Interesting thought Polly

You could bury all 93000 bodies in a cube of 30 metres each side. Being generous and allowing for the bodies put in coffins, not all squished together. Not that our Polly has ever been noticed for numeracy.

Squawkbox, you sure? Order of magnitude error?

The UK runs at over 650K deaths per year:

https://fullfact.org/online/2020-death-toll-comparison/

From that, looks like 2020 will have been 680K or so. So up a tad – but hardly historical highs (“highest since 1985”)

FWIW, 680K/yr = ~1860/day, so five days is about 9K

Plus, as we know, they’re deaths ‘associated with’ COVID-19, not directly caused by.

@Bloke on A470 – how do you measure relative sadness? Is 600g of murdered baby more or less sad than 76kg of person dying after a long and relatively fulfilled life, of an incurable and agonising cancer?

@TtC

Don’t think there’s any way that false positives can be “dominating” the test results. Sure, they happen, but dominate? No way. If they did, the positivity rate (including of the random sampling done for the ONS and REACT surveys) would presumably have stayed roughly level throughout the epidemic, with peaks or troughs in the virus prevalence having hardly any impact. But in fact there are very clear patterns in the positive results which are compatible with both changes in contact rates (eg during lockdowns) and observed demand for hospital beds. That’s not compatible with the vast majority of positives being due to systematic error.

@Bloke InTejas

The interesting thing about deaths in the UK in 2000 being 610,000 is that the UK’s population is now 15% higher now than it was in 2000. Add 15% to the 610,000 deaths in 2000 and you get 701,500.

Anything less than that dying in 2020 means that on percentage terms 2000 was a worse year than 2020.

It’s a bit like this story about all the gold ever mined. HSBC calculated it in the early 00’s, could fit it in two double decker buses. Now, 3-4 max?

Give me 90k bodies, a caterpillar tractor and legal immunity and I’ll fit it all in a small 2-bedroom bungalow near Leatherhead.

UK average age of death: 81.16 years

UK average age of death from covid: 82.4 years…

@ Andy F
Agreed, but the “years of Life Lost” is not normally zero for someone in their 80s: it may only be 20% of that for a 30-year-old but it still matters.

@john77: “Most people with a pre-existing condition who have died of Covid-19 were highly unlikely to die in 2020-2023: a youngish Actuary wrote a blog to demonstrate this to anyone numerate enough to understand.”

Do you have the link to hand? If so, would you please post it?

I ask because many of the old folk killed by Covid lived in care homes. The median stay in British care homes isn’t very long: BUPA figures –

“The median length of stay was 19.6 months for all admissions. Median length of stay for people admitted to nursing beds was 11.9 months and for residential beds it was 26.8 months. In the PSSRU study, average length of stay was predicted at 29.7 months following admission.”

Locally the numbers have been going down and the govt blamed it on people not wanting to get tested over Christmas, seemed strange to me they didn’t want to take credit for their recent round of restrictions before Christmas that they brought into to control rising numbers.
Also if they don’t think the restrictions (including closing churches) had any impact why did we bother in the first place. Surely the answer is stop testing asymptomatic people and the numbers will get better.

@ dearieme
https://henrytapper.com/2020/04/07/theres-life-in-the-old-dog-yet-let-no-one-be-abandoned-to-covid-19/

@john77: and what about the tens of thousands with cancers going undiagnosed and thus will die sooner than necessaty? Do they get £400bn splurged on cancer care to make sure they’re not abandoned? How about the millions suffering from mental health issues exacerbated by the lockdowns? Will they get hundreds of billions spent on mental health problems? What about flu itself? It manages to kill tens of thousands of people every winter, perhaps we should make sure they’re not ‘abandoned’ and lock the entire country down from October to May every year?

This notion that ‘nobody must be allowed to die from Covid’ while consigning millions more to illness, affliction and death from more ‘normal’ medical issues, and impoverishment from economic depression is not only insane, it’s morally bankrupt.

I’ve never (long before the COVID stats issue) been convinced the with/from distinction is especially meaningful in practice. If someone dies in a traffic collision or a thirty-something dies due to a cancer of their liver, that’s not pleasant but at least it’s clear-cut. Ish. What if the tumour in the liver metastasised from a cancer elsewhere in the body, and the primary cancer would itself have likely been fatal but the cancer in their liver finished them off first? What if the primary cancer was itself likely caused by an underlying genetic condition like Lynch syndrome, or due to a radiation or chemical exposure incident? What if the road traffic collision was deliberate homicide or the result of intoxication due to chronic alcoholism? We can have careful guidelines about what primary cause a death gets attributed to, but they’re not going to all fall into neat and mutually exclusive categories. It’s a fact of life (or death) that many events tick multiple boxes.

In reality most deaths happen in the elderly, most very elderly people have multiple health conditions, and if one nasty thing doesn’t finish off a ninety year old, there’ll be another round the corner to finish the job. But perhaps not for a few years yet.

Those looking at the actuarial link will be wondering how long people live and have the idea that most people who died of COVID will have had a reasonable length of time to go. I urge caution. Actuaries deal with averages and means are very poor ways of evaluating risks. We do not know whether those carried off with COVID will have been at the healthy end of those with co-morbidities or the less healthy end. Thus we don’t know how the future mortality profile of the pool will be affected.

In my firm we’ve assumed COVID deaths are effectively randomly selected from the groups of people at particular ages. That approach works rather well as we’ve not got millions of people on the books, merely hundreds of thousands. Assuming random selection doesn’t matter that much. It might prove that actually we’ve got the longer lived people left, our assumption will cost us money, or the longer live were carried off and we’ll be quids in. But the amount at risk is small so we don’t care.

The UK government however can’t, or rather shouldn’t, make such a casual assumption.

As for @BiND’s linked article that is truly terrifying and shows a casual disregard for medical care ethics. They are easing suffering but like my example we don’t know whether those selected are those what will pull through or not, those that would have lived longer or not. And I seriously doubt they care. So the ones that look like hard work to support are given morphine and sedatives whether they would pull through or not. WTAF?

That’s one thing US medical care delivers, a real effort to keep people alive until the money runs out as the fear of being sued if efforts are not made is real. Here the NHS just covers up deaths from negligence and then pays out to keep people quiet.

Cumulative excess deaths metric is published here, Figure 2:

https://fingertips.phe.org.uk/static-reports/mortality-surveillance/excess-mortality-in-england-latest.html

What is interesting is that there does appear to have been a noticeable net impact around the month or two at the very peak of the first wave. Then the death rate was bang on trend pretty much until year-end, with a very slight acceleration perhaps. Over the course of the year, it was a bit like having three average flu seasons instead of one; not really that bad if you are objective about it, and not really a great reason to smash 10% or whatever off your GDP and run up world war increases in national debt.

With the new strains, this second wave could be materially worse however – higher transmissibility can lead to exponentially higher cases unfortunately. It may justify caution far more than it was in the first wave. Unfortunately we burned up so many resources supporting the first wave that it’s harder to repeat the trick second time around. It’s lucky the vaccine could at least backstop the costs at some point.

Obviously the peaking of the second wave isn’t really appearing on the chart yet.

You can’t really judge the impact of the pandemic until some time after it has ended, certainly after the next winter season. The excess death rate will probably be negative for some time afterwards as many people who died only had their time brought forward by months, which is not good but certainly less of a tragedy than cutting down the young.

There should be a distinction made between sacrificing livelihoods for a disease that kills 1% of sufferers and a disease that kills 1% of sufferers a month or year early. The future years of life lost are vastly different.

Unfortunately epidemiology is a bit like weather forecasting – at the point we need predictions to base decisions on, the uncertainty bounds are so wide the models are only the loosest of guesstimates. By the time we have enough data to calibrate the models to be rather accurate the pandemic has already run its course.

@ Andrew Again
The research looked at the separate averages for each age of those with co-morbidities and those without.
There are also separate sets of data for those who have died with covid-19 but are assumed to have died from other causes. However the PHE analysis including everyone who died within 28 days of a positive test as having died of covid muddies the water somewhat

@Jim

“and what about the tens of thousands with cancers going undiagnosed and thus will die sooner than necessaty”

There is an argument that ticks me off which is made quite frequently by some of the lockdown arch-sceptics – a group with whom I have a certain amount of sympathy in general. Hector Drummond made what was generally a very fair point listing all the really serious negative consequences of lockdown but I took issue with the fact he’d stuck in all the deaths from other conditions going untreated. Now I happen to think those deaths are really serious, really grim, and likely to distort “excess deaths” measures which many people hope will be the gold standard for measuring Covid deaths (as a way of getting round the with/from debate and getting a clearer comparison against a counterfactual).

Hector’s argument was that these deaths formed part of the general Covid hysteria but I’m not sure if he was overreaching to the point of disingenuity or if he thought he was making a serious point. If the latter then I can’t get my head around it, as I can’t grasp how he causally attributes them to lockdown policy.

If you’re willing to let hospital capacity take more severe strain because you’d rather our economy, society and the cause of liberty should be as unencumbered as possible, then just as night follows day, other folk who rely on that hospital capacity are going to suffer. That’s just how it is, unless you’re one of the few people who disbelieve the Covid epidemic is real and the number of respiratory patients is shooting upwards. Depending on your personal views and values it is perfectly arguable that even this is a trade-off worth making. I don’t think it would be majority view, particularly among cancer patients and their relatives, but it wouldn’t be an inherently immoral or illogical position to take.

But if you think the poor sods bumped down the hospital waiting lists due to ballooning Covid demands are an absolute tragedy and every effort must be undertaken to save them, I can’t see how that’s compatible with demanding fewer restrictions on social contact and increased virus transmission – and inevitably, not much further down the line, more beds taken by Covid patients and fewer by anybody else.

Strongly agree with @Jim that “nobody must be allowed to die from Covid” would be a daft line to draw in the sand and completely distort the cost-benefits calculations. If you go out and stick values on things and tot the figures up, there’s likely an “optimal” number of Covid deaths (more precisely, an optimal pandemic strategy that happens to result in this many Covid deaths) that’s somewhere north of zero. Though actually computing an optimal strategy means accepting some kind of epidemic model which is fraught with error/uncertainty… Perhaps the best you can do from such a model is an order-of-magnitude type prediction and some grasp of the dynamics of the situation. But the dynamics of infection do matter, no matter how little you trust the models for them, and clearly one Covid case begets another in a way that lung cancer cases don’t. The comparison with seasonal flu is an interesting one as that has the ability to kill tens of thousands of people and strain NHS capacity. We don’t ignore flu, and do have extensive vaccination campaigns and a seldom-used policy of targeted school closures if felt necessary.

But a different perspective on it is that we don’t ever expect seasonal flu to risk causing hundreds of thousands of deaths or potentially exceed double or more of existing NHS capacity. There’s too much pre-existing immunity, too low a fatality rate, and flu has an R-number about 1.3 rather than (unconstrained) 3ish for Covid. Even if you’re a very strong sceptic of the policy responses governments have thrown at Covid so far, it’s pretty clear that Covid needs to be handled differently to seasonal flu because the tail risks it poses are more substantial. The more relevant comparator is a mildish-to-moderately severe pandemic flu, but that’s still not quite like-for-like because anything you do on the transmission control side needs to be substantially more heavy-duty for Covid than pandemic flu on account of the higher base value for R. And anything you do on the healthcare capacity front alone is unlikely to be enough – even a 50% boost to capacity is an extraordinary leap that can only realistically be made through compromises on quality of care. But if infections and hence potential hospitalisations can double in the matter of weeks then unless the curve flattens out pretty quickly (by itself through natural disease dynamics, or by policy) then such gains can be eaten away before there’s any opportunity of further expansion. Not saying capacity flexibility is a bad thing – aside from the obvious benefits, might well have had fewer infected patients sent back to care homes if hospitals had felt less pressure for beds in the first wave – but you can’t handle order-of-magnitude level challenges that way.

It’s even plausible that a moderate-to-high severity pandemic flu would kill more people than Covid due to a higher fatality rate, yet require substantially less stringent policy response in general due to lower R producing a naturally flatter epidemic curve. It may cause far more harm in those sections of the population it sweeps through, but infect a smaller proportion of the population and do so at a slower rate, hence its consequences may be easier to manage and its spread easier to inhibit. In comparison, an R0 of 3 is bloody hard work to control or suppress, and even if the consequences of infection are usually mild, the sad exceptions add up very quickly if you don’t get it under control. It’s sensible to be level-headed about the cost of that relative to the cost of potential interventions, but the way the world looks today I’m doubtful there’s a ready supply of easy answers no matter high your granny-death (mostly men actually, so presumably grandad-death) tolerance levels are set.

@Oblong

Something else that frustrates me about lockdown arch-sceptics is the way so many of them have rehashed the same arguments for each lockdown – but in each case we have had different data, different uncertainties. The kneejerk responses to this one which don’t take into account evidence of faster transmission this time seem a bit lazy to me, or suggest a cognitive bias of not wanting to appear to have had a change of mind. You could still make an argument against lockdown now, but you couldn’t honestly do so on the basis that hospital capacity looks fine and it would be a stretch to say people will change behaviour to stop transmission voluntarily anyway. Kudos for not falling into that trap.

Agree that we can only judge policies in retrospect but sadly that isn’t much help for policy-designers or setters! Excess deaths has its flaws but is definitely one of the more useful metrics available. The big problem is we lack counterfactual excess death figures for alternative policies, which is what you really need to judge the effect. That gap either gets filled by modelling disease dynamics, which has all the well-known flaws, or (something quite in vogue in public health the last few years) by using “synthetic controls” made by averaging out countries which followed particular policies. Though given differences in demographics, policy implementations and data collection between countries, I might even trust that less than pure modelling.

@JK277

Think there’s some merit to doing broad-brush comparisons to a worst-case scenario. The weakness of your argument is that QALYs actually have a very technical definition in health economics and relate purely to “health utility”, not to the wider concept of utility of the kind Bentham and Mill would have us employ. The Q is for HRQOL (health-related quality of life) and not subjective QOL in general. While lockdown will have had several knock-on impacts on HRQOL they won’t average anywhere near 10% average reduction.

Perfectly fair to say you’re using a wider concept of “util-years” or something, though I think the 10% figure still needs some evidence – it’s clearly subjective and varies from person to person. But if you’re totting up at a population level, you actually need to define a social welfare function, since economists don’t necessarily calculate aggregate utility at a societal level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_welfare_function

This is probably the biggest issue with your argument, though it is clear the choice of SWF is itself subjective. Many SWFs penalise inequality of outcomes, as the concentration of disutility among the dying would produce. This may actually be realistic if you consider what your worst-case counterfactual of 500k deaths involves – queues of dying people unable to get into hospital and quite likely a very visceral and deep-seated regret that more could not have been done to save them, especially if other countries had managed their death toll more successfully. I imagine if this played out that a decent proportion of people would agree with a statement like “living under restrictions might have made me feel X% worse, but I would rather not have lived in a society where we abandoned hundreds of thousands of people to die in such desperation and without medical care.” If you think I’m stretching things with that, you might at least accept any politician presiding over this situation would be unlikely to get a ratings boost out of being so level-headed over simple aggregate utility. That would suggest an element of social preference for outcomes in which harms are not concentrated on the unlucky few even if this means society accepting a greater burden on aggregate – which is precisely why these alternative SWFs are often argued to be more reflective of what people actually value at a societal level.

Just as a minor point – lockdown sceptics often bring up the suicide stat as if it is real clincher but I’m dubious of its power. Annual suicides are about six thousand annually in the UK so even a substantial rise isn’t likely to be much more than a rounding error in comparison to the uncertainty over the exact figure for Covid deaths. Ascribing causality is even trickier since the suicide rate follows trends of its own. There’s an interesting and, considering the source, surprisingly balanced discussion at https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/health/2020/11/suicide-rate-UK-pandemic-lockdown-corona-virus-covid As an aside, in economic recessions there tends to be a rise in suicides somewhat offset by a fall in road deaths since declines in economic activity tend to reduce traffic. I suspect that will play out in the 2020 stats too.

An alternative ballpark estimate of whether policies have been “cost-effective” might be taking discounted life-years purportedly saved compared to the worst case scenario (if you run with 500k deaths or whatever you need to bear in mind these will likely have bitten down substantially into lower age ranges, not just the 80+ even if it likely would include fairly few under-50s, due to the breakdown of healthcare provision this scenario involves) then multiply by the statistical value of a life-year (I think GBP 60k in HM Treasury Green Book, which is higher than what NICE use for drug evaluations but is the figure the Department for Health used in pre-Covid pandemic planning) and comparing to the estimated economic cost of the policies employed (again, bearing in mind the counterfactual still involves substantial disruption due to illness and reduced trade/tourism etc, so you can’t just use the annual GDP hit). Unlike your method this doesn’t account for the subjective costs of restrictions, though. One minimum combination that gets you to the GBP 100 billion mark is 400k people gaining a bit under 4.5 years on average. Upgrade or downgrade those assumptions and the monetary value changes proportionately…

@SMFS

Sadly your post is almost complete balls. The fact many people died without going to hospital doesn’t mean hospitals aren’t or weren’t under pressure – obviously in many cases it wasn’t worth the care home sending them there and they wouldn’t have done so with any other severe respiratory infection, in other cases perhaps they would have liked to if they felt a bed would be found but the capacity issues made this infeasible. This doesn’t mean there weren’t lots of sick people in hospital, some dying and rather more (thankfully) surviving. To accommodate Covid patients, areas which were previously being used for other things have been repurposed. To take one of your examples, operating theatre have often been converted to makeshift ICUs (I believe because of facilities they offer). And ICU is one of the most nursing-intense areas of a hospital, so expanded ICUs actually increase demand on nurses. And indeed doctors – to take another of your examples, I’m genuinely aware of oncologists being redeployed to said ICUs. Staffing pressure not being helped by the number off sick of course. The field hospitals are an emergency overflow measure to counteract the tail risk of a severe surge in cases. They’re the equivalent of buying a call option on the size of epidemic peak – or rather, given their own limited capacity, a bull spread. They can’t offer the same level of care as a fully equipped hospital – my understanding is this is partly a staffing issue and partly because they just don’t have the kit to manage the more complex needs many of the frailer Covid patients have – which is why they’re only being used as a last resort once existing hospitals have no more capacity that can be diverted.

@MBE – “so many of them have rehashed the same arguments for each lockdown – but in each case we have had different data, different uncertainties.”

Interesting posts. I agree with this – it was one of the points I was trying to make about my own thinking, I am happier to accept lockdown this wave than last given the new evidence.

I think the main reason is that we haven’t yet seen the bulk of the deaths or hospital capacity stretch from this second wave, so propose haven’t got hindsiggt to update their mental models. It’s also very human to repeat arguments in the face of mixed evidence – after all socialism has for some remained humanity’s saviour over and over again despite purges, famines, repressions and economic malaise.

Whilst I think there is a good case to argue that lockdown was an excessive response in the first wave, it’s harder this time. One of the shames about excessive caution first time around is that we burnt so much money that doing it a second time is going to be more crippling than it should be. Thankfully the vaccines make the sustainability of a policy stance less of a question than it might otherwise be.

But I’m also very conscious that it’s easy to judge with hindsight. No politician or epidemiologist is going to look at the mid-point of their projections and base policy on what’s *probably* going to be ok. They want a margin of safety as they know people will blame them for a pandemic is a way they don’t for e.g. annual flu deaths.

If the earliest models suggested 500k might be killed by COVID without policy response in a pessimistic scenario and we’ve had 70k excess deaths with another wave to come despite a lockdown response… then the models weren’t actually a million miles off in scientific terms when you consider the huge uncertainties involved at the start. Right order of magnitude at least! That may be as much luck as judgment given what we’ve learned about the Ferguson model coding since but you’re right, people forget that simpler pandemic models exist that are less informative but don’t suffer the same drawbacks of complexity.

Argh my last post should have said ‘people haven’t got hindsight to update their mental models yet’. Typo- apologies.

BiNd–you can buggeroff with yr bollocks about how nasty it is to die gasping for air. Sickening childish bullshit. Some POS female Beak read out exactly the same emotional shite in a court re an anti-LD activists case. As was pointed out later–if I am tailgated in a minor car crash–should I take a huge set of glossy photos of car wreck horrors to court and use that as my case? If emotional vapouring is what everything is now about.

The kind of shite you are peddling is exactly HOW this fucking hysteria was started.” Do you want to die suffocating for days/weeks–if not kiss the arse of tyranny and sign up for a nasty new world”.

Lots of deaths are nasty. And if the mother-fucking scum of the NHS boss class are so full of compassion maybe the bastards should try using some of the 6-8 odd actual TREATMENTS that exist for c19 but NHS wont touch. Because they’d take a pin to Blojob’s bogus casedemic bubble. And the same with those already dying from assorted other conditions. Even if some of them HAVE another 2 or 3 years to go then treating them is an infinitely better approach than using vents more likely to help kill them.

Pseudo-intellectuals can sod off as well. Number-crunching and cockrot about a vax not proven to be effective let alone safe . Shite about “we haven’t seen 2nd wave peak deaths in hosps yet” . The same tired old “mega-death in the next two weeks” twaddle that was being played in May last year. And was a pack of shite back then.Accepting the pack of lies about 70000/93000 deaths is another sign of bs on the job. All these posts accepts all the lying garbage the state puts out as a given.
Blow out of your arses lads.

Are there 10-50000 “new” cases a day and which hospitals are they going in then? Because that WOULD swamp for real an NHS that says it is emptier than this time last yr. It is lying shite Johnson and his gang are working.

If your stats talk was just intellectual wanking it would be of no importance. But it is enabling mass ruin and tyranny. The Johnson gang are getting a taste for giving orders even if they are not WEF stooges. And the forthcoming economic mess will be made far worse by Biden’s antics to come in the USA.

Lots more are going to die from LD and economic ruin than this POS virus has ever killed.

@john77: thank you for the link. But I suspect his results may be vitiated by the facts – if facts they be – that (i) many of the ancients who have perished have lived in care homes where they have been disproportionately exposed to infection, and (ii) the ancients in care homes are not a representative sample of ancients, but are biased heavily towards people near death – see the BUPA figures I quoted.

@myburningears: I disagree. I think those Cambridge data show unambiguously that if prevalence is low then test results will be dominated by false positives. For anyone who hadn’t realised that fact it’s a useful lesson.

A separate lesson is that ten thousand student-age people did have a prevalence of zero in the last week of Full Term in December. I’d have found that hard to believe if it hadn’t been so carefully established. How on earth was it achieved?

Hang on; suitable use of plenty of pillows could be used to simulate beds with face-holes. Why isn’t this notion pursued on the wards? Surely I can’t be the first person to think of it?

Dear Mr Worstall

Something has been killing more people than ordinary this year.

Excess deaths to week 52 amount to about 80,000 for the UK. 2020 is a 53 week year, adding perhaps another 12-14,000: cue additional hysteria.

For England and Wales, 2018 excess deaths were about 21,000 for the year, making 2020 about four times worse in excess death terms, out of a total of 604,000 deaths to week 52.

I have been plotting excess deaths by age groups for England and Wales:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/189200946@N04/50806314173/in/dateposted-public/

Having killed so many oldies last year, there are fewer available to die this year. I suspect that the latest lockup for our own good™ is a last ditch effort to claim credit for a natural decline in deaths in the early part of this year.

Sir Vallance Bedspread, Mr *hitty, Boris Johnson and UTC and all have saved us!

Gongs all round and ignore the devastation.

DP

@ dearieme
Yes, there is a scandal that Scottish Care Homes, and to a lesser extent, English ones have suffered from the discharge of patients infected in NHS hospitals BUT the Scottish deaths are a small %age of the total (because Scotland has a small share, c.8%, of the population).
Care Home residents account for around one-third of all England’s covid-19 deaths in the period covered by the first set of official stats that I could find but also only about one-third of covid-19 deaths among over-65s. That is because 89.85% of all deaths reportedly due to covid-19 were among the over-65s. Simplified – 5 out of 9 covid-19 deaths were OAPs who were *not* in Care Homes (and 1 in 10 were under-65s).
So they are facts BUT misleadingly stated facts. Firstly “many” is still a minority; secondly a large proportion of those in Care Homes these days are in good physical health but suffering from dementia and nowhere near death’s door. New regulations have made Care Homes horribly expensive for the middle classes, home helps being far cheaper, so frailty is no longer the primary reason for going into Care.

@john77: thank you for that. A question: “Care Home residents account for around one-third of all England’s covid-19 deaths in the period covered by the first set of official stats …”

Given the common standard of official stats, forgive me if I ask whether Care Home residents who fall ill and are taken to hospital, there to die, are recorded merely as hospital deaths or as Care Home resident deaths?

@ Mr King
That is only literally true if you choose to go to one of the relatively few Care Homes actually owned by a council.
What actually happens is that local authorities demand that privately-owned care homes charge below cost (a little above marginal cost) for LA-funded residents so the Care Home charges self-funding residents extra to cover for the LA-funded ones’ share of fixed overheads and to provide the owners with a livelihood/profit.

@ Andy ex-Taiwan
If you read through the blog you will discover life expectancies for people with diabetes, chronic xyz etc are non-zero.
For dementia without other co-morbidities, life expectancy is only moderately lower than for people of the age and sex classified as healthy: I suspect that many (?most) of these were infected in Care Homes by other residents discharged from hospital.
The table does not distinguish between Type 1 diabetes and Type 2 diabetes: it is quite possible to live for half-a-century while suffering from Type 1 diabetes; OTOH the causes of Type 2 diabetes increase the mortality rate from other causes of those suffering from Type 2. A significant share of the multiple conditions comprise co-morbidities of Type 2 Diabetes

Thank you, john77. The Care Home biz would seem to be a lousy business to be in.