O/T:- Are we over-reacting to COVD19?

[jackal2]

I certainly listen to him, just as I listen to many other experts in the field who are questioning the different response compared to in other countries. An important part of science is peer review and consensus, so when the health officials in one country take a radically different course of action to most other countries, I think it's wise to consider other points of view.

No sh*t? I'm sure that's what our CMO is doing all the time and I've got no reason to think his qualifications and judgement are notably inferior/superior to others elsewhere. As long as the Government follows his advice rather than reacting to the media, I think that's the safest bet.

I didn't dodge it, I answered that delaying the spike is a good thing as it gives time to prepare. Why would you have a bigger spike down the line? The number of potential infections is the same, but you would have had more time to procure equipment, train staff, build specialised hospitals etc.

Actually, spreading and flattening the spike is the best outcome so we don't have to build excessive additional capacity, hence the phased approach. As I've said previously, if you over-quarantine people whose immune systems can successfully fight COVID-19 anyway, you risk suppressing those systems to a point where some become less 'ready' than they would otherwise have been, potentially to greater detrimental effect.

You've cleared up your own point. The suicide rate is stable, while deaths from coronavirus multiply exponentially. When you posted your misleading statistics, Italy had had two deaths in the space of a few days.

So the public interest is best served by overplaying an illness that kills a relatively small number of people quickly and then disappears, whilst ignoring one that kills a relatively large number of people more slowly and continues? Using that logic, if Notts County win their next game 10-0 then I don't care if they lose the next 10 games after that.

Now N.Italy has been under lockdown for a week and they're still getting about 200 deaths per day. If they hadn't chosen lockdown the health service wouldn't have been able to continue functioning. That is why Coronavirus is receiving more government attention than suicides do and I think it's hard to argue with that.

I never did argue with that. My point was about the media not the Government. Of course Coronavirus will be the Government's priority for the next few months while the virus is active, and so it should be, but this does not excuse the media from overplaying the threat and scaring people into panic buying industrial quantities of toilet rolls!

Apart from the fact that I don't think you can tar all of the media with the same brush, because some newspapers dedicate more space than others to mental health issues, I think your obsession with the media and their motives is clouding your judgement.
I also think you are failing to distinguish between what the media reports because it is relevant, like coronavirus, what is not relevant but is in the news purely because it sells, like celebrity gossip and so on, and things that should be in the news but aren't, like provision of mental health professionals.
Just because suicide is under reported, doesn't mean coronavirus is being driven by media hype.

Literally as I write, the number of COVID-19 cases recorded worldwide is 163,332 from which there have been 6,086 deaths against a world population of around 7.8 billion people. The effect of Coronavirus on the world population is and will be miniscule and temporary. Suicide sees 800,000 die each year which is still a small number but ongoing. The level of fear being created around Coronavirus by the media is demonstrably, ridiculously excessive.