Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

The reports of people going to Skegness for a day out in the amusement arcade are horrific. But I think taking a caravan to the Highlands sounds pretty good altruistic sense to me. If those involved then shut themselves away or walk at a distance from others then they are not only likely to escape infection but to escape being unwitting passers on of infection in town.

I suspect a lot of people are in rather similar situations to my wife and I, who have had to leave London in order not to be living in the same house as a daughter who is supposed to be working in a school. Breaking the contract chain has to make sense.

I have a feeling that very soon the community will become divided into two groups. One group will strictly keep themselves to themselves and stay free of infection. The other group will rapidly cross infect each other. Immunity will develop in that group but for it to do so soon there will have to be a phase of breakdown of hospital care (literally nowhere to teat people). For many people in London joining the first group may require being out of town. If others insist on being part of the second group the first lot cannot be blamed for going where they can, as long as they keep clear of others.

I was thinking a bit more about the school policy. The policy of allowing children of essential workers to go to school looks to me to be a disaster. Presumably within a week or two ALL these children will be infected, with the result that ALMOST ALL key workers, as parents, will also be infected. This is the opposite of what we need. My idea would be that if one parent is not a key worker they should do the childcare. If both are key workers they should alternate, not just for their own sake but to preserve a body of key workers for the next month.

Section about schools copied to new thread

 

Thanks, hopefully they can get transmission under control.

I went to the shops yesterday and get told off when I got home i.e. for not preparing properly for bringing shopping into the house etc. I had two pairs of gloves on and a make shift face mask; washed my clothes and showered when I got back ---. It's a bit unreal i.e. you can't see anything so the danger isn't clear.

 

Respirators - a thought.

There is clearly a severe impending shortfall in medical respirators. So some people will not have access to respirators who desperately need them. Desperate circumstances sometimes call for desperate solutions. There are a great many industrial respirators that are available, not necessarily intended for life saving but for life preservation - forced air versions are available I believe. Although probably not as effective as medical respirators, would they still help save lives, possibly with some trivial adaptations? Maybe for less critical patients who perhaps need a concentrated oxygen supply but can still breathe it themselves? So that the medical respirators can be used where they are absolutely needed?

Would an industrial respirator be better in some cases than no respirator at all? Might they help save lives, both directly, and also indirectly by releasing medical respirators for those who really have to have them?

I appreciate there are strong regulatory issues here, which is partly what I mean by desperate measures. If industrial respirators could help save lives, then maybe there emergency legislation could be passed to allow their use, and for how they should be used, during this crisis.

Could there be any mileage in this @Jonathan Edwards?

 

This guy makes sense and they are starting this in New York where the confirmed cases are shooting up with increased testing.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1241440439380488194

 

Another story about people 'escaping to the countryside' and causing problems for the local residents from the Guardian daily updates:

 

Yes.. although London is certainly one of a few areas where lockdown should and could have happened. Also in other countries, there were certain regions that were more badly hit.

Also, why are shops still open? A friend is still working in a shop that sells toys and home accessories and towels etc. My local primark (and those in the UK know how busy primark is), is still open, as far as I know. Outdoor areas are still open, and people are congregating there.

 

A infectious doctor said this morning that 25,000 people died of the flu last year in Italy. Perspective.

 

And 5,000 out of about 100,000-200,000 infected people have died from Covid19 in a month. The population has a lot of immunity to flu so it does not spread to everyone. Covid19 can be expected to spread to everyone. So the expected number of deaths from Covid19 in Italy this year is about 1.5 million. Perspective.

 

Todays Sunday Times as to the origins of the herd immunity theory practiced in the UK. (John Harris is a Guardian Journalist). I think this is big in the UK right now.

https://twitter.com/user/status/1241637993313689601

 

The irony is I think that the reluctance to spend money on containing the virus in order to spare the economy might well end up doing economic damage that exceeds that of an aggressive and early containment strategy. Time is so precious when dealing with a situation where infection and death rates double every few days to a week.

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-51994504

 

Because the govt hasn’t forcefully closed shops in the UK yet, individual employees are resorting to things like this -

https://twitter.com/user/status/1241663109783326725

 

My home town had its first death (out of 10 known infected cases). There is also a newborn that is infected.

PS: and 4 people recovered, so that is good news at least.

Tomorrow they will begin disinfecting the streets. Just like the Chinese did.

 

Looks like we have DominicCummins and Patrick Vallance to thank for our current situation - at least according to this Buzzfeed report (thanks to @Andy, I think, for posting earlier)

10 Days That Changed Britain: "Heated" Debate Between Scientists Forced Boris Johnson To Act On Coronavirus https://www.buzzfeed.com/amphtml/alexwickham/10-days-that-changed-britains-coronavirus-approach

Here is what it says:
— despite all that stuff about following expert advice, it turns out the experts in the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, SAGE, didn't agree amongst themselves. Patrick balance, Chief Scientific Advisor to the government, told a Parliamentary committee last week week "if you think SAGE is a cosy consensus of the green, you are very wrong indeed".

Which makes it really strange that the government went out on a limb with its light-touch approach — which proved not to work.

This is the key quote: "a Minister told Buzzfeed news that Dominic Cummings and Vallance were "close allies" and claimed the government had "bet" the future of UK on advice from a very small group of scientists that for a long time differed from the wider international consensus, and other members of SAGE."

Also:

"The Prime Minister has held deep ideological reservations about turning Britain into effective police state, as some other countries have done. On Wednesday, Johnson told press conference that the UK was a "land of liberty","

It was only after the presentation of findings from Imperial College that Vallance and Johnson finally accepted that the NHS would soon be overwhelmed if the UK continued on its previous strategy.

This excerpt is good too
[The experts] also raised concerns that the government must be completely transparent with the public, questioning why Vallance later chose to describe the difference between the mitigation and suppression strategies as “semantics”. “This will all come out in the mother of public inquiries,” a source said.

"If you want to know how much we underestimated this, last Wednesday Rishi's budget gave a £30 billion stimulus for the economy, six days later he had to spend another £330 billion," said a Whitehall official.

 

I agree that non essential shops should close. I'm not sure why Waterstones hasn't. Perhaps because it hasn't an online presence?

Most of the shops I use online have physical stores. My inbox has been much busier with messages from them saying they are closing their stores, but are still open for business online.

 

That's true, but you can easily determine the degree of exponential growth by looking at the increase in deaths over the previous two weeks say. If for example the deaths were to double every 6 days, then you put that into your exponential calculation. If mitigations are put in place that slow down viral spread, and then deaths then double only every 14 days say, that becomes the basis of your formula.

The death figures are likely to be much more accurate than the reported number of infected, because lots of people have mild symptoms and they do not get included in the figures. So the good thing about this formula is that it is based on the more reliable death numbers, not the reported cases.

PLE report that there are 5,018 infected cases in the UK today, but with the total deaths at 233 so far, Tomas Pueyo's formula predicts that there are actually 233 * 800 = 186,400 infected people in Britain.

Yes, having a large elderly population, and having a shortage of ventilators, are factors which can increase the death rate. Italy have both, which may explain their higher death rate.

But this again is something you can enter into the formula: Tomas Pueyo based his x800 factor formula on a death rate of 1%, but if the death rate is higher, then you adjust accordingly:

His formula is pretty simple:

Number currently infected = D * (100/P) * 2^(17/T)

Where:
D = number of deaths to date
T = death number doubling time in days
P = percentage of infected people who die

Do you know of any computer models that are currently being used to predict the number of infected people in the UK on a day by day basis? I have not seen any. That's why I found the formula offered by Tomas Pueyo a useful way of getting a rough figure for the number infected.