Yes more people will live if they have access to care because the system isn’t overwhelmed. People in the later stages will also benefit from the institutional knowledge hospitals gain from treating patients. There will also be more PPE and essential medication that will make treatment more effective. Time is our ally.
This is like the third or fourth spot I've seen on this very site where people are postulating that covid deaths would have really died in "months" anyway. Why is this so weirdly consistent?
To be clear: there is absolutely no evidence for a number like that, none at all. Typical at-risk patients with comorbidity like advanced age or obesity are routinely expected to live for decades. Actual conditions with a death-in-months prognosis are extremely rare, and tend to require hospital care already. Think advanced heart failure or stage 5 cancer.
In Sweden, which only has a voluntary lockdown, over 30% of covid19 dead come from elderly homes[0]. Swedish elderly care is highly focused on keeping the elderly independent (at home) as long as possible, so the people in elderly homes are the ones in the worst state - 20% don't even survive one month from arrival[1] (I saw another statistic that 40% don't survive 6 months, but I can't find that source, google search results are now overwhelmed with covid19 news)
That may point to an upper bound of 30% on the people dying from this that would have died "within months/a year anyway"
There are some bayesian tripwires in that analysis, though I think the data is good and it fits roughly with my intuition that bulk of covid deaths are in the "basically healthy and will live for many years" population.
The fact that a large-ish fraction of the entrants to the care homes die soon means that the people who don't die soon are going to be over-represented in the population. So if you pick a bunch of people from these homes at random, you probably (depending on the total population and total number of such deaths, which isn't cited) don't find people at the edge of death.
So I buy the upper bound, but think the actual number is likely to be much lower.
Stated more intuitively: there just aren't that many people "within months of death" at any time, and there are a lot of people dying to covid.
If you look at the median age of covid fatalities in Italy at age 81.5, this question is entirely valid. Some of the numbers I read pointed to a 16-20% all cause mortality rate for that group irrespective of covid. So by definition the circles overlap to a meaningful extent.
The vast majority of deaths in Canada (for example since I live here) are those who are 80+ and around half lived in nursing homes. Given average life expectancy in our country is only 82, the vast majority of coronavirus victims' probability of death any given year was quite high.
There's a metric called something like "estimated years of life lost" based on mortality rate by age and life expectancy, but you'd also want to factor in individual life expectancy—a lot of the people dying from this already had other health conditions.
Are we saving lives, or are people now dying in June that would have died in November anyway?