"if COVID-19 had been allowed to run amok those figures may well have been very much worse."
Nonsense.
Based on the facts (as opposed to the usual frenetic keyboard bashing guesswork) the deaths rate from this virus - like all other viruses - naturally maxes out relatively early according to the Gompertz function which describes such bio-statistical phenomena.
This virus is doing exactly the same thing that all pandemics do: i.e., the death curves follow the Gompertz function.
And the reason they follow the Gompertz curve is because the death curves are baked in due the heterogeneous nature of populations and societies, and because regional communities and populations are finite in number and transmission is not unlimited.
And it won't matter what one tries to do, the Gompertz Law will always ultimately come into effect by dint of the sheer statistical and physiological nature of the problem.
What the evidence shows is that what authorities got wrong is they took their policy cues from "models" being applied by the so-called experts; these models made use of
unconstrained exponential growth assumptions (i.e.
divergent geometric series).
But this is totally flawed because it fails to capture what happens in the real world - in which the rate of change in the number of infections is constrained by the laws of nature.
This means that the exponential growth becomes self-defeating relatively early at some equilibrium point and the geometric series actually
converges, instead of
diverging.
You can pick any discrete regions in the world - with different levels of restrictions, different localised factors, different demographics - and the deaths in each of those regions will max out at a pre-determined asymptotic level which is reflective of the Gomertz function, such as these:
Those curves are effectively baked in by the laws of statistics and heterogenous physiology and authorities can try to intervene to prevent them reaching those horizontal asymptotes, but unless they do it immediately (literally in the first two or three weeks), that rapid exponential growth at the early stages means that there is very little that can be done.
And the natural result is only short-duration (literally a few weeks) of exponential growth before rates change in the number of deaths slows quickly, and very soon that rate of death increase tends to almost zero.
For context, in the first two months of the virus, countries in Europe (Spain, France, the UK, Italy, Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden) collectively recorded 125,575 Covid-related deaths (that covers the exponential growth part of the Gomptertz curve. In the past two months (coinciding with the Gompertz plateau), the total number of deaths in those countries is 5,071.... a reduction of 96%(!!) compared to the start of the virus.
And this is not unique to this virus... all virus outbreaks follow the exact same geometric sequence which has very high geometric ratio in the beginning, but that ratio very quickly tends to 1.0.
This is the only virus that authorities thought they could somehow prevent from reaching the Gomptertz plateau.
What they failed to understand - despite much precedent to be observed - is that the geometric ratio, r, is not constant (which is what the modelling assumed), but is
highly variable in the real world
, starting out at a very high level, but then very quickly tending to unity.
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It is this failure to recognise that "r" is only meaningfully greater than 1.0 for a very short period of time - right at the very outset of the virus - before it very rapidly decays to 1.0, which is what resulted in all the predictions from the "models" being so far off the mark (not even remotely close, in most cases).
Even today, the media still quotes "modellers" making projections about deaths based on about long-duration exponential growth.
Which is simply nonsense, because it is physically not possible.
.
