Generic Virus Thread

[Genie]

35 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Yep. They’re making it very clear that they’re going to meet the target by claiming they have capacity. 
 

Hancock’s pledge was specifically tests carried out. I pray that journalists don’t let them forget this. It’s still on the governments own website

 

Yes, unused capacity suggests people don’t want or need the test which is clearly not the case. If there’s unused capacity then it’s something else for the government to be held to account for.

Edited April 23, 2020 by Genie

[VILLAMARV]

Just now, chrisp65 said:

I’m not sure why there’s such a downer on Shipman.

Every last one of those pensioners would have died anyway.

Thank **** someone replied. I thought I'd gone too far already and I've only been back a week! 

 

[Stevo985]

4 minutes ago, Genie said:

Yes, unused capacity suggests people don’t want or need the test which is clearly not the case. If there’s unused capacity then it’s something else for the government to be held to account for.

Exactly. 
 

If I told my boss I’d be making 100,000 parts by the end of the month, and then by the end of the month I said “oh I’m only MAKING 50,000 but I’ve got the CAPACITY to make 100,000” then I’d have failed to hit my target. 
 

Filling capacity is part of the task. and they’re gonna fail it

[snowychap]

58 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

Also do you have a link mate? genuine curiosity here, not sneering or anything. 

I also read it on one of the BBC summary articles yesterday or the day before, I think. but I've gone through my history and I can't seem to identify which page it was on.

I can have another look later but there's a shit load of potential pages!

[Chindie]

5 minutes ago, VILLAMARV said:

Thank **** someone replied. I thought I'd gone too far already and I've only been back a week! 

 

He had a good impact on the funeral trade economy too, and I daresay there's a few solicitors glad of the fees his efforts brought in.

How many undertakers would have gone under if not for Shipman? We'll never know... But think of the impact they're would have been if this doctor hadn't sent a lot of old biddies to a premature grave.

Likewise Fred West did wonders for the shovel and paving slab economy.

[TheMelvillan]

10 minutes ago, Stevo985 said:

Exactly. 
 

If I told my boss I’d be making 100,000 parts by the end of the month, and then by the end of the month I said “oh I’m only MAKING 50,000 but I’ve got the CAPACITY to make 100,000” then I’d have failed to hit my target. 
 

Filling capacity is part of the task. and they’re gonna fail it

And im sure they were tasked with creating a SMART target, which by definition would have been a realistically achievable one. and they still failed miserably

[Villarocker]

With regards to people with other ailments such as cancer and heart trouble who aren't getting their normal care in hospital; would it not be possible to move all Covid-19 patients, as well as those that are showing symptoms that are suspected cases, to the Nightingale hospitals and have dedicated staff there to deal with them so all virus patients and care staff are in smdedicated facilities. Then, leave the main hospital units to deal with the normal day to day stuff? I understand there are still risks at hospitals of patients going in but surely they could set up units outside each hospital that people go through and get tested before being allowed to go into the main building? Anyone tested positive could be dealt with separately. I mean, according to the daily figures, it seems like there is capacity to test 40k but only doing 22k per day. If there are 18k tests sitting around per day, they could make good use of them on site at the hospitals. 

[Stevo985]

7 minutes ago, TheMelvillan said:

And im sure they were tasked with creating a SMART target, which by definition would have been a realistically achievable one. and they still failed miserably

If they had any **** sense they’d have set that target internally and pledged half of it. Then if they met their target they’ve over delivered. 
 

But that’s not how politics work. It doesn’t work like a real job. It’s all about over promising to get the positive headlines and then lying your way out of it when you fail 

[Demitri_C]

1 hour ago, snowychap said:

 

In this scenario, capacity is not the issue. The ability to satisfy the demand and utilise the excess capacity (i.e. X-Y) is the issue.

Capacity (in that apparently the desire is to increase capacity further still to 100k by the end of the month) is a separate issue.

And you know this how ? When i said capacity i was referring to the number of staff able to carry out these tests. To get the mumber the government wants tested you have to pull out staff from other areas of the hospital to do the numbers they want.

Its been a struggle today apparently here as staff shortages has meant staff have have to been taking off testing to help treat patients. This is the major problem your not understanding. You can  throw as many facts and figures as you like from online sources but until your actually in that working environment you dont realise the challenge of how to scale this many tests daily.

 

 

[bannedfromHandV]

How have Vietnam managed to get away with no recorded deaths and now no new cases for a week?!

Something just doesn’t feel right about all of this, I think the more time I spend at home the more my mind strays into conspiratorial thinking but something is starting to feel really off with the patterns of infection, if there are patterns.

[Genie]

I'd love to know the real figures for China, realistically it must be in the hundreds of thousands of deaths surely? USA at ~50k deaths and has had time to prepare for it. With the epicentre in Wuhan it must have been spreading like crazy before they knew what was happening.

[Jareth]

1 hour ago, VILLAMARV said:

Do you have a link for that boyo bach? I'm intrigued. 

I think I caught it on the BBC Wales live feed yesterday or the day before (tried looking but means major trawling and I'm a lazy ***) - anyway it lodged as we've a pair of old gits who live with us and it made them happy to see they were not necessarily first in the firing line!

[wazzap24]

5 minutes ago, bannedfromHandV said:

How have Vietnam managed to get away with no recorded deaths and now no new cases for a week?!

Something just doesn’t feel right about all of this, I think the more time I spend at home the more my mind strays into conspiratorial thinking but something is starting to feel really off with the patterns of infection, if there are patterns.

There is some good info out there on what they did. They knew they didn’t have the capacity to cope from a medical perspective and they didn’t have mass testing capacity so they used lock downs and tracked/traced every single case. Pretty amazing really and just goes to show - you don’t need all the gear, if you’ve got an idea. 
 

https://www.ft.com/content/0cc3c956-6cb2-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

Quote

Rather than embark on mass testing, which has been the crux of wealthier South Korea’s response to the outbreak, Vietnam has focused on isolating infected people and tracking down their second- and third-hand contacts.  “Mass testing is good, but it depends on the resources of each country,” said Tran Dac Phu, a senior health official advising Vietnam’s Emergency Operation Centre, which is equivalent to the US Centers for Disease Control. “The important thing is, you need to know the number of people who might have come in contact with the disease, or returned from pandemic areas, then perform tests on these people.” Apart from aggressive tracing of infected people’s contacts, the communist leadership’s measures have also included forced quarantines and the conscription of medical students, retired doctors and nurses to join the fight.

 

[Delphinho123]

1 hour ago, chrisp65 said:

I’m not sure why there’s such a downer on Shipman.

Every last one of those pensioners would have died anyway.

I think the question is, did they die with Shipman or because of Shipman?

[chrisp65]

The Shipman debate:

 

 

[StefanAVFC]

38 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

And you know this how ? When i said capacity i was referring to the number of staff able to carry out these tests. To get the mumber the government wants tested you have to pull out staff from other areas of the hospital to do the numbers they want.

Its been a struggle today apparently here as staff shortages has meant staff have have to been taking off testing to help treat patients. This is the major problem your not understanding. You can  throw as many facts and figures as you like from online sources but until your actually in that working environment you dont realise the challenge of how to scale this many tests daily.

 

 

Capacity means how many tests they can do. This (I would imagine) takes into account all of these challenges.

For example, my team have a capacity of 100 changes to our system per month. That takes into account the other work they have to do. Their capacity isn't if I pulled them off all other work and made them focus purely on changes to the system. Obviously that would be higher, but it isn't the capacity. 

[snowychap]

33 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

And you know this how ?

By reading the announcements from the Department of Health, by listening to the statements made by Ministers in the House of Commons, by listening to Patrick Vallance and Chris Whitty.

34 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

When i said capacity i was referring to the number of staff able to carry out these tests.

If there is capacity for 40,000 tests to be done per day then one should be assuming that this is 'in order to carry them out' and not just that there's a pile of 40,000 bits of test equipment labelled 'Monday', 'Tuesday', &c. stacked on a shelf.

If there are not the staff available to carry out 40k tests per day then there isn't the capacity for 40k tests per day.

37 minutes ago, Demitri_C said:

This is the major problem your not understanding.

Again, I'll reiterate the above (which has also been remarked upon by a number of other posters) - what you are saying here (by staff being pulled off testing, not being able to help to do it, still requiring training and so on) would impact the capacity, i.e. bring the capacity down fron 40k (or even perhaps down from 50k to what the Dept of Health claims it is now which is 40k) though it may have an effect on helping to get the demand to the supply as I've already acknowledged.

The points you make are important in as far as the practicalities of doing testing are concerned butr you are misunderstanding the issues and conflating them.

There is an issue with increasing capacity and there is, separately, an issue with being able to bridge the gap between the existing demand and the claimed/announced capacity though there may be a little crossover.

[bannedfromHandV]

27 minutes ago, wazzap24 said:

There is some good info out there on what they did. They knew they didn’t have the capacity to cope from a medical perspective and they didn’t have mass testing capacity so they used lock downs and tracked/traced every single case. Pretty amazing really and just goes to show - you don’t need all the gear, if you’ve got an idea. 
 

https://www.ft.com/content/0cc3c956-6cb2-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

 

But haven’t we done all of that?

Early on we were identifying individuals then tracking who they’d come into contact with.

We’ve imposed quarantines on infected people and we brought in students and retired staff.

Unless I’m missing something? (Beyond the usual)

[Awol]

2 hours ago, HanoiVillan said:

I mean, the thing on testing is that no-one can deny it's difficult. But, this is the crisis we're in. It's not a training crisis, and we can't switch it to easy mode. Testing isn't just a 'nice to have', it is an 'essential to have' if we want to set up a contact-trace-and-testing system to bring us out of lockdown. If we can't set that up, we either have to remain in lockdown, face a second wave of infections, or hope that we can replicate the exact results that Sweden has had from a very-far-from ideal starting point. So, testing at scale is really important, and we simply have to find solutions that work. Again, I'm not denying that it's hard, but if people can't do the job required during a national emergency then the only honourable course of action is to resign so that they can be replaced by somebody who can.

Exactly this, except they don’t even have to resign (or at least wait until it’s over, a new and unsighted minister might make things worse) just bring in the expertise available to help. That’s both a party political (acknowledging that non-specialist politicians aren’t all knowing, all managing paragons of excellence) and a civil service (the instinct to centralise and control process) problem. 

In other words, for the love of god, let the army in to lead and organise the various organisations involved in all aspects of testing, while still remaining accountable to and directly under ministerial control in the CoC.

There’s no shame in admitting the current structures have failed, we can all see it anyway. At least acting to correct it quickly would show grown-up, responsible leadership.

Even the local resilience forums staffed by the military to support local authorities are not being employed to the degree they could usefully be.

[VILLAMARV]

Just now, bannedfromHandV said:

But haven’t we done all of that?

Early on we were identifying individuals then tracking who they’d come into contact with.

We’ve imposed quarantines on infected people and we brought in students and retired staff.

Unless I’m missing something? (Beyond the usual)

As far as the tracing thing goes what have we done? We keep hearing about the govt app being the game changer but it needs huge percentages of the population to voluntarily sign up to it for it to be effective.

Other than that, and it's a genuine question to the vt hive mind (especially those in the nhs or those who have had it) what efforts have been made to isolate, track and trace. 

We do this for certain std's albeit tentatively and despite the awkwardness. I haven't seen or heard anything to suggest we've been doing similar for this. Admittedly I may have missed it in the hubbub.