UK is a grand experiment. There are 66.5 Milliion people in the UK.
Lets assume that 16.5 Million are in the high risk category and are able to perfectly self-quarantine for an "appropriate" amount of time.
That leaves 50 Million "low risk" folks that should be just fine, right?
Well, if we assume the low-low-low mortality rate of "only" 0.2% despite adequate medical care. That still leaves us with -------->>>>> 100,000 dead "low risk" healthy young people.
Do you find this number acceptable?
JGS
This assumes that every young, healthy person would get the virus. Thus far, There's no place on Earth that's anywhere near even 10% of the total population getting it (including elderly and at-risk) let alone 10% of the young healthy demographic.
Expecting 100k young, healthy deaths seems wildly pessimistic to me.
To look at it another way, Hubei province has a population of about 58.5 million, which isn't far off of your UK population estimate of healthy people. They've had 67794 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with 3085 resulting in death over a 4 month period. That means that in the hardest hit place on the planet, 0.11% of the total population has confirmed cases, and 0.0052% of the total population died. That's including the elderly and predisposed.
Run those rates for the UK total population and you'd get 3454 deaths in all of the UK, with a large percentage of those coming from the weakest demographics.
I think you are not taking into account that Hubei was put on a central party lockdown that is much more stringent that the UK or the US would ever be able to mandate. That's why their numbers were relatively low.
It took over two months for them to implement that lockdown though. The first reported case of what is now known as COVID-19 was reported to the Chinese gov on 11-19-2019:
https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.htmlWuhan was locked down 1-23-2020. There are 58.5 million people in Hubei, which is very similar in land area to Washington state. For reference, California is the most populous state in the US with 37 million people and more than twice the land area of Hubei. So Hubei is very densely populated. Hubei also has pretty poor air quality. So in Hubei, they gave a new respiratory virus a 2 month head start in what's basically an ideal breeding ground (dense population, poor air quality, travel and manufacturing hub generates tons of movement among citizens).
If you'd like to consider other locations than China, lets look at the latest situation report from the WHO:
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/situation-reportsItaly has 59138 confirmed cases among a population of 60.5 million ~ 0.097% of the total population
Spain has 28572 cases among 46.6 million ~ 0.06% of the total population
Germany has 27774 cases among 82.8 million ~ 0.033% of the total population
The UK has 5687 cases among 66.4 million ~ 0.0085% of the total population
Iran has 21638 cases among 81.1 million ~ 0.026% of the total population
US has 31573 cases among 327 million ~ 0.0096% of the total population
And keep in mind that those numbers show the number of confirmed cases. Only a relatively small percentage of those confirmed cases result in deaths. I understand that testing isn't being done on a large number of people, and that there are guaranteed to be many people with minor symptoms that haven't been tested and therefore aren't showing up in this data. That's probably true for every country on Earth.
That means that a larger percentage of the total population than what is shown likely has COVID-19, but it also means that the mortality rate is lower than what's been calculated with the current data as well.You can't add a bunch of people with minor symptoms (or no symptoms at all) to the data set without reducing the mortality rate by a decent margin. In other words, the virus is more widespread than the data reflects, but it's also less deadly than the data reflects too.