“But you cannot accurately use the figure to say ‘covid-19 has been the cause of 60,000 deaths’, as you would be selectively citing only one of several conditions which contributed to death. And you know how you hate it when the ‘sceptics’ do that!”
You can because if not for the fact that these 60,000 contracted SARS Cov2 at that point in thier lives they would not have died then but went on to live and died either of their cancer, heart disease or hit by a bus. It is that infection that caused the terminal event.
What it is that each condition is a predisposing factor and the addition of several predisposing factors will cause someone to die. This concept is also used to determine predicted survival used for example in life insurance.
Just to give an example, patients who have leukaemia and are being treated for it are susceptible to infections of the blood with bacteria that rarely cause death in normal people, they die of bacterial sepsis not with it as a passenger, as implied by some in relation to covid 19.
When does this discussion become relevant? When we realise that there is an increasing number of risk factors that can predispose to death from covid 19 and then you will find that say 20-30% of populations in the west suffer from these. These include age, heart disease diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, diseases suppressing immunity. The problem is actually a very large one because taking individual conditions that can cause predisposition to death from covid 19 can be much more than just the occassional old people.
So to start with age:
22% of UK population are above the age of 60, that is 14.3 millions of whom 4. 3 million are above seventy and 3.1 million above 80 years. Then take diabetes. There is an estimated 4.8 million diabetics and heart disease and hypertension and obesity. You will soon find out that the disease can badly affect a much larger proportion of the population than what you want to believe.
I would like you to read this article written by a scientist. It is in relation to the SARS cov2 vaccine but also addresses some of what you say earlier about interfering with nature.
On a final note, let me just conclude with a thought about the ridiculous claim that mRNA vaccines permanently alter your DNA or somehow make you “transhuman”. You have to remember that antivaxxers view vaccines as somehow “unnatural” to the point of altering what human beings are. They’ve been making that clear ever since I started paying attention to antivaccine pseudoscience two decades ago, and were doing so long before that. Of course, just because something is natural does not make it good, benign, or even just neutral. Nature is harsh, and the battle for survival brutal, and it’s completely “natural” for all manner of animals to be eaten by bigger, faster, and hungrier animals, and it’s just as natural for humans to die horrible deaths from infectious diseases. Indeed, just look at how horrible the deaths suffered by over 260K of my fellow Americans have been, and COVID-19 is entirely “natural”. Yet the mindset behind so much of “alternative” medicine and antivaccine views is that natural is always good and that anything synthetic should be viewed with extreme suspicion. (Come to think of it, that’s why COVID-19 denialists go to such enormous lengths to falsely portray SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes the disease, as somehow “unnatural” and bioengineered in a laboratory, with the pandemic being a “plandemic” initiated by global elites to control and subjugate the population.) It’s silly, because even “natural” nutrients and medicines are just as much chemicals as any synthetic nutrient or chemical. We have to judge whether such chemicals are harmful based on science and where the evidence leads us, not based on whether the chemical is “natural” or not. When considering claims about a novel disease such as COVID-19 and vaccines against it, we must also consider the totality of what we know about biology, especially molecular biology, and how a potential vaccine works in assessing the plausibility of alarmist claims about vaccines like those developed by Moderna and Pfizer. Claims that mRNA vaccines like these can “permanently alter your DNA” (or make you “transhuman”) fail miserably on that score.
I hope you are not an antivaxxer or a covid denier but unfortunately there is an increasing covid skepticism that is latching on to some of the pseudoscientific nonsense that is being spread around.