A massive new study of COVID-19 patients in the UK has debunked claims the disease is only killing off people who would have died anyway, according to the scientists behind it.
The disease, which has killed at least 233,000 people around the world since emerging from China earlier this year, can be fatal at any age - but is especially deadly to the elderly and those with underlying conditions, such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity.
Data from New York shows almost half of all COVID-19 deaths there are people aged 75 or over. This has led to claims it's no more dangerous than relatively common diseases like influenza, and many of its victims would have died anyway.
"The alarm you're seeing offshore in places like Italy is false coverage to the extent that many of those who die were dying anyway," controversial Newstalk ZB broadcaster Mike Hosking claimed in April. "It's a hard thing to say, but it's also true."
Medical experts who are studying the carnage COVID-19 is wreaking on the UK, say it's not true.
In a new study published online Thursday (NZ time), they say once COVID-19 patients arrive in hospital they have about as much chance to survive as those infected with the deadly Ebola virus.
They looked at the health outcomes over 14 days of almost 17,000 patients in early April - at the time about 14 percent of all Brits known to be infected with the disease and 28 percent of all those who required hospital care.
Of those, half recovered to the point they could leave hospital; 17 percent remained in hospital; and the rest - a third - died. Of those admitted to ICU, 45 percent died.
"The finding of independent associations of advancing age, male sex, chronic respiratory (though not asthma), chronic cardiac and chronic neurological disease with in-hospital mortality are in line with early international reports," their study read.
"However, although age-adjusted mortality rates are high in the elderly, most of these patients were admitted to hospital with symptoms of COVID-19 and would not have died otherwise."
Even those who weren't considered sick enough to receive critical care died in massive numbers - 31 percent. One of the researchers behind the study told Sky News many would have had "little to no aspiration to recover", and using up valuable ICU resources wouldn't have done them "any favours".
Prof Calum Semple of the University of Liverpool, who led the team behind the research, said once you're in hospital, you have about the same chance of surviving COVID-19 as you do Ebola, which the World Health Organization says kills between 25 and 90 percent of everyone it infects.
He told Sky News people "need to hear this and get it into their heads".
"This is an incredibly dangerous disease. We still see isolated egregious examples of selfishness where people think it is okay to meet up in the park and share a four-pack of beer.
"There is a particular group of younger people who are taking an 'I'm alright Jack, this doesn't bother me' attitude. They don't understand they are just as likely to catch it and transmit it, and that will affect the rest of society."
The study backs up data collected by UK newspaper the Financial Times earlier this week, which showed massive spikes in deaths across Europe, which has been hit hard by the pandemic. Deaths in Italy were up 90 percent on the usual rate at this time of year, for example; Belgium deaths up 60 percent and England and Wales together up 37 percent. These increases would be unexplainable if most people who contracted COVID would have died anyway.
Like much research into COVID-19 and the virus behind it, SARS-CoV-2, the study is yet to be peer-reviewed but has been published online.
