O/T Coronavirus Thread (2)

[millertop]

Keeping shops open to sell football scarves
Opening up your car park and encourage people to congregate to sell beer

All 72 hours before lockdown

Serious I don’t know how you get on in life 🙄
It was food as well

[KerrAvon]

UK death rate getting up to almost 10 percent per known case now - one of the worst in the world. Draw your own conclusions.

Different counties have different testing regimes and different ways of deciding whether a death is attributable to Covid-19. With that being the position, drawing any conclusion from an international comparison is a largely meaningless exercise.

In the UK, testing has been largely confined to patients who are ill enough to be admitted to hospital. It is hardly surprising that a significant proportion of them go on to sadly die (unless the conclusion that you are drawing is that the standard of care in the NHS is low by international standards?).

The country that some people like to compare us to is Germany. They have a significantly higher testing capacity than the UK, but the data that they produce is skewed in a different way to ours as many of the people they have tested are younger than the UK tested cohort. Their generous approach to testing is also not without problems:

https://www.spiegel.de/international...9-eb4364c43f2e

[mikemiller]

Advice from WHO was that rigorous testing was an important factor in monitoring and controlling the virus - again, draw your own conclusions...

[millertop]

Advice from WHO was that rigorous testing was an important factor in monitoring and controlling the virus - again, draw your own conclusions...

Seriously Mike, do you know what actually goes off/ is being done behind closed doors, do you think everything is easy?
Why don’t you go and run the country if you think you can do better.
Why don’t you go and volunteer in a car park and do the testing.

Now is not the time to keep digging is it really.

[mikemiller]

Seriously Mike, do you know what actually goes off/ is being done behind closed doors, do you think everything is easy?
Why don’t you go and run the country if you think you can do better.
Why don’t you go and volunteer in a car park and do the testing.

Now is not the time to keep digging is it really.

I probably could do better regarding decision making- so could millions of others, especially the NHS staff

[KerrAvon]

Advice from WHO was that rigorous testing was an important factor in monitoring and controlling the virus - again, draw your own conclusions...

What conclusions are you drawing, Mikey?

If there is a lack of capacity to test then you can't test. Similarly, if there are concerns over the accuracy of some of the tests that have (necessarily) been rushed to market, then there has to be doubt over the accuracy of some testing regimes.

[KerrAvon]

I probably could do better regarding decision making- so could millions of others, especially the NHS staff

Blimey. I'm supposed to be the arrogant poster.

Are you sure that you aren't simply looking at this through the lens of your political prejudice?

[Exiletyke]

Blimey. I'm supposed to be the arrogant poster.

Are you sure that you aren't simply looking at this through the lens of your political prejudice?

Ther's no "supposed to be " about it

Of course you don't have any political prejudice do you?

[rolymiller]

PM's virus adviser warns Britain might still need to adopt herd immunity
Boris Johnson's coronavirus lockdown has pinned Britain 'into a corner' with no obvious exit strategy, according to a senior Downing Street scientific adviser who braced the country for a return to a policy of herd immunity. Professor Graham Medley, the government's chief pandemic modeller ) said the only viable path through the health emergency would be to let people become infected so they are no longer vulnerable. He warned the current restrictions would not steer the country out of the pandemic - only prevent a short-term spread - but would bring the economy to its knees. Mounting unemployment, domestic violence and burgeoning mental health issues could be widespread if the normal functioning of society remains paralysed , Prof Medley forecast. Describing a trade-off between harming the lives of the young versus safeguarding the wellbeing of the elderly, the scientist said the Prime Minister had a 'big decision' to make on April 13 when the lockdown will be reviewed . Yet noises from Number 10 suggests the current curbs to everyday life will not be lifted, with Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday urging the public to 'keep their discipline'. He begged Britons to stay indoors ahead of a warm weekend as the UK announced 684 more Covid-19 fatalities, hiking the death toll to 3,605 and more than 38,000 cases (right) - surpassing the number of deaths recorded by China, where the virus spawned late last year.

It dunt look good does it. I sort of get the herd immunity thing but given the generally unhealthy state of the British population ie smokers, drinkers and obesity there will be a lot of younger people who won't survive a dose of this bug. Then you have to weigh it up against ,as the adviser says, the severe problems it will have on people s healths for those confined at home. We as a nation and as a world have got to learn some serious lessons from all this. I suspect we are naturally now going to have a cull of the vulnerable..

[KerrAvon]

PM's virus adviser warns Britain might still need to adopt herd immunity
Boris Johnson's coronavirus lockdown has pinned Britain 'into a corner' with no obvious exit strategy, according to a senior Downing Street scientific adviser who braced the country for a return to a policy of herd immunity. Professor Graham Medley, the government's chief pandemic modeller ) said the only viable path through the health emergency would be to let people become infected so they are no longer vulnerable. He warned the current restrictions would not steer the country out of the pandemic - only prevent a short-term spread - but would bring the economy to its knees. Mounting unemployment, domestic violence and burgeoning mental health issues could be widespread if the normal functioning of society remains paralysed , Prof Medley forecast. Describing a trade-off between harming the lives of the young versus safeguarding the wellbeing of the elderly, the scientist said the Prime Minister had a 'big decision' to make on April 13 when the lockdown will be reviewed . Yet noises from Number 10 suggests the current curbs to everyday life will not be lifted, with Health Secretary Matt Hancock yesterday urging the public to 'keep their discipline'. He begged Britons to stay indoors ahead of a warm weekend as the UK announced 684 more Covid-19 fatalities, hiking the death toll to 3,605 and more than 38,000 cases (right) - surpassing the number of deaths recorded by China, where the virus spawned late last year.

It may be unpalatable, but what do you see as the alternative to a herd immunity outcome? There is no vaccine and there is no prospect of one being available on a mass scale for 18 months or so. The only strategy is to adopt policies that create a ‘slow pandemic’ as opposed to a fast one that overwhelms the ability of health services to cope and the avoidable deaths that would flow from that.