If Covid is on the death certificate, it is considered to have contributed to the death in a significant manner i.e. they wouldn't have died if it hadn't been for Covid.
As I always say whenever people mention the fact that most of the children who have died had co-morbidities, yeah, fuck those sick kids, eh? To be less pithy, there are a lot of people out there (hundreds of thousands in the UK alone) with compromised immune systems for various medical reasons and therefore at greatly increased risk from Covid. The whole, "It's endemic, let's get on with things" conveniently forgets or ignores these people. Putting a mask on when going out shopping over the winter to hopefully help keep rates down is really no effort and might well save the life of one of these folk. Wearing a mask is really no effort whatsoever. Mandating better ventilation and filtration of air in buildings would cost money but will also have general health benefits as well as reducing the risk of infection. Of course, they would then need to admit that Covid is airborne which they seem to want to play down. However, this isn't just the issue over here. The NHS is on its knees - a backlog of almost 6 million people awaiting treatment, hospitals operating at reduced capacity and already full to bursting point even at this early part of the winter. All of the English ambulance services have been on black alert for weeks (the military has already been called in to help to a limited extent) and people are dying because Covid patients are sitting in ambulances for hours waiting to be admitted to hospitals. Not so many dying in the ambulances, perhaps, but have a heart attack or a stroke now and your chances of a paramedic getting to you in time to save your life are slim, because of the huge delays caused by Covid's strain on the system. Any reasonable country would already have reintroduced simple measures such as masking and we're seeing lockdowns in European countries now long before their health systems are under as much strain as ours. Unfortunately, we've got a bunch of corrupt and incompetent charlatans running the country who are ideologically incapable of learning from their mistakes because it wouldn't look good for their base to admit they were wrong. It's practically pathological by this point.
Also, please don't conflate general mitigations with lockdowns. Doing nothing makes lockdown more likely. People who are anti-masking, anti-distancing, anti-vaxxing and against all mitigations, you're unwittingly pro-lockdown.
One of the arguments we heard earlier in the pandemic is that novel viruses tend to evolve to be milder and less deadly. That's one possibility. The other is that (before modern medicine gave us more of an understanding of what occurred), the most vulnerable are killed off over the course of a few years as natural selection takes place. We know that there is a genetic component to risk for Covid as well because completely healthy individuals become extremely ill on occasion. There was an indication in early studies that a certain proportion of the population have a mild autoimmune disease which generally wouldn't be recognised as an issue, but this is what can trigger the catastrophic autoimmune response which leads to most Covid deaths. I have a feeling the post about research is hidden somewhere earlier in the thread, but I don't have time to check now. I seem to think the study found that something like 2% of the study sample size had this issue. Providing this 2% continues out across the whole population, that's a heck of a lot of people.
