Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

Just wanted to point out that while I agree with the above quote those aren't my words. Don't know what happened here but I think they may belong to @Barry .

I had a moment there as I wracked my brain thinking did I write that? I remember nothing.

 

This really is an extraordinary admission. How come I had worked this out a month ago?

 

What I find so extraordinary is that it seems that Whitty and Vallance accepted some modelling that clearly had no relation to reality.

So Grant Shapps's 'following the science' is more the blind leading the blind.

 

To state the obvious, I meant that the Government strategy relied on a populace which was not well informed! The recommendation from WHO is to test, and trace, i.e. to reduce transmission. Failure to reduce transmission overwhelms the health service (ventilators/ICU) as per Italy - and the death toll increases (potentially up to 5X?).

I've still no idea why they haven't delivered large scale testing ---- anyone reading this who can explain/enlighten.

The UK Governments 'Laissez-faire attitude' is challenged here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51892402

 

I'd assumed you were referring to this notion of herd immunity which, despite misleading reports, was never part of the Govt's immediate strategy. I (or they) was referring to delaying lockdown to maintain healthcare capacity until such a stage that it's no longer tenable.

As per this explanation :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl6tTwxzCi8

Possibly over-simplistic but then I'm no podiatrist.

It seems though that events have now overtaken things. What worries me now is the extent to which citizens are aware that they're on lockdown until they come up with a vaccine?

 

I talked to a friend (who is a doctor) about a month ago and he explained the difficulty in getting access to ventilators in the UK - having to hand ventillate a patient. There were no ICU beds available in the UK - that was before coronavirus. My friend also explained that about 5%(?) of people, infected with cornovirus, needed to be ventilated. So yes this does not appear to have been news to informed people @Jonathan Edwards , except the Government/it's advisors!

You can see why scientists have been challenging this 'Laissez-faire attitude' https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51892402

 

This would seem to clarify that it was part of their strategy.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51915302

 

Nothing to do with the herd immunity stuff. I don't understand how delaying lockdown, generating thousands of suchk people, maintains healthcare capacity. One would assume that lockdown would not apply to healthcare professionals. The schools issue is complicated but if they really thought schools were a good place to spread things a bit then that is serious miscalculation. Even by the time they were discussing this enough school staff members had been allowed to mix with infected people for sick rates to be substantial. I get a blow by blow account from my daughter who teaches. She has the additional problem that she caught TB from a school epidemic that was allowed to spread by similar incompetence. The head teacher is still denying that there was ever a real outbreak, despite the molecular biology evidence on DNA isolates!

 

What worries me is:
""It is almost impossible to predict what that will mean in terms of human costs, but we are conservatively looking at tens of thousands of deaths, and possibly at hundreds of thousands of deaths," he said." [Birmingham University's Prof Willem van Schaik - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51892402]

5% of "36 million people", needing access to ventillators/ICU, is not a particularly difficult concept it means "hundreds of thousands of deaths".

 

Check online - search "r naught" basically if your looking at measles, which is highly infectious - 1 infected person infects 18 people (r naught = 18), then you need to vaccinate more than 90% of the population. If you manage 90%+ vaccination for measles then on average an infected person cannot transmit the virus to a person who is not immune and the outbreak dies out. With coronavirus (r naught = 3) if more than 66% of the population are immune then the outbreak will not be sustained.

Problem is if 66% of the population get coronavirus in a short period of time, then you don't have enough ventillators/ICU, and the death rate increases from about 1% (with ventillators/ICU) to possibly 5% (without ventillators/ICU).

Mass testing/contact tracing is the advice from the WHO.

 

Yes, without this we have no absolutely no idea who has the condition.

Then there’s the fact our frontline GP staff, who are coming into contact with people with coronavirus, are not getting tested

I don’t know why this is happening.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ts?CMP=share_btn_tw&__twitter_impression=true

Everyone is scared to speak up: doctors on frontline need Covid-19 tests

 

We left it too late. The NHS staff are already coming on the TV and saying they can’t cope. Already.

 

I agree. They are now trying to say they are still “using the same model”. Only, the inputs have changed now. So they’ve changed the intensive care number from 15% to 30%. Apparently their old “numbers” were based on influenza and viral pneumonia.

 

I just skim read bits of the imperial paper.

But this jumped out at me:

“The measures used to achieve suppression might also evolve over time. As case numbers fall, it becomes more feasible to adopt intensive testing, contact tracing and quarantine measures akin to the strategies being employed in South Korea today. ”


I think the reason the UK is not testing extensively is because this paper is telling them not to do it yet! As it’s not “feasible”! This is terrible.

In the paper they are pretty obsessed with “mitigation” as a strategy. Even now. Also very keen to defend themselves still, in the paper itself. Which seems weird. I think this Imperial team also ought to go.

 

Oh, and in the imperial paper, they’re still saying mass gatherings don’t have much of an effect.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1239807835984273408




Trump is finally taking some advice from the right people here instead of his unqualified son in law.

 

The high death rates in northern Italy could also be in part due to high air pollution levels. It's a densely populated and industrialized area.

 

The old version of the model must have been rubbish, predicting low mortality which surely must have been obviously wrong to anyone who glanced at the numbers from China.

Bear in mind the new model which predicts 260,000 deaths with the mitigate strategy says it is based on the assumption that the NHS somehow treats all the people who need it, while also pointing out that doing so is impossible as demand would be 8 fold higher than capacity. So what would the real mortality number have been, a million?

The original plan was always obviously high risk. Now they want to pretend its the same plan instead of admitting they got it wrong, too many ppl would have died.

 

That 250,000 is such a big under estimate. But they can’t admit it would have been millions.