Generic Virus Thread

[sharkyvilla]

3 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

I wonder if the UK government is regretting using that global death comparison graph at the daily press conferences. The UK deaths in all settings is going to show today as being above every other country in the world, on that comparative day, bar the USA.

I wouldn't be surprised if they stop showing this graph as we are quickly becoming the outlier around the world along with USA.( I accept that China are almost certainly not declaring many of their deaths).

I still can't get my head around that with the foresight we had of being able to see what was happening in Italy and then Spain that we failed to react quickly enough.

I don't think Italy and Spain have shown deaths in all settings when releasing their data up til now either.  

[VILLAMARV]

4 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

I'd like to know why they've used a Z score, where the data is from, because that graph just doesn't really stack up against other, much more clear ones. E.g.:

 

So they can overlay them on the same chart, as opposed to the one you posted where the scales are all different. 

[mjmooney]

My son in law's grandmother has dementia and his granddad has been struggling to cope with her at home for a good while. Before the pandemic broke out his granddad had a major health crisis of his own, requiring bowel surgery - so (very reluctantly) agreed to the old lady being moved into a care home. He was still recuperating when the pandemic broke out, and he immediately brought her home. Now at the time, we all thought this was a really bad idea, given their situation. But with what we know now it might well be that he saved her life. 

[sharkyvilla]

5 minutes ago, mjmooney said:

My son in law's grandmother has dementia and his granddad has been struggling to cope with her at home for a good while. Before the pandemic broke out his granddad had a major health crisis of his own, requiring bowel surgery - so (very reluctantly) agreed to the old lady being moved into a care home. He was still recuperating when the pandemic broke out, and he immediately brought her home. Now at the time, we all thought this was a really bad idea, given their situation. But with what we know now it might well be that he saved her life. 

My Nanna is 99 and after a fall on Christmas Eve she moved into a care home.  We thought she'd be devastated as she has been really independent but it turned out it was a massive weight off her shoulders and she has loved it there doing thinks like painting and her first ever game of dominoes, even walking round using her Zimmer frame for the first time in ages.  Now she is quarantined in her room which is sad.  The care home is brilliant but even they said as well as being good they need to be lucky.  

[Xela]

24 minutes ago, DCJonah said:

By the end of this, people should be so angry that it really should be the end of the tories for a long time. But I know that we've got such a stupid mindset in this country and are so easily distracted that nothing will come of it. 

People should also be angry at the huge numbers of people thinking the lockdown doesn't include them. Roads were much busier tail end of last week and the weekend. 

Biggest mistake for me was keeping the airports/ports open. Madness. 

[Davkaus]

36 minutes ago, OutByEaster? said:

 

If not, why aren't the sick in care homes being moved into hospitals that have capacity to help them?

Because for a lot of these patients, they have significant co-morbidities, and invasive treatment has been deemed by their families and their current healthcare professional to not be in their best interests.

[Stevo985]

The ONS figures are awful yet not a single journalist at the daily presser have even referenced them. 

[blandy]

3 hours ago, DCJonah said:

I just look at the two in charge and can't believe its a coincidence that our death totals will be horrendous

Me too.

[blandy]

3 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I just think we’re lucky we took back control. Imagine if we still didn’t have control of our own borders. 

Tongue in cheek I know, but I thought in this transition period we were carrying on (and so is the EU) as was "normal"?

That said, plenty of EU places closed borders, instigated quarantine and stuff, but we didn't, and still haven't, have we. Idiotic.

[LondonLax]

1 hour ago, Davkaus said:

I'd like to know why they've used a Z score, where the data is from, because that graph just doesn't really stack up against other, much more clear ones. E.g.:

 

The source is the EuroMOMO.eu website.  It tracks excess mortality across Europe.

[chrisp65]

19 minutes ago, blandy said:

Tongue in cheek I know, but I thought in this transition period we were carrying on (and so is the EU) as was "normal"?

That said, plenty of EU places closed borders, instigated quarantine and stuff, but we didn't, and still haven't, have we. Idiotic.

Yeah that was kinda my point. We’ll claim right up to the end that it’s the EU stopping us doing this or that, just as it’s been the EU stopping us controlling immigration so far. It obviously isn’t / wasn’t, but enough people are happy to believe it as it fits their world view of us good / them bad. EU countries acted unilaterally as soon as they felt it actually mattered. Their intention, to protect their population.

When push has come to shove on being sovereign and in charge of our own destiny, we’ve failed to check people arriving at Heathrow during a pandemic and we’ve flown in ‘essential’ fruit pickers from Romania. 

Always obvious it was all fake for the gullible and the mildly not a racist. Wish it hadn’t taken tens of thousands to die during a pandemic for it to be made this obvious.

 

[HanoiVillan]

2 hours ago, VILLAMARV said:

Quite

Edit: I think we all know the answer, perhaps we shouldn't say it out loud because it's rather callous

Kind of feel like the opposite; it's imperative to force people to say it out loud so that the public have to confront the full reality.

[Dodgyknees]

2 hours ago, DCJonah said:

By the end of this, people should be so angry that it really should be the end of the tories for a long time. But I know that we've got such a stupid mindset in this country and are so easily distracted that nothing will come of it. 

Football supporter mentality. Cheerleaders for a fascist government, because believing is winning. Look at how England fans when it comes to England in a world cup, there is zero difference.

[markavfc40]

1 hour ago, Stevo985 said:

The ONS figures are awful yet not a single journalist at the daily presser have even referenced them. 

The whole daily press conference is a waste of time in fairness. The government and whoever they have brought along with them don't get pressed or grilled. The journos get one question, if they are lucky a follow up and then they move on to another journo who often asks a completely different question. Apparently channel 4 and the Sunday Times are no longer allowed to ask questions as the government aren't happy with their reporting.

I have just seen the government aren't putting a minister up tomorrow to be interviewed by Piers Morgan on GMB. I have little time for Morgan but he at least hasn't stood for their bollocks and failure to answer questions or to be in receipt of facts. I am sure we will see a government minister rock up on the BBC though where they can spout their propaganda, pretty much unchallenged, and tell us all what a great job they are doing whilst showing zero humility and acknowledging their huge failings.

 

[HanoiVillan]

Very weird to be saying this, but Bernard Jenkin had a good piece on ConservativeHome the other day about the route out of our current situation, and a clear-eyed assessment of what the possibilities are (or, really, aren't) and what the consequences are likely to be.

Bernard Jenkin: Keeping or junking the shutdown won’t work. But the alternative requires a transformation unparalleled since the war

'[...]Talking about the mechanics of re-opening the economy is important in order to understand how and in what order different sectors of the economy can recover. However, such a discussion assumes we can loosen the restrictions while also having in place the public health infrastructure and policies for the whole of society that will prevent a second spike in infections. But that is the daunting challenge we cannot yet meet.

The most helpful way to think about meeting it so to consider the so-called  R number (the average number of people one infected person will themselves infect).

If this number is below one, the number of cases goes down. If it is consistently above one, the disease will spread to the entire population. In the words of Carl Bergstrom, Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Washington: “There’s really not a middle ground. It does one of two things: either you get it under control, and it goes back down to very low levels… or it’s out of control and it keeps getting worse and worse until you get a very large fraction of the population infected.”

So if we re-open the economy, even in a phased way, without keeping R below one, we will merely create a slower form of the disastrous “Surrender” scenario described above.

To keep R below one thus far has taken a national lockdown and the deliberate spreading of fear about the virus. To contain R below one, while opening up, will not be attractive to advocates of a small state.

The task is to reduce how easily people infect each other with Covid-19, despite being far freer to move around and socialise than currently. This requires, in the US or UK, “national government to achieve within three months the sort of pandemic preparedness it took Taiwan five years to develop.”

This is why there is now a debate about whether people will need to wear PPE at all times in public. The scale of the requirement for PPE means that the state will have to be much more involved in the supply chain. There will have to be a comprehensive plan for contact tracing and testing, by which the recent contacts of infected individuals are themselves tracked down and either tested negative or isolated.

To collect high-quality data on where ill people have travelled, and who they have been near, phone apps or similar technology to those used in South East Asia must be widely accepted, and personal data used far more freely than we would normally find acceptable. In order to contain a disease that would otherwise spread freely, we will have to increase daily testing to levels capable of catching outbreaks we would otherwise have no idea about.

No longer would testing be limited to hospitals or symptomatic patients: analysis from E. Glen Weyl (one of the Harvard paper’s authors) and Divya Siddarth, both of Microsoft, suggests that, scaled for the UK, we would need to test not 100,000, but 300,000 people per day if we can accurately identify likely infected people. Otherwise, the testing rate would have to be closer to 18 million per day. Given that we are currently managing less than 20,000 per day, we cannot achieve this any time soon.

When considered together, successfully delivering these public health policies would require a level of Government intervention in the market, or “in society” and intrusion into our private lives, of a magnitude never before seen in the democratic West outside the two world wars.

Whole industries would have to be created or expanded and directed by the state.  Huge sums of money would be spent, and tens if not hundreds of thousands of workers would have to be retrained. We would have to accept restrictions on civil liberties for an indefinite period.'

(from: https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2020/04/bernard-jenkin-keeping-or-junking-the-shutdown-wont-work-but-the-alternative-requires-a-transformation-of-britain-unparalleled-since-the-war.html)

The part before this section is also quite good; the part after is mostly some half-hearted attempt at exculpation for the Conservative Party. However, I think this is a good summary of the reality that actually, the hard work is just about to *start*. The volume of daily testing we will need is more than ten times what we are currently managing. That means we will need massively more people producing the components needed, and delivering, administering and analysing the results. We won't simply need to provide masks for healthcare workers, or even for them plus other essential workers, but enough for everyone in the country to have multiple masks. We will need the contact tracing app to have mass takeup of a majority of the population.

[Jareth]

Boris 'raring to go' Johnson might be dodging PMQs tomorrow and leaving it to Raab. Not yet confirmed. If true, well, looks like his brush with death (if it was so) hasn't changed him very much at all. Also no ministers doing GMB with Piers Morgan now. Looks like the leader personifies his team, they hide. 

[terrytini]

7 hours ago, DCJonah said:

I think a lot voted for tories, knowing full well it meant Boris, a racist clown, would become pm because Brexit would get done. Brexit unfortunately turned into like a sport event, with reasoning out the window and just winning seemly taking over both sides  

Trump continues to be treated as a cult leader because many would rather win with a **** lunatic in charge than let the 'libtards' win. 

I agree there is lots more to it. I just look at the two in charge and can't believe its a coincidence that our death totals will be horrendous. 

 

It isn’t coincidence !!

Both Breitbart backed Koch brother financed Free Market disciples who’s sole philosophy is the destruction of  anything resembling institutions or expertise in favour of entrepreneurs and the free market. Which in this case meant a complete “ hands off” approach until they had no alternative.

[terrytini]

10 hours ago, chrisp65 said:

I have been quite surprised by how many people would shrug and offer up the last 8 years of other people’s lives to be able to ‘get back to normal’.

Normal being sitting in traffic, working in an office, grabbing a costa coffee, shuffling around Primark of a weekend.

I’d want something a bit more inspirational than that to kiss goodbye to a quarter of a million people.

Best Post Ever.

[terrytini]

6 hours ago, markavfc40 said:

 

 

Care Homes are completely devastated. Both from virus deaths and other deaths and illnesses which would otherwise be less severe.

No apologies for repeating this over and over.

 

[terrytini]

8 hours ago, Genie said:

I said it before but the real China figure must be mega. How many got infected and died before they realised what was going on? Real number must be 100x higher than what they declared.

I understand the concern many express over China’s figures, and don’t want to get in a back and forth, but by way of a different perspective I’d throw in ...

....like many Asian countries they were far better prepared for a virus, mask wearing in urban areas is widespread, and they had a very very tight lockdown - nothing at all like ours -......( for just one example compare their actions on effectively nationalising and taking control of masks in January with us and others still using boxer shorts and tea towels)

...additionally all the reporting from Adidas, Apple and the rest says they’ve seen no evidence ‘ on the ground’ that it was significantly worse ( how truthful they are being ..who knows ?)......and likewise there has been no Intelligence of the sort you would expect if there was widespread massive under reporting of deaths.

Theres no doubt it suits the narrative of the Right to say China must be engaged in a huge cover up - Trump referees to it all the time - so, whilst I’m not denying the possibilities, I’m open to the possibility their reporting is not significantly more inaccurate than ours.