Generic Virus Thread

[terrytini]

3 hours ago, tinker said:

Your right and odds are it will affect us all, from the stats today. Nearly 7 more days of more or less exponential growth until we start to see the affects of the lock down. 

I’m afraid that whilst it’s possible we may see limits on the exponential growth in a week or so,that’s very much only a small part of the picture

Whilst it’s impossible to directly compare, it’s informative to look at us compared to Italy.
 

Italy reached 6000 cases and 233 deaths on March 7th.

UK reached approx 6000 cases and 235 deaths on March 23rd.

Italy Locked Down fully on March 10th.

At that time they had 10,000 serious cases and had had 631 deaths.

They now (22 days later) have had over 100,000 cases and over 11,000 deaths.

We locked down a couple of days earlier by comparison. March 23rd.

Therefore it isn’t unreasonable to suggest that by mid April we could have 100,000 cases and 10,000+ deaths. 
Cases, and Deaths, are still rising significantly each day in Italy. The RATE of new cases is slowing, but there’s still around 4000 a day.

We will have been fortunate if this stops killing significant numbers in this Country by the end of May.

 

 

Edited April 1, 2020 by terrytini

[KentVillan]

5 hours ago, snowychap said:

I don't know. I get what you're saying but I wonder whether a lot of the 'expert' stuff is being given on the basis that they're doing their best to try and distance themselves from the politicial influence whilst not disagreeing with those politicians in charge.

I think I compare Harries to Birx. Fauci to Whitty. Listen to them all but listen to Fauci & Whitty most.

Yes, Whitty strikes me as the most sincere. He may have made some mistakes early on, but he seems comfortable admitting to concern / uncertainty, and distinguishing "best guess" opinion from fact.

I have friends on the front line in the NHS in London who say what Harries is saying in press conferences about PPE and testing just isn't true (or even internally logical), but I think the debate is starting to get skewed a bit towards the political leaders because frontline NHS staff literally don't have the time to go on social media and call bullshit. Plus some of them are being threatened over whistleblowing:

Good friends of mine (and no doubt friends and relatives of many people on these boards) are risking their lives to deal with this, with substandard equipment, and having to deal with the emotional conflict of this kind of shit being directed their way.

Harries seems to be the most vociferous about lack of PPE and testing not being an issue, and even implied yesterday that it's more an issue of perception rather than reality. At times, I feel like I'm watching an episode of Chernobyl.

[Awol]

1 hour ago, KentVillan said:

Plus some of them are being threatened over whistleblowing:

 

Cover-ups seem to be built into the DNA of Officialdom in UK, but threatening NHS staff right now is pretty special. 

The managers involved should be given a choice: immediate P45 or a mop and transport to NHS Nightingale. If it’s coming from above them then the same applies.

When the US shifts to recommend the public ALL wear face masks outside the home it’s going to be interesting to see UK advice hold the line that British people shouldn’t.

That’s the single worst piece of official misinformation put about to date, I suspect to avoid embarrassment over the lack of domestic stocks. 

[KentVillan]

A couple of very good articles presenting the critical case.

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/03/why-weren-t-we-ready

Quote

...

On its website, MI5, the home security service, states that terrorism is “the biggest national security threat that the UK currently faces” but that conclusion is not supported by the National Risk Register. This is a document “given no publicity at all”, according to David Spiegelhalter, professor of risk at Cambridge University. While it is true that terror attacks are considered to be more probable than a pandemic, they are classified as only having a Level 3 impact. Other key threats – cyber attacks on infrastructure, widespread flooding, a nationwide blackout – are all rated as both less likely and less impactful than a severe pandemic. 

Covid-19 is that pandemic. That it is a novel virus and the government’s plans were for influenza is “immaterial”, says David Alexander, professor of disaster risk reduction at University College London. The coronavirus closely resembles the threat anticipated in government planning documents, of a highly infectious respiratory disease that critically hospitalises between one and four per cent of those it infects. And yet the government appears to have been unprepared. The UK lacks ventilators, personal protective equipment and testing kits, while emergency procedures for manufacturers and hospitals are being improvised on the fly. 

But the government’s planning documents – which date from 2005 to 2018 but are mainly based on the 2011 “Influenza Preparedness Strategy” – suggest that Britain may in fact have been prepared, just for the wrong outcome. The UK’s plans appear to have rested on a false assumption: if a pandemic such as Covid-19 struck, the UK intended only to mitigate rather than suppress the impact.

...

And https://members.tortoisemedia.com/2020/03/30/chris-cook-coronavirus-nhs-at-capacity/content.html?sig=keNLL8BRfhyxlRYS9-EoICk4I44jgZb_ahgq3Zdx6pY

Quote

...

In 2017, a revision to the risk register noted the risk of “several thousand people experiencing symptoms, potentially leading to up to 100 fatalities”. Their assessment of the balance of risks suggested flu was the real danger – not an emerging infectious disease, like the novel coronavirus.

That is why the UK’s pandemic strategy, published in 2011, is actually an influenza strategy. It was a response, in part, to the swine flu pandemic of 2009-10 – an event which, combined with a very cold winter, stretched the NHS’s capacity to its limits.

Under plans from 2011, a “National Flu Pandemic Service” (NFPS) would spring from mothballs into being – a service to determine who should get the anti-virals held in Britain’s national stockpile. But the anti-virals that we hold for these emergencies are Tamiflu and Relenza, anti-flu drugs. They do not work against the coronavirus.

Some of the government’s planning assumptions were also flu-driven. The pandemic plan assumes a vaccine could be rolled out in five to six months – a normal time frame for flu vaccines. But the time to bring a coronavirus vaccine to market is likely to be double, or triple, that.

...

Also worth reading this one in full.

My interpretation of it all is that this has been a long time in the making... the crisis would have unfolded similarly under Cameron, May or Johnson, and probably even Blair / Brown (although the latter two would have had a better resourced NHS to handle the storm).

The other conclusion I draw from it: all of these detailed plans and simulations were done in advance, and that perhaps caused us to downplay the weight of evidence coming in from China / Korea / Iran / Italy. As Chris Whitty might put it, "a bad plan is worse than no plan at all".

[LondonLax]

6 hours ago, snowychap said:

 

I mean - really?

Here's a hint: what are you actually saying? And, again, what are you actually saying?

The key metric in a pandemic is the rate of ‘excess mortality’ i.e. how many extra people died ‘because’ of the virus not how many people happened to die whilst also having the virus. 

It seems everyone who dies for whatever reason but who also had the virus is being recorded as a COVID-19 death and added to the stats. 

We are all sitting around watching graphs of deaths growing but without the context of what a normal year looks like it’s difficult to tell how exceptional it is. 

There is a better explanation here (the whole article is worth reading for the problems in reporting on this, even in official circles): 

Quote

When giving evidence in parliament a few days ago, Prof. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London said that he now expects fewer than 20,000 Covid-19 deaths in the UK but, importantly, two-thirds of these people would have died anyway. In other words, he suggests that the crude figure for ‘Covid deaths’ is three times higher than the number who have actually been killed by Covid-19. 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-

[LondonLax]

3 hours ago, terrytini said:

It’s not stopping in two or three weeks !!!!

Yes this seems to be a common misunderstanding.  

The only way this stops is with ‘herd immunity’ either through a vaccine (12 months away) or through enough people getting it over the course of the year who can then go about their lives again and not be a carrier.

The purpose of a ‘lockdown’ is not to stop the virus but to ‘flatten the curve’ so we all get our dose in different months of the year instead of all of us getting it in April. 

Hence, the calling of a lockdown and all the additional police powers that comes with that has to be carefully considered. Will this level of restriction on liberty be in place for 12 months or more? Will we open society and close it again periodically throughout the year? At what point does the population get fed up with all the restrictions and start rebelling against them? 

[KentVillan]

3 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

The key metric in a pandemic is the rate of ‘excess mortality’ i.e. how many extra people died ‘because’ of the virus not how many people happened to die whilst also having the virus. 

It seems everyone who dies for whatever reason but who also had the virus is being recorded as a COVID-19 death and added to the stats. 

We are all sitting around watching graphs of deaths growing but without the context of what a normal year looks like it’s difficult to tell how exceptional it is. 

There is a better explanation here (the whole article is worth reading for the problems in reporting on this, even in official circles): 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-

Two problems:

• As soon as you're dramatically scaling up hospital capacity (emergency manufacture of ventilators, emergency return of retired workers, building entire new hospitals) that rather suggests that you are going WAY beyond normal. It's not just excess mortality, it's excess usage of NHS resources by ludicrous multiples of the status quo. (200%? 300%? 1000%?)
• Neil Ferguson's <20,000 deaths forecast is based on extreme lockdown policies which have **** the economy.

[tinker]

3 hours ago, terrytini said:

It’s not stopping in two or three weeks !!!!

No its not because people are still passing the virus to one another, if this stopped the virus would die within 2-3 weeks , if the two week period of possible contagiousness is correct.

 

[LondonLax]

3 minutes ago, tinker said:

No its not because people are still passing the virus to one another, if this stopped the virus would die within 2-3 weeks , if the two week period of possible contagiousness is correct.

 

But it’s not possible to stop it passing to people because we still have to interact with each other to keep essential services running. The Chinese did manage it but only with hyper draconian measures, apartments being bordered up and people having to present to their balconies each morning to be tested by a drone taking their temperature, anyone showing a fever was taken off to a quarantine camp. 

We’re not implementing anything like this anywhere in the west. We will all get the virus eventually. Fortunately it looks as though the mortality rate is actually in line with a bad seasonal flu.

[LondonLax]

25 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

Two problems:

• As soon as you're dramatically scaling up hospital capacity (emergency manufacture of ventilators, emergency return of retired workers, building entire new hospitals) that rather suggests that you are going WAY beyond normal. It's not just excess mortality, it's excess usage of NHS resources by ludicrous multiples of the status quo. (200%? 300%? 1000%?)
• Neil Ferguson's <20,000 deaths forecast is based on extreme lockdown policies which have **** the economy.

Indeed, I expect that a level of ‘excess mortality’ will begin to show up as hospitals are overwhelmed but getting an accurate handle on what this rate actually is is very important.

Shuttering the economy for 12 months will also result in deaths. There will be additional deaths from alcoholism, drug use, depression due to job losses. Additional deaths from domestic violence. Additional deaths from things like malnutrition. It is very important to get a proper understanding of whether the deaths from the virus are greater than these deaths, in order to justify the measures. 

Edited April 1, 2020 by LondonLax

[KentVillan]

14 minutes ago, LondonLax said:

Indeed, I expect that a level of ‘excess mortality’ will begin to show up as hospitals are overwhelmed but getting an accurate handle on what this rate actually is is very important.

Shuttering the economy for 12 months will also result in deaths. There will be additional deaths from alcoholism, drug use, depression due to job losses. Additional deaths from domestic violence. Additional deaths from things like malnutrition. It is very important to get a proper understanding of whether the deaths from the virus are greater than these deaths, in order to justify the measures. 

Of course, but killing 500,000 people will also cause a lot of grieving people (and indeed overwhelmed NHS staff) to suffer from those same issues, so it's a false dichotomy.

Too many people are presenting this as a simplistic economic vs. medical trade-off (i.e. a balancing act). They aren't perfectly negatively correlated. It's possible to screw up both.

I completely agree that shutting down the country for 12 months would do untold damage to people's lives. But a severe 2-3 month lockdown might be much more justifiable, even as a cold economic calculation, if it buys time to deal with the medical issues more efficiently.

Remember, a 45-year-old who emerges from this with lifelong lung damage will likely be a decades-long burden on the economy, in addition to the human tragedy of giving someone a disability halfway through their life. It's not as simple as just looking at excess mortality, the costs of letting this virus do maximum damage before treatments and preventative measures have been improved run much deeper.

And until those excess mortality figures are available, we should err on the side of caution. The economy can be repaired, people can't be brought back to life.

[LondonLax]

4 minutes ago, KentVillan said:

Of course, but killing 500,000 people will also cause a lot of grieving people (and indeed overwhelmed NHS staff) to suffer from those same issues, so it's a false dichotomy.

Too many people are presenting this as a simplistic economic vs. medical trade-off (i.e. a balancing act). They aren't perfectly negatively correlated. It's possible to screw up both.

I completely agree that shutting down the country for 12 months would do untold damage to people's lives. But a severe 2-3 month lockdown might be much more justifiable, even as a cold economic calculation, if it buys time to deal with the medical issues more efficiently.

Remember, a 45-year-old who emerges from this with lifelong lung damage will likely be a decades-long burden on the economy, in addition to the human tragedy of giving someone a disability halfway through their life. It's not as simple as just looking at excess mortality, the costs of letting this virus do maximum damage before treatments and preventative measures have been improved run much deeper.

And until those excess mortality figures are available, we should err on the side of caution. The economy can be repaired, people can't be brought back to life.

Of course 500,000 people dying who otherwise wouldn’t have would be a horrific outcome. I don’t think you would find anyone saying otherwise.

However, how accurate is that figure, what assumptions is it based on? And can societies negotiate a safer path through this to minimise excess deaths without becoming a police state for an undefined period of up to a year, which will in itself do untold damage?

They are valid questions that need to be answered because the measures being taken are quite extraordinary but mostly people seem to just be accepting it without questioning anything. 

[OutByEaster?]

The number of people killed by the virus now exceeds the capacity of Villa Park.

 

[It's Your Round]

2 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

The number of people killed by the virus now exceeds the capacity of Villa Park.

 

That’s a sobering way to visualise the figures. A full Villa Park (or 23 St. Andrews worth) is a lot of people. 

[HanoiVillan]

6 hours ago, LakotaDakota said:

I didn't say it did but when nearly 50% of the deaths are over 85 years old and that the average age in a country like Italy that is swamped is 82 I would say that there is a pretty good chance that a good portion of the 20-30000 or so 80+ year olds would have died anyway given that 100000 old people die every single day and this has been going on for 2+ months. 6/7 million people have died of old age since the beginning of feb. Corona accounts for about 0.5% of that and of that 0.5% I would suggest that half of them may have died anyway

In UK terms, average life expectancy for a man who reaches 85 is about 5 years, and for a woman it's about 7 years. 85 is older than the average victim so far. We can go back and forth about whether 5 - 7 years counts as *soon* in context, but I wouldn't have described it as such myself. I don't think we have any way of knowing whether the virus is mainly taking those who would have died under that average or not. The phrase 'had underlying health conditions' probably doesn't help us because how many people get to 80+ without any underlying health conditions? 

I also think we need to take seriously that the difference between dying on a hospital bed surrounded by the ones you love, and dying in a frantic icu with a tube down your throat for several days feeling like you're drowning, is not *just* a difference in numbers. 

[Davkaus]

My smell is slowly returning, but it's wrong. My coffee kind of smells of cheese. 

Still no taste.

[DCJonah]

7 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

In UK terms, average life expectancy for a man who reaches 85 is about 5 years, and for a woman it's about 7 years. 85 is older than the average victim so far. We can go back and forth about whether 5 - 7 years counts as *soon* in context, but I wouldn't have described it as such myself. I don't think we have any way of knowing whether the virus is mainly taking those who would have died under that average or not. The phrase 'had underlying health conditions' probably doesn't help us because how many people get to 80+ without any underlying health conditions? 

I also think we need to take seriously that the difference between dying on a hospital bed surrounded by the ones you love, and dying in a frantic icu with a tube down your throat for several days feeling like you're drowning, is not *just* a difference in numbers. 

Absolutely. 

We can't just look at people as numbers on a sheet. The impact it will have on society is going to be huge. 

I can't imagine losing someone I love in the manner you describe above. I know that shit would affect me for a long time after. 

And then think of the drs and nurses that are witnessing multiple people dying like this every single day, with nothing they can do. What affect is that going to have on them?

Edited April 1, 2020 by DCJonah

[lapal_fan]

This is 51 mins long, but it's filled with GOOD information, no fluff, no spin - just facts. 

I urge you to watch it, it is being watched by my Trust, the QE Trust by clinical staff and my companies staff who have to go on site.

@snowychap - Aerosolising is mentioned in it too    

Edited April 1, 2020 by lapal_fan

[Chindie]

I mean, yeah a Villa Park of dead people is a lot of corpses, you know, but if you really think about it, really, like... They were all gonna die anyway, so you know... Should we be bothered? Kinda fing. Like, you know, all that effort and money, it's kinda.. you know... wasted. 'cos ultimately we all gotta go, kinda fing.

[HanoiVillan]

4 hours ago, KentVillan said:

I have friends on the front line in the NHS in London who say what Harries is saying in press conferences about PPE and testing just isn't true (or even internally logical), but I think the debate is starting to get skewed a bit towards the political leaders because frontline NHS staff literally don't have the time to go on social media and call bullshit.

[...]

Harries seems to be the most vociferous about lack of PPE and testing not being an issue, and even implied yesterday that it's more an issue of perception rather than reality. At times, I feel like I'm watching an episode of Chernobyl.

I saw someone the other day describe that press conference as 'policy-based science making', which seemed sadly accurate.