Along_the_Wire you thought what?
It’s difficult to make direct comparisons about the point I was making, but here are some rough numbers for context:
Since the start of the whole pandemic, so over about 16 months, 455 people in England aged between 15 and 34 died “within 28 days of a positive covid test”, and not all of those will have been actually caused by covid, and a lot of those will have likely been people with serious underlying health conditions.
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&areaName=England
Meanwhile, in 2019 there were 708 registered deaths in England and Wales involving cocaine (though as with the Covid death figures above some of those could have also been partly impacted by other things; some of them will have also been older adults) .
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54540863.amp
Now consider that at least 15% of the population are estimated to have caught covid at some point (as of Jan, so will now be a fair bit higher), but only around 3% of people in the UK aged 15 - 59 take cocaine in a year, and it seems likely that cocaine is more deadly than covid for young people.
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-15-3-of-englands-population-estimated-to-have-had-coronavirus-by-mid-january-12207328
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jan/30/the-white-stuff-why-britain-cant-get-enough-cocaine
In fact, considering how many more people have caught covid than take cocaine, and looking at the age distribution of covid deaths, I reckon it probably even holds for people up to the age of 54 as well (above which they’re unlikely to be doing coke anyway).
