviously not the good news he had expected from that meeting.

So due to this closer connection to his circumstances, his death hit me harder than I might have suspected beforehand, because as well as losing a drinking and conversation companion (and its not like I have that many), I just couldn't help thinking that the Covid crisis had some factor in this sudden and unexpected death. As he surely would have seen a doctor earlier, if not for the lockdowns and his resultant reluctance to see doctors over small things like a cough or sore throat, and so maybe his life would have been saved before the pandemic. Perhaps going forward and trying to deal with the health treatment backlogs, we should consider some of the additional deaths that we record over the next few months as being Covid-19 related, even if they don't have the virus.

I know that amongst all the death and suffering of the last 18 months, this is but one small tale, but when you break down what's happened over this time span, its simply made up of a lot of small personal stories like this.