WELL WELL WELL, WOULD YOU ADAM AND EVE IT,
26-03-2020, 10:10 AM#19swaledale swaledale is offline
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Quote Originally Posted by ramAnag View Post
Well there’s an unholy alliance if ever there was one. Good though that people of such different persuasions can set aside such differences to occasionally agree.
I completely agree with your second paragraph but beyond that I’m puzzled.
Clearly you make a fair point about the impact on the NHS, but to suggest that ‘it probably won’t result in many more deaths than usual’ makes no sense at all to me, as the figures and scenes that have emerged from both Italy and Spain over just the last month or so would suggest.
You do actually ‘stop it’ by slowing down the ‘rate of transmission’ allowing time for a vaccine to be discovered and developed. The trick then is to make such a vaccine universally available rather than just another means to make a vast profit.
That last sentence may be naively idealistic on my part, but then I speak as one who believes that it shouldn’t take a crisis to bring about free on site parking for NHS workers, and is still coming to terms with the most right wing PM since Thatcher apparently embracing a philosophy more akin to Communism.
RA the one question you need to ask is what is Italy's (and other countries) death rate from coronavirus as compared to the normal death rate?
Because without that information you have no context other than the number of cases is very high.
So in the Uk in average year there are 56,000 "excess winter deaths" most of which are from respiratory diseases.
If this year that rises to say 76,000, then we will know that coronavirus killed an additional 20,000. BUT that isn't likely and the government experts have admitted there will be considerable overlap between those killed by Corvid - 19 and some other disease. In fact they haven't taken into account in their modelling of these other deaths! I would put a substantial amount of money on there being minimal additional deaths due to Corvid-19, most would have died anyway.
We don't even know the mortality rate, because thousands of people will have been infected but not tested it could be very low indeed.
Yes the 7,000 or so deaths in Italy (90% over 70's) sounds bad, but if 6,500 would have died anyway this year then its a different picture.
There wont be a vaccine for 18 months and therefore we will return to something like normal once we can test for infection and immunity. The collapse of the world economy will likely kill more people than Corvid-19.