Coronavirus outbreak

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marinyork

Resting in suspended Animation
Location
Logopolis
You and I know Gove hasn't got a clue regarding number infected - how can he, given only those who are serious enough to be admitted into hospitals are tested? c7000 tests a day is only around 5 tests per hospital a day in the country!

Number of deaths, on the other hand, has to be more reliable, although apparently those who die at home with symptoms have not been counted. As we all can see below, total fatalities recorded have definitely been doubling every two to three days.

Someone locally said that we were ten days behind london. When they've discussed this before they've said that it's been based on hospital admissions, ICU and a few other things. Although that can change rapidly as happened with the London hospitals last week and a huge surge of deaths over a 3 day period. In theory the hospital gives you an idea of what's going on a week to two weeks ahead of the deaths. We don't have access to the figures.
 

snorri

Legendary Member
Some form of testing kit due to arrive from South Korea next week.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52068752
 

winjim

Smash the cistern
Worth reading this piece in the Lancet.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30727-3/fulltext
510956
 
Location
London
I think the Lancet, and possibly other journals as well, are making all their coronavirus coverage free to access in the public interest.
Read it.
Horrifying in its implications going forward.

But on the blame thing found this:

https://reaction.life/coronavirus-prophet-richard-horton-is-at-it-again/

Haven't had time to check its credentials.

On the contact tracing, wouldn't things have very very rapidly gone beyond the point where it was at all practicable?

I also have the idea that the virus may have been around here significantly before the first reported cases.
 

Pale Rider

Legendary Member
Haven't had time to check its credentials.

The article quotes published and date stamped remarks by Horton, which cannot be sensibly challenged.

What they show is, like the government, he didn't see it, or at least the scale of it, coming.

Which is fine, few people did.

Horton's most recent remarks have an air of hindsight and good old fashioned Soviet revisionism about them.

I'm not surprised to see one of the professions closing ranks and blaming the government when something goes wrong.

Lawyers tend to do the same.
 

winjim

Smash the cistern
Read it.
Horrifying in its implications going forward.

But on the blame thing found this:

https://reaction.life/coronavirus-prophet-richard-horton-is-at-it-again/

Haven't had time to check its credentials.

On the contact tracing, wouldn't things have very very rapidly gone beyond the point where it was at all practicable?

I also have the idea that the virus may have been around here significantly before the first reported cases.
I personally think contact tracing would only have been useful in conjunction with a quarantine / lockdown, but we seem to have had neither for such a long time. As for knowing about it at the end of Jan, I don't know about that but we certainly had an idea by the beginning of March and still nothing was being done.

Anyway, regardless of what we knew about this specific pandemic, we've always known that there would be one, we just obviously couldn't predict the specifics. So there should already be a plan, both political and clinical, we should have things like PPE, this shouldn't have come as a surprise. Every hospital in the country has a major incident plan that they can put into action at a moment's notice, there should have been a national pandemic plan.
 

I've read his thread several times and am struggling to come to any conclusions.

We already know that the following factors contributed heavily to the initial spread beyond Hubei:
- China's government suppression of information that made them look bad (see Li Wenliang as a prime example)
- information that was coming out was contradictory
- the WHO took PRC info at face value

I do not think that is in dispute.

Personally, I don't think his timeline is as exonerating as he thinks: there's an 18 day gap in the timeline between 3rd and 21st February, where it went from "we might need to implement social distancing" to "the risk assessment for the UK population was still moderate, although there was now a push for it to be moved to high".

This was the same day that 16 new cases were confirmed in Lombardy and the first lockdowns started.
2 days later, all of northern Italy was in lockdown mode.
Why was it still at moderate??? Why weren't we mobilising?

The "Take it on the chin" was 5th March - 11 days after Northern Italy was in lockdown.
The Cheltenham Festival was the 10th-13th.
Pub closures were announced *in advance* on the 20th, leading to a lot of people going out on the swally while they still could.

It was inevitable that it would come here given two traits of the virus: that it is highly contagious and that a significant proportion of people can be carriers without developing any symptoms.

However, an island nation with decent border control infrastructure and advance warning has no excuse for this running away from them.
 
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Joey Shabadoo

My pronouns are "He", "Him" and "buggerlugs"
The Cheltenham Festival was, even at the time, extraordinarily stupid. Also big concerts by Stereophonics and someone else I can't remember - 10s of thousands of people in enclosed spaces. The pub thing - weren't they asked to close "as soon as is practicable"? I know the chain my nephew works in around Edinburgh closed their doors at 7pm - were there others that behaved sensibly? Must have been.

Maybe one mistake has been treating people like adults when a significant proportion are (and continue to be) stupid, selfish sods.
 

Rezillo

TwoSheds
Location
Suffolk
That article is being a bit misleadingly selective in its quotation of Horton's editorial but to some extent, it has a point. Perhaps the Lancet was guilty of assuming that the data pouring out of China once they relaxed information controls was being acted upon and didn't need panic headlines for a largely professional readership. The data certainly scared me and I've been out of the game (at a very junior level) for years.

Not the time for blame games, though; that can come later.
 

Pale Rider

Legendary Member
The pub thing - weren't they asked to close "as soon as is practicable"?

Boris announced the pub closures on a Friday tea time with a plea for us all not to go out on a last session.

The regulation didn't come into force until 2pm on Saturday, which also explains reports of some pubs being open that lunchtime.

I suppose there's no seamless way to introduce an emergency measure, so the introduction of this one went as well as could be expected.
 
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