Australia is spending up to $25 million for each Covid life saved

Every morning we are beng conditioned in Australia to listen to various press conferences around Covid, yet some numbers are missing every single day.

• 464 – that is the number of Australians who die every single day, around 170,000 each year.

• 76 is the number of easily preventable deaths which occur every day in Australia, 28,000 each year.

• 2 – the number of Australians who have died on average from Covid-19 each day since the pandemic began – 1000 over 18 months.

Yes, had we not taken lockdown measures, those numbers would have been much higher. Sweden, which has a similar health care system, took no hard lockdown measures and since the pandemic began has had a death rate of 1500 per million people.

Extrapolated to Australia's population, this would be around 39,000 people – sounds bad, doesn't it? Except that around 19,000 Australians die each year from heart disease, and around 16,000 from dementia in Australia alone.

Obviously, you can't catch heart disease like Covid-19 – but if we spent the vast sums of money on disease research like we have spent in Covid measures, then perhaps we would have a shot at defeating these serious illnesses.

Every single death is both sad and tragic, but we need to consider Covid deaths in a broader context.

The Coroners Court of Victoria recently announced a spike in childhood injury deaths during 2020 for Victoria.

One child under 14 died from completely preventable accidents almost every 11 days in Victoria during 2020 – almost double the 17 children in 2019 – and reversing almost a decade worth of downward trend in preventable child deaths, this trend wasn't replicated in any other state in Australia.

Double the number of children in Victoria died accidentally during Covid than the year prior, and the years prior to that.

Just as Covid victims had families, so to do those children all but they don't make the Premier's press conference and we didn't have the discussion about those kids' deaths.