Not sure if I’ll get told off for starting another Covid-19 thread but…

I’ve not seen this discussed before, I’ve tried googling but to no avail. What is happening to viruses in the UK population (other than Covid-19)? I’m thinking things like Chicken Pox. Will this now be pretty rare in the population for the next few years? and could this cause vulnerabilities down the line when these things all start creeping back in?

Chickenpox is much more transmissible than SARS-COV-2. There is also a vaccine. About 9/10 people reach adulthood having contracted the virus. Infection is life-long, but there is some protection from subsequent exposure (although you can develop shingles). It’s not hugely seasonal.

My wife caught it at 32 and was very ill after my 3yo brought it home from nursery and infected her and out 3 month old baby. When you have no maternal immunity, the spots were magnificent. Fortunately he couldn’t scratch.

Influenza is seasonal unless pandemic. Too early to predict the consequences of next winter, but some social isolation may lead to lower morbidity.

On a similar vein, I was thinking that things like head lice could see a big decline in their numbers and prevalence.

Its going to be swings and roundabouts really – there’ll at least in the short term there’ll be less low level lurgy. How much can’t really be measured as  – a bit like C-19 –  the medical services only encounter the instances of flu, measles, mumps, and the screaming ab-dabs where people get very ill.

Down the line we’ll see a big spike in cancer deaths. In Scotland at least there have been reports in a 75% drop in urgent cancer tests because of the drop in / cancelation of routine appointments.

As a for instance I had a biopsy this time last year – not because I’d gone to the docs worried that I had cancer but because a doc saw something that worried them during an otherwise unrelated routine dermatology appointment – all the appointments with that service have been cancelled this year- those checks and tests aren’t happening (in fact despite the all clear I should be getting annual checks and thats not happening either).

A lot of early diagnoses  and interventions of all kinds are going to be missed – things your GP / Dentist / Optician  would have noticed and might have saved your life.

When the dust settles its not just going the C-19 infection rate that needs to be compared between countries but the excess deaths as a whole – what services countries were unable to maintain while they handled C-19

True. 100% of us are making huge sacrifices for 0.5% of the population.

100% of us are making huge sacrifices

Its more that people are being sacrificed – we’ve voted for a government that runs a health service in a way that it can only just cope with ‘normal’ and nothing in reserve. And this is the price. Those excess deaths will be because we have far fewer nurses and high dependency beds per capita than many of our neighbours.

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True. 100% of us are making huge sacrifices for 0.5% of the population.

Not really – we actually don’t know who we are protecting and what long term consequences we are avoiding. Mortality is not the only issue.

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There are no guarantees that as an illness COVID-19 is done and dusted after a couple of weeks. The number of people who have it for months is worrying. There are potential long term consequences and life shortening conditions emerging. Protecting as many people as possible is wise.

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