While I agree with much of what you say, what we are dealing with in terms of anger is an expression of anxiety, and that anxiety is driven by fear. There is a lot to fear at the moment. Loss of income, of freedom, of jobs, of lifestyle, of home, of family, and of life. A lot of that anger will be displaced onto convenient targets. I understand that, it is counterproductive but very human.
China is not a “convenient target”, it literally is the source of this virus, and its tendency to lies and obfuscation is one big reason this virus is now so menacing
if they had listened to the Wuhan doctors (now dead) rather than arresting them and silencing them, and if they had confessed the real mortality rate, rather than hiding it, the world would have been forewarned, months ago. They did not. China lied. And here we are.
This is rewriting history. The world was sufficiently warned, whether the 'true' number of deaths/cases was underreported or not. This is just a cheap copout for those who failed to respond to the facts more decisively.
We really weren’t warned. The Chinese government lied to us, via WHO
I am surprised that someone as smart as you is parroting this drivel.
The first indication the NERVTAG Committee had of human to human transmission from China was on 20th January. It is right there in the minutes of the Committee meeting from 2st January.
What is this bien pensant excuse-China mindset?
It’s mad
“Taiwan has accused the World Health Organization of failing to communicate an early warning about transmission of the coronavirus between humans, slowing the global response to the pandemic.
Health officials in Taipei said they alerted the WHO at the end of December about the risk of human-to-human transmission of the new virus but said its concerns were not passed on to other countries.
Taiwan is excluded from the WHO because China, which claims it as part of its territory, demands that third countries and international bodies do not treat it in any way that resembles how independent states are treated.”
Financial Times, March 20 ($$)
I was not excusing China at all - quite the opposite. I was excusing our own scientific experts who were working on false information although there was no way they could know that.
It is clear from your quote that not only did China fail to warn the rest of the world but they also blocked the warnings coming out of Taiwan making use of their position of influence on the WHO.
You must agree though that when the WHO declared it a "Public Health Emergency of International Concern" on Jan 23rd, that the warning was well and truly out there for all to see?
I agree and from that point on there are no excuses. My point is not primarily about saying our Government did no wrong, but to point out that those who are strangely trying to defend the Chinese government are flying in the face of the basic facts.
@bigjohnowls The problem on testing staff is capacity. In Leicester we only swab inpatients with respiratory symptoms, because we simply do not have the swabs to do more. We do have 250 slots per day to swab staff at the drive through in Nottingham, 40 miles away, and 11000 staff in the Acute Trust (more in primary care, mental health and social care) which need to be authorised by a manager. Currently 10% of staff are absent for isolation. In a week we could get them screened, though getting them to Nottingham is a challenge for those without their own car, or too unwell to drive.
As the Governments disastrous inability to ramp up testing and the fact have only tested 2000 of 1.3m nhs workers comes to light.
The clappers try to deflect blame onto China.
Did they advise we plod along testing less than 10,000 for weeks and weeks on end?
I may have mentioned it's a fiasco that will cost lots of additional lives as cross infection in hospitals is bound to be rife as untested healthcare professionals infect thousands. It gives me know pleasure at all to be proved right it just makes me f**king angry.
Would you rather we test healthcare staff or patients?
We need to do both stop being a Clapper.
The testing strategy has been a disaster as I have said consistently for weeks.
It appears the PM and even the right wing press now know it.
It has been inadequate and it is not fair to, in particular, the NHS workers. On the plus side, the financial measures put in place here have been impressive and will help society, longer term, get through this (Spain and Italy are still trying to sort this out) so in some areas we have done a good job. It's also important to acknowledge this...
@bigjohnowls The problem on testing staff is capacity. In Leicester we only swab inpatients with respiratory symptoms, because we simply do not have the swabs to do more. We do have 250 slots per day to swab staff at the drive through in Nottingham, 40 miles away, and 11000 staff in the Acute Trust (more in primary care, mental health and social care) which need to be authorised by a manager.
Why does the test take so long?
I keep reading about tests-now-taking-15-minutes but you said yours took days.
Lab capacity, I think. They have their own illness problems handling the stuff.
@bigjohnowls The problem on testing staff is capacity. In Leicester we only swab inpatients with respiratory symptoms, because we simply do not have the swabs to do more. We do have 250 slots per day to swab staff at the drive through in Nottingham, 40 miles away, and 11000 staff in the Acute Trust (more in primary care, mental health and social care) which need to be authorised by a manager.
Why does the test take so long?
I keep reading about tests-now-taking-15-minutes but you said yours took days.
It’ll be the difference between point of card testing and reference lab testing
The government has made the decision that the latter - slower and more expensive - is better because it is more accurate and reliable
While I don't want to let the government off on the issues of testing and PPE, in both areas they have been lamentable and it is costing the lives of frontline NHS staff, and I have a large number of friends and family who are in or about to be in the thick of it.
However, if the true death figure from China is 40x larger than reported and closer to 150k rather than 3.5k then I'm pretty sure the initial response would have been different and the ramp up would have been different.
The issue for me is that the government was naive enough to believe anything coming out of China and the WHO. We should have been better prepared and they have let us and the NHS frontline staff down and it is going to cost many lives.
I hope that the testing and PPE situations are remedied in the next few days. On the latter I'm reliably informed that it isn't the amount that's the issue, it's the poor quality. Staff need overalls, gloves, proper masks with 3M air filters and full face plastic visors or wrap around safety glasses. What they are getting is a plastic pinny, a thin paper surgical mask and gloves. The government is writing blank cheques for this stuff, why aren't we procuring the best possible safety equipment for our doctors and nurses? What are the bottlenecks and who is letting the side down. We need this resolved or four deaths of frontline staff is just the beginning.
I'm very disappointed with how poor the government has been at communicating with doctors and nurses on this. Honestly, I can't imagine this would have happened with Dave and George in charge.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
The Gov't needs to pull the trigger on marshal law or some such for a week or so.
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
Last word on PPE, a very close friend of mine said it's like being sent into battle armed with a handgun when you know the enemy is coming at you in a tank. He's not worried for himself but for his dad who has been asked to come our of retirement.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
No, as it will take at least another fortnight for the UK lockdown to start flattening the UK curve
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
Damn. Stacy's Mom is one of the finest pop videos ever.
I thought I recognised the name, he wrote the songs for a musical version of the John Waters film 'Cry Baby' that ran on Broadway. He was also supposed to have a new musical on soon that he wrote with Sarah Silverman. With him and Terence McNally gone the New York theatre community is not in a good place.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Except that the death rate fell on Sunday and Monday.
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
Ample evidence on social media (supported by reliable sources like DW) shows that they are burning corpses in the streets of Guayaquil.
I therefore suggest the Ecuadorian govt stats are utterly meaningless. It is totally out of control and is ravaging the population
Don't believe everything you read on social media and I doubt Ecuador have covered up to the extent the Chinese have yet
Ecuador is not covering it up because Ecuador is in meltdown
On the latest figures it is certainly less in meltdown than us, the US, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden and Iran
Ecuador is a banana republic. Are you seriously suggesting we take their official stats at gospel? When there are multiple vids of people dead in the street?
Well according to the BBC we have to take the Chinese stats as gospel despite suggestions this week more people died in Wuhan based on crematoriam stats than have so far died in the whole world
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
John Edmunds and others at LSHTM have just (released 1 April!) done a study suggesting the lockdown should be strict enough based on comparing a survey of people's contacts to one that was done before the epidemic.
Using the change in contact patterns, the team calculated a change in reproduction number between the POLYMOD (pre lockdown) and CoMix (post lockdown). They found that the mean number of contacts per person measured was more than 70% lower now than before the lockdown.
This suggests that the reproduction now would be between 0.37 and 0.89 with the most likely value being 0.62.
Professor John Edmunds from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led the research said: “If we see similar changes across the UK population, we would expect to see the epidemic to start to decline.
“However, our estimates are not to be read as ‘job done’. Rather, they should be used as motivation for us all to keep following UK government instructions. It’s imperative we don’t take our foot off the pedal. We must continue to stop transmission of the virus to reduce the burden on the NHS now, and over the coming months.”
The more technical blurb from the study:
We found a 73% reduction in the average daily number of contacts observed per participant (from 10.8 to 2.9). This would be sufficient to reduce R0 from 2.6 prior to lockdown to 0.62 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.37 - 0.89) after the lockdown, based on all types of contact and 0.37 (95% CI = 0.22 - 0.53) for physical contacts only
I'm a bit concerned people had more reason to lie in the more recent survey now that there's a social desirability bias towards being good obedient citizens and not having had much contact! (And presumably a social desirability bias the other way in the previous survey - who wanted to admit being the kind of sad sack that has hardly any human contact when we were living in more normal times?)
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
There was concern in today's press conference about an increase in car journeys. On my late night walks, there are still people driving around here at 10/11pm. The only people on foot, apart from me, look to be about twenty or less, also chiming with the finding that the teens are the ones who are not doing what they've been asked (that was from the report in the post before this. Teens still have a contact ration of three, when we need to see them on less than one).
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
There was concern in today's press conference about an increase in car journeys. On my late night walks, there are still people driving around here at 10/11pm. The only people on foot, apart from me, look to be about twenty or less, also chiming with the finding that the teens are the ones who are not doing what they've been asked.
It's like a ghost town here (Edinburgh) ... even during the day.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
There was concern in today's press conference about an increase in car journeys. On my late night walks, there are still people driving around here at 10/11pm. The only people on foot, apart from me, look to be about twenty or less, also chiming with the finding that the teens are the ones who are not doing what they've been asked (that was from the report in the post before this. Teens still have a contact ration of three, when we need to see them on less than one).
People can still go for walks, even at 11pm, police will only stop them if clearly in a group
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
There was concern in today's press conference about an increase in car journeys. On my late night walks, there are still people driving around here at 10/11pm. The only people on foot, apart from me, look to be about twenty or less, also chiming with the finding that the teens are the ones who are not doing what they've been asked (that was from the report in the post before this. Teens still have a contact ration of three, when we need to see them as under one.
It appears to be the first 3rd World country (unless you count Iran) where the Bug has really got a horrible grip - and therefore might be a sign of things to come across Lat Am and Africa
I’ll link to just two tweets, there are plenty more which are equally vivid and distressing
The striking thing is how much these echo the first horrific vids that came out of Wuhan.
For me the major concern is how this will impact such countries. It's clearly going to be bad here (say 25K deaths in the first wave, fewer in the following as we get better prepared) but in less well-prepared countries they are going to only have one wave, and it is going to just be appalling.
Yes, very scary.
Also the Ecuador situation kinda puts to sleep the last hope that warm weather kills this bastard virus.
And Ecuador might be very poor, but it is richer than lots of African countries
I wonder why Ecuador has got it so bad early on. Links to China?
Ecuador increased by 456 cases over the last 24 hours with 19 deaths, the Netherlands with roughly the same population increased by 1019 cases with 134 extra deaths.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
Ample evidence on social media (supported by reliable sources like DW) shows that they are burning corpses in the streets of Guayaquil.
I therefore suggest the Ecuadorian govt stats are utterly meaningless. It is totally out of control and is ravaging the population
Don't believe everything you read on social media and I doubt Ecuador have covered up to the extent the Chinese have yet
Ecuador is not covering it up because Ecuador is in meltdown
On the latest figures it is certainly less in meltdown than us, the US, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and Sweden and Iran
Remember that the figures are only as good as the testing regime.
In terms of cases maybe, not deaths
And if deaths aren't being reported properly?
Ask the Chinese government
Hm? We were talking about Ecuador. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that the healthcare system can't deal with the number of deaths in an orderly fashion. For deaths to appear in the statistics, they have to be counted.
Ok China has to take a lot of the blame for this pandemic. But it's a bit weird how everyone suddenly knows that the Chinese are hiding tens of thousands of deaths. This sudden realisation coincides with the understanding that the UK and the US are going to have more deaths than the 3k so far admitted to in China. The timing is a bit suspicious.
And last week it was all: the Germans are definitely cheating on their death figures.
Is there any actual evidence for these tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths?
Just use your brain and look on social media (more reliable than any MSM)
Sieve the evidence, look at the videos, assay the rumors, and the truth is obvious. China would not have sacrificed half of its economy, and risked national unrest, for a bug that was only going to kill 3k people.
This is the essential truth I saw at the start.
The first time I realised that this was going to be really bad was that NO2 picture from NASA showing industrial output had virtually stopped in northern China. It was immediately obvious that this was far worse than they were letting on. It was also obvious that we were going to be hard hit by this and I said so repeatedly on here and elsewhere.
China lied and failed to ring the alarm bell for the world but frankly what our government needed to do was look and think. They did, but it took them a long time and that time definitely sold the pass on containment. Whether that would ever have worked in this country is a moot point but it was made so by a combination of duplicity and stupidity.
One thing that the government really should be condemned for is the utterly casual attitude towards continuing air travel and the lack of quarantine for arrivals.
Assuming that is the things I read on PB are correct.
I'll add that when things ease and overseas travel becomes possible then the government should make it clear that people doing so do so at their own risk and that there will be no more emergency flights to rescue them.
The priority given to freedom of movement for air travellers is genuinely bewildering but we are far from atypical in this. So many early cases were caused by those who had flown in in so many countries. It’s almost as if those who indulge in frequent flying are more important than the rest of the population.
This problem wasn't caused by frequent flyers. It's silly to mention them IMO.
How exactly did it arrive here then? There more people travelled, the more it was spread (especially as it looks like it spreads particularly efficiently in air conditioned boxes full of people, like aircraft). Obviously hindsight is an amazing thing, and I don't think it would have been possible to sell this to the public back then, but had we effectively closed our borders in mid January, insisting on 14 days isolation for anyone coming into the UK from anywhere, then we would now be still in a pretty much "business as usual" secario with zero cases.
I would imagine that if there is the slightest hint of a similar disease cropping up in the future, the government will slam the shutters on the airports within moments of hearing the news - keeping them open just won't be worth the risk.
There was concern in today's press conference about an increase in car journeys. On my late night walks, there are still people driving around here at 10/11pm. The only people on foot, apart from me, look to be about twenty or less, also chiming with the finding that the teens are the ones who are not doing what they've been asked.
It's like a ghost town here (Edinburgh) ... even during the day.
I go to the fringe every year; not this year, though, sadly.
The press are going to muck this up; the way they are planting in people’s minds that a lockdown is too much for people is going to have people relaxing way too soon. In Italy and Spain they had to lock down even harder when that happened and I think that may be needed here in the weeks around Easter.
The reporting on this is irresponsible, it should be more on the lines of how it is necessary and for the good of all. Otherwise this semi-lockdown starting to be taken less seriously is going to elongate the peak for a lot longer and any proper relaxation will be pushed to further into the summer.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
There was concern in today's press conference about an increase in car journeys. On my late night walks, there are still people driving around here at 10/11pm. The only people on foot, apart from me, look to be about twenty or less, also chiming with the finding that the teens are the ones who are not doing what they've been asked (that was from the report in the post before this. Teens still have a contact ration of three, when we need to see them on less than one).
People can still go for walks, even at 11pm, police will only stop them if clearly in a group
Teens hanging around after 11pm? School age ones, as well. There appears to be a lack of control among some parents (not entirely unexpected, I suppose).
Ok China has to take a lot of the blame for this pandemic. But it's a bit weird how everyone suddenly knows that the Chinese are hiding tens of thousands of deaths. This sudden realisation coincides with the understanding that the UK and the US are going to have more deaths than the 3k so far admitted to in China. The timing is a bit suspicious.
And last week it was all: the Germans are definitely cheating on their death figures.
Is there any actual evidence for these tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths?
Just use your brain and look on social media (more reliable than any MSM)
Sieve the evidence, look at the videos, assay the rumors, and the truth is obvious. China would not have sacrificed half of its economy, and risked national unrest, for a bug that was only going to kill 3k people.
This is the essential truth I saw at the start.
The first time I realised that this was going to be really bad was that NO2 picture from NASA showing industrial output had virtually stopped in northern China. It was immediately obvious that this was far worse than they were letting on. It was also obvious that we were going to be hard hit by this and I said so repeatedly on here and elsewhere.
China lied and failed to ring the alarm bell for the world but frankly what our government needed to do was look and think. They did, but it took them a long time and that time definitely sold the pass on containment. Whether that would ever have worked in this country is a moot point but it was made so by a combination of duplicity and stupidity.
One thing that the government really should be condemned for is the utterly casual attitude towards continuing air travel and the lack of quarantine for arrivals.
Assuming that is the things I read on PB are correct.
I'll add that when things ease and overseas travel becomes possible then the government should make it clear that people doing so do so at their own risk and that there will be no more emergency flights to rescue them.
The priority given to freedom of movement for air travellers is genuinely bewildering but we are far from atypical in this. So many early cases were caused by those who had flown in in so many countries. It’s almost as if those who indulge in frequent flying are more important than the rest of the population.
This problem wasn't caused by frequent flyers. It's silly to mention them IMO.
How exactly did it arrive here then? There more people travelled, the more it was spread (especially as it looks like it spreads particularly efficiently in air conditioned boxes full of people, like aircraft). Obviously hindsight is an amazing thing, and I don't think it would have been possible to sell this to the public back then, but had we effectively closed our borders in mid January, insisting on 14 days isolation for anyone coming into the UK from anywhere, then we would now be still in a pretty much "business as usual" secario with zero cases.
I would imagine that if there is the slightest hint of a similar disease cropping up in the future, the government will slam the shutters on the airports within moments of hearing the news - keeping them open just won't be worth the risk.
Ok China has to take a lot of the blame for this pandemic. But it's a bit weird how everyone suddenly knows that the Chinese are hiding tens of thousands of deaths. This sudden realisation coincides with the understanding that the UK and the US are going to have more deaths than the 3k so far admitted to in China. The timing is a bit suspicious.
And last week it was all: the Germans are definitely cheating on their death figures.
Is there any actual evidence for these tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths?
Just use your brain and look on social media (more reliable than any MSM)
Sieve the evidence, look at the videos, assay the rumors, and the truth is obvious. China would not have sacrificed half of its economy, and risked national unrest, for a bug that was only going to kill 3k people.
This is the essential truth I saw at the start.
The first time I realised that this was going to be really bad was that NO2 picture from NASA showing industrial output had virtually stopped in northern China. It was immediately obvious that this was far worse than they were letting on. It was also obvious that we were going to be hard hit by this and I said so repeatedly on here and elsewhere.
China lied and failed to ring the alarm bell for the world but frankly what our government needed to do was look and think. They did, but it took them a long time and that time definitely sold the pass on containment. Whether that would ever have worked in this country is a moot point but it was made so by a combination of duplicity and stupidity.
One thing that the government really should be condemned for is the utterly casual attitude towards continuing air travel and the lack of quarantine for arrivals.
Assuming that is the things I read on PB are correct.
I'll add that when things ease and overseas travel becomes possible then the government should make it clear that people doing so do so at their own risk and that there will be no more emergency flights to rescue them.
The priority given to freedom of movement for air travellers is genuinely bewildering but we are far from atypical in this. So many early cases were caused by those who had flown in in so many countries. It’s almost as if those who indulge in frequent flying are more important than the rest of the population.
This problem wasn't caused by frequent flyers. It's silly to mention them IMO.
Obviously hindsight is an amazing thing, and I don't think it would have been possible to sell this to the public back then, but had we effectively closed our borders in mid January, .
Maybe but I ordered my protective equipment on 23rd January and I'm not a scientist or politician.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
Yes. Tho again it is on social media, tho again social media seems to be the only place you can get real time news.
Coronavirus in toto has been a grave maybe fatal failure in mainstream journalism. The only reason I was quick to notice that the Wuhan situation was dire (which therefore meant this virus was far worse than the CCP was letting on) was because of the endless horrific and unfakeable vids on Twitter.
These videos (mocked by many on here when I first posted them) have now been repeated around the world. Indeed they have been repeated exactly: the lockdown suicides, the uncollected corpses, the people collapsing in the street, the prison break outs, the massive plague pits.
As far as I can tell barely any of these videos were relayed on MSM. Up until a couple of weeks ago, if you relied on BBC, CNN, ITV, whatever, for your news, Coronavirus was a minor problem confined to the East.
A shocking failure. All you had to do was sit down and look at Twitter with open eyes for about an hour.
I think there was a big problem with today's Downing Street press conference.
Not just Sharma but more importantly the lady from the NHS - I don't think she was anything like as good a communicator as the other medical experts we have had up to now.
I have no wish to criticise her - she is probably very good at her job. But she didn't have the media and communication skills of everyone else who has appeared at those press conferences up to now.
I think it's imperative that they get back to the top team tomorrow - which in Boris's absence means Jenrick, Harries and Vallance.
(Skip to 9 and a half minutes in if you ever want to torture yourself with this. The minor uptick detected in car travel suggesting that a few people are starting to ignore the lockdown a wee bit more was probably the highlight of the thing for me - shows the difficulty in getting the timing and enforcement right.)
In person I've found Yvonne Doyle to be an absolutely excellent communicator. Not sure the lecture style really works well in this kind of context. I'm sure she'd have delivered her content better if she wasn't sticking to the slides (Ibefore now I've seen her just give up on a slideset and flick through them as background decoration while ad libbing very fluently...).
I think the biggest problem with the presser today is that Sharma just didn't have anything useful to announce, the medical side was largely a rehash of known ground and in the questioning neither of the speakers wanted to commit to hard targets when the press wanted to get them pinned them down which always results in frustrating viewing.
The lack of new stuff is one of the problems with daily press conferences. Viewers are going to be getting pretty fatigued so even if there is something new to announce there's not likely to be many people watching!
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
You do realise that the people dying now were almost all infected pre lockdown ? The same pattern has been seen everywhere else, and those figures in their own tell you nothing about the effectiveness of the lockdown.
We are headed for the worst case scenario in the UK: a lockdown strict enough to fuck our economy but not strict enough to flatten the curve.
Enough now: the cops need to start arresting people for breaking quarantine. Whip them. Taser them. Shoot them. If we must have a lockdown then it has to be severe and draconian or it is pointlessly destructive. Do it. Now.
Too early to expect to see results in the UK, I think? Is there stuff happening on the ground to make you think the lockdown's being undermined by people breaking quarantine?
John Edmunds and others at LSHTM have just (released 1 April!) done a study suggesting the lockdown should be strict enough based on comparing a survey of people's contacts to one that was done before the epidemic.
Using the change in contact patterns, the team calculated a change in reproduction number between the POLYMOD (pre lockdown) and CoMix (post lockdown). They found that the mean number of contacts per person measured was more than 70% lower now than before the lockdown.
This suggests that the reproduction now would be between 0.37 and 0.89 with the most likely value being 0.62.
Professor John Edmunds from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led the research said: “If we see similar changes across the UK population, we would expect to see the epidemic to start to decline.
“However, our estimates are not to be read as ‘job done’. Rather, they should be used as motivation for us all to keep following UK government instructions. It’s imperative we don’t take our foot off the pedal. We must continue to stop transmission of the virus to reduce the burden on the NHS now, and over the coming months.”
The more technical blurb from the study:
We found a 73% reduction in the average daily number of contacts observed per participant (from 10.8 to 2.9). This would be sufficient to reduce R0 from 2.6 prior to lockdown to 0.62 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.37 - 0.89) after the lockdown, based on all types of contact and 0.37 (95% CI = 0.22 - 0.53) for physical contacts only
I'm a bit concerned people had more reason to lie in the more recent survey now that there's a social desirability bias towards being good obedient citizens and not having had much contact! (And presumably a social desirability bias the other way in the previous survey - who wanted to admit being the kind of sad sack that has hardly any human contact when we were living in more normal times?)
FWIW the LSHTM result was broadly similar to what Imperial released on 30 March suggesting, based on comparing number of deaths in European countries to fitted models, that lockdown cut transmissions by 50% or so (but with considerable uncertainty).
There is no general election for 4 years, the government has a big majority, it should not worry about the press and focus on what the medical experts advise
This site is getting more extreme and unforgiving as the crisis lights up. When I post calm, thoughtful stuff I get called all sorts of things. But last few days it’s more serious because I have been accused of bias, despite pointing to The Mail, FT, Guardian for research behind my argument, you try to make it out to be one bad egg. truth is, we’ve all got a bit of a bias, it displays your own bias to seek to batter or belittle 🥚 when you want to shut down discussion, Rather than engage in thoughtful discussion I am offering. So here goes, can you properly rise to the challenge. That is, what is it’s work...
The nub of it I will explain like this. Sky Q. Go to a movie. Go parental advice. It gives you ratings as warning for what is deemed vices in it, profanity, sex nudity, violence, consumerism.
Consumerism? Are you wondering why this is on the list, something to shield children from?
If you are wondering what on earth consumerism is doing on the warning list, it is not your bias I am calling out, after all we all have bias. But your ignorance. I call you out as being behind the times. Claim you are lacking a consciousness of the garden you have been sitting in.
What Corona crisis teaches us, it is mindfulness, sacrifice, and community our civilisation boils down to when faced with such a threat. But nothing stays the same in this world. where the garden around you changes for worst you need to appreciate your own soul to see this, and act to allow the mindfulness, sacrifice and community to flourish.
And never is the lack of conscious awareness more stark on PB than when we all thrash around, being defensive, deflecting blame to others, in the abuse we give and names we call each other we come close to calling corona virus evil. Ask yourself, do you wish to excommunicate Coronavirus from the kingdom of heaven? what is your case for excommunication?
Truth is, when it dies Coronavirus goes to heaven. And God thanks it for its work. Doesn’t he?
Mumbo jumbo alert.
The virus is Gods work. It changes us. We learn more about our own soul, so clearly see true state of the garden, how the consumerism is a bit over grown, some other weeding and clipping to allow the mindfulness, self sacrifice and community to flourish. It shouldnt need this to bring action and best out of us. We have been lacking conscious awareness. Back to caring for the soil, mindful again to the spirituality of our beautiful earth.
This site is getting more extreme and unforgiving as the crisis lights up. When I post calm, thoughtful stuff I get called all sorts of things. But last few days it’s more serious because I have been accused of bias, despite pointing to The Mail, FT, Guardian for research behind my argument, you try to make it out to be one bad egg. truth is, we’ve all got a bit of a bias, it displays your own bias to seek to batter or belittle 🥚 when you want to shut down discussion, Rather than engage in thoughtful discussion I am offering. So here goes, can you properly rise to the challenge. That is, what is it’s work...
The nub of it I will explain like this. Sky Q. Go to a movie. Go parental advice. It gives you ratings as warning for what is deemed vices in it, profanity, sex nudity, violence, consumerism.
Consumerism? Are you wondering why this is on the list, something to shield children from?
If you are wondering what on earth consumerism is doing on the warning list, it is not your bias I am calling out, after all we all have bias. But your ignorance. I call you out as being behind the times. Claim you are lacking a consciousness of the garden you have been sitting in.
What Corona crisis teaches us, it is mindfulness, sacrifice, and community our civilisation boils down to when faced with such a threat. But nothing stays the same in this world. where the garden around you changes for worst you need to appreciate your own soul to see this, and act to allow the mindfulness, sacrifice and community to flourish.
And never is the lack of conscious awareness more stark on PB than when we all thrash around, being defensive, deflecting blame to others, in the abuse we give and names we call each other we come close to calling corona virus evil. Ask yourself, do you wish to excommunicate Coronavirus from the kingdom of heaven? what is your case for excommunication?
Truth is, when it dies Coronavirus goes to heaven. And God thanks it for its work. Doesn’t he?
Mumbo jumbo alert.
The virus is Gods work. It changes us. We learn more about our own soul, so clearly see true state of the garden, how the consumerism is a bit over grown, some other weeding and clipping to allow the mindfulness, self sacrifice and community to flourish. It shouldnt need this to bring action and best out of us. We have been lacking conscious awareness. Back to caring for the soil, mindful again to the spirituality of our beautiful earth.
Do you think that's the lesson China has taken from it?
A good friend's best friend just died of the virus in New York. She was 48.
Somebody else the Wife knows extremely well has it. She won't be put on a ventilator, as she is too old.
Shit got real.
An interesting day back at work. We now have 122 confirmed Covid19 patients as inpatients. 22 fatalities (to yesterday) 38 discharged home.
Thanks for the update @Foxy! If you're allowed to say, are all of the 62 'active' cases in the ICU?
122 active cases, not counting in my figures resolved cases. Currently increasing about 20% per day. Most are on medical wards. ICU only taking those with good Clinical Frailty Scores.
Looking at table 2, we see that out of 50 patients admitted to ICU (representing 26% of all inpatients so perhaps not far different to the situation chez Foxy) there were only 11 survivors (22%) compared to 39 deaths (78%). All three who received ECMO died; 31 out of the 32 who received invasive mechanical ventilation died; 24 out of the 26 who received non-invasive mechanical ventilation died; 33 of the 41 who received high-flow nasal cannula oxygen therapy died. The median ICU stay was 8 days (IQR from 4 to 12) for those who died and 7 days (IQR from 2 to 9) for those who survived.
Volunteers working at the NHS Nightingale coronavirus hospital have been told to prepare for the fact that up to 80 per cent of patients who are on ventilators will die, MailOnline can reveal.
Selfless heroes flocking to staff the emergency 4,000-bed unit in east London have been told to 'be prepared to see death', with a mortality rate of 50 to 80 per cent among those on ventilators.
This site is getting more extreme and unforgiving as the crisis lights up. When I post calm, thoughtful stuff I get called all sorts of things. But last few days it’s more serious because I have been accused of bias, despite pointing to The Mail, FT, Guardian for research behind my argument, you try to make it out to be one bad egg. truth is, we’ve all got a bit of a bias, it displays your own bias to seek to batter or belittle 🥚 when you want to shut down discussion, Rather than engage in thoughtful discussion I am offering. So here goes, can you properly rise to the challenge. That is, what is it’s work...
The nub of it I will explain like this. Sky Q. Go to a movie. Go parental advice. It gives you ratings as warning for what is deemed vices in it, profanity, sex nudity, violence, consumerism.
Consumerism? Are you wondering why this is on the list, something to shield children from?
If you are wondering what on earth consumerism is doing on the warning list, it is not your bias I am calling out, after all we all have bias. But your ignorance. I call you out as being behind the times. Claim you are lacking a consciousness of the garden you have been sitting in.
What Corona crisis teaches us, it is mindfulness, sacrifice, and community our civilisation boils down to when faced with such a threat. But nothing stays the same in this world. where the garden around you changes for worst you need to appreciate your own soul to see this, and act to allow the mindfulness, sacrifice and community to flourish.
And never is the lack of conscious awareness more stark on PB than when we all thrash around, being defensive, deflecting blame to others, in the abuse we give and names we call each other we come close to calling corona virus evil. Ask yourself, do you wish to excommunicate Coronavirus from the kingdom of heaven? what is your case for excommunication?
Truth is, when it dies Coronavirus goes to heaven. And God thanks it for its work. Doesn’t he?
Mumbo jumbo alert.
The virus is Gods work. It changes us. We learn more about our own soul, so clearly see true state of the garden, how the consumerism is a bit over grown, some other weeding and clipping to allow the mindfulness, self sacrifice and community to flourish. It shouldnt need this to bring action and best out of us. We have been lacking conscious awareness. Back to caring for the soil, mindful again to the spirituality of our beautiful earth.
I respect your view. My view is that we shouldn't allow this crisis to change our way of life in any fundamental way once we've got through it.
This site is getting more extreme and unforgiving as the crisis lights up. When I post calm, thoughtful stuff I get called all sorts of things. But last few days it’s more serious because I have been accused of bias, despite pointing to The Mail, FT, Guardian for research behind my argument, you try to make it out to be one bad egg. truth is, we’ve all got a bit of a bias, it displays your own bias to seek to batter or belittle 🥚 when you want to shut down discussion, Rather than engage in thoughtful discussion I am offering. So here goes, can you properly rise to the challenge. That is, what is it’s work...
The nub of it I will explain like this. Sky Q. Go to a movie. Go parental advice. It gives you ratings as warning for what is deemed vices in it, profanity, sex nudity, violence, consumerism.
Consumerism? Are you wondering why this is on the list, something to shield children from?
If you are wondering what on earth consumerism is doing on the warning list, it is not your bias I am calling out, after all we all have bias. But your ignorance. I call you out as being behind the times. Claim you are lacking a consciousness of the garden you have been sitting in.
What Corona crisis teaches us, it is mindfulness, sacrifice, and community our civilisation boils down to when faced with such a threat. But nothing stays the same in this world. where the garden around you changes for worst you need to appreciate your own soul to see this, and act to allow the mindfulness, sacrifice and community to flourish.
And never is the lack of conscious awareness more stark on PB than when we all thrash around, being defensive, deflecting blame to others, in the abuse we give and names we call each other we come close to calling corona virus evil. Ask yourself, do you wish to excommunicate Coronavirus from the kingdom of heaven? what is your case for excommunication?
Truth is, when it dies Coronavirus goes to heaven. And God thanks it for its work. Doesn’t he?
Mumbo jumbo alert.
The virus is Gods work. It changes us. We learn more about our own soul, so clearly see true state of the garden, how the consumerism is a bit over grown, some other weeding and clipping to allow the mindfulness, self sacrifice and community to flourish. It shouldnt need this to bring action and best out of us. We have been lacking conscious awareness. Back to caring for the soil, mindful again to the spirituality of our beautiful earth.
You're supposed to use the sanitser on your hands not drink it.
Will this be a bit like Black Monday 1992 - ie when John Major's not long re-elected govt plunged out of the ERM and then spent a very long time trying to reestablish credibility in the face of a new media savvy Labour leader?
Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory tract infection that emerged in late 20191,2. Initial outbreaks in China involved 13.8% cases with severe, and 6.1% with critical courses3. This severe presentation corresponds to the usage of a virus receptor that is expressed predominantly in the lung2,4. By causing an early onset of severe symptoms, this same receptor tropism is thought to have determined pathogenicity, but also aided the control, of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 20035. However, there are reports of COVID-19 cases with mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, suggesting the potential for pre- or oligosymptomatic transmission6–8. There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.
Will this be a bit like Black Monday 1992 - ie when John Major's not long re-elected govt plunged out of the ERM and then spent a very long time trying to reestablish credibility in the face of a new media savvy Labour leader?
The polls soon swung against the Tories after Black Wednesday:
I think there was a big problem with today's Downing Street press conference.
Not just Sharma but more importantly the lady from the NHS - I don't think she was anything like as good a communicator as the other medical experts we have had up to now.
I have no wish to criticise her - she is probably very good at her job. But she didn't have the media and communication skills of everyone else who has appeared at those press conferences up to now.
I think it's imperative that they get back to the top team tomorrow - which in Boris's absence means Jenrick, Harries and Vallance.
(Skip to 9 and a half minutes in if you ever want to torture yourself with this. The minor uptick detected in car travel suggesting that a few people are starting to ignore the lockdown a wee bit more was probably the highlight of the thing for me - shows the difficulty in getting the timing and enforcement right.)
In person I've found Yvonne Doyle to be an absolutely excellent communicator. Not sure the lecture style really works well in this kind of context. I'm sure she'd have delivered her content better if she wasn't sticking to the slides (Ibefore now I've seen her just give up on a slideset and flick through them as background decoration while ad libbing very fluently...).
I think the biggest problem with the presser today is that Sharma just didn't have anything useful to announce, the medical side was largely a rehash of known ground and in the questioning neither of the speakers wanted to commit to hard targets when the press wanted to get them pinned them down which always results in frustrating viewing.
The lack of new stuff is one of the problems with daily press conferences. Viewers are going to be getting pretty fatigued so even if there is something new to announce there's not likely to be many people watching!
I've pretty much reached total virus news fatigue. There's nothing new for rolling news networks to say. Nothing new to inform me. Certainly no enterainment to be had from it. I'll start watching in about week, to see if we are flattening out.
Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory tract infection that emerged in late 20191,2. Initial outbreaks in China involved 13.8% cases with severe, and 6.1% with critical courses3. This severe presentation corresponds to the usage of a virus receptor that is expressed predominantly in the lung2,4. By causing an early onset of severe symptoms, this same receptor tropism is thought to have determined pathogenicity, but also aided the control, of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 20035. However, there are reports of COVID-19 cases with mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, suggesting the potential for pre- or oligosymptomatic transmission6–8. There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.
'Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load." is surely the scsry bit of that - you are still infectious after recovering and developing immunity?
Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory tract infection that emerged in late 20191,2. Initial outbreaks in China involved 13.8% cases with severe, and 6.1% with critical courses3. This severe presentation corresponds to the usage of a virus receptor that is expressed predominantly in the lung2,4. By causing an early onset of severe symptoms, this same receptor tropism is thought to have determined pathogenicity, but also aided the control, of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 20035. However, there are reports of COVID-19 cases with mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, suggesting the potential for pre- or oligosymptomatic transmission6–8. There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.
'Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load." is surely the scsry bit of that - you are still infectious after recovering and developing immunity?
I don’t think so; seroconversion just means you’ve produced a load of antibodies in response to the virus which are detectable in the bloodstream. Recovery (or not) follows that. And again, not quite right - you can infectious after symptoms have gone; full recovery takes a bit longer.
Will this be a bit like Black Monday 1992 - ie when John Major's not long re-elected govt plunged out of the ERM and then spent a very long time trying to reestablish credibility in the face of a new media savvy Labour leader?
The polls soon swung against the Tories after Black Wednesday:
Will this be a bit like Black Monday 1992 - ie when John Major's not long re-elected govt plunged out of the ERM and then spent a very long time trying to reestablish credibility in the face of a new media savvy Labour leader?
The polls soon swung against the Tories after Black Wednesday:
If the government does suffer it will be because of the impact to the economy rather than a lack of testing or PPE.
Death count above 2000 a day could do it
What we haven't had is much footage within our hospitals. I wonder if that will change over the next few weeks?
I don't think statistics matter much, what matters is when people start to feel pain themselves. That's why the economic impacts are more important, in my opinion.
Virological assessment of hospitalized patients with COVID-2019 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory tract infection that emerged in late 20191,2. Initial outbreaks in China involved 13.8% cases with severe, and 6.1% with critical courses3. This severe presentation corresponds to the usage of a virus receptor that is expressed predominantly in the lung2,4. By causing an early onset of severe symptoms, this same receptor tropism is thought to have determined pathogenicity, but also aided the control, of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 20035. However, there are reports of COVID-19 cases with mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, suggesting the potential for pre- or oligosymptomatic transmission6–8. There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.
'Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load." is surely the scsry bit of that - you are still infectious after recovering and developing immunity?
Which is why the WHO say for patients to isolate until 14 days after resolution of symptoms. The UK policy is only 7 days from start of symptoms, and that is what is being done at UK hospitals.
Combine that with 10% of the workforce being off with suspect COVID19 (the figure in my Trust) and lack of staff testing, and we have a major source of onward transmission.
Comments
The problem on testing staff is capacity. In Leicester we only swab inpatients with respiratory symptoms, because we simply do not have the swabs to do more. We do have 250 slots per day to swab staff at the drive through in Nottingham, 40 miles away, and 11000 staff in the Acute Trust (more in primary care, mental health and social care) which need to be authorised by a manager. Currently 10% of staff are absent for isolation. In a week we could get them screened, though getting them to Nottingham is a challenge for those without their own car, or too unwell to drive.
https://twitter.com/KevinMKruse/status/1245472713004724226?s=19
The government has made the decision that the latter - slower and more expensive - is better because it is more accurate and reliable
However, if the true death figure from China is 40x larger than reported and closer to 150k rather than 3.5k then I'm pretty sure the initial response would have been different and the ramp up would have been different.
The issue for me is that the government was naive enough to believe anything coming out of China and the WHO. We should have been better prepared and they have let us and the NHS frontline staff down and it is going to cost many lives.
I hope that the testing and PPE situations are remedied in the next few days. On the latter I'm reliably informed that it isn't the amount that's the issue, it's the poor quality. Staff need overalls, gloves, proper masks with 3M air filters and full face plastic visors or wrap around safety glasses. What they are getting is a plastic pinny, a thin paper surgical mask and gloves. The government is writing blank cheques for this stuff, why aren't we procuring the best possible safety equipment for our doctors and nurses? What are the bottlenecks and who is letting the side down. We need this resolved or four deaths of frontline staff is just the beginning.
I'm very disappointed with how poor the government has been at communicating with doctors and nurses on this. Honestly, I can't imagine this would have happened with Dave and George in charge.
Ecuador is the worst case in Latin America per capita, so this is clearly primarily still a European, North American, Far Eastern and Iranian virus
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1245467211185229824?s=20
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8177759/Camilla-Parker-Bowless-ex-husband-coronavirus-fears-caught-Cheltenham-Festival.html
Using the change in contact patterns, the team calculated a change in reproduction number between the POLYMOD (pre lockdown) and CoMix (post lockdown). They found that the mean number of contacts per person measured was more than 70% lower now than before the lockdown.
This suggests that the reproduction now would be between 0.37 and 0.89 with the most likely value being 0.62.
Professor John Edmunds from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine who led the research said: “If we see similar changes across the UK population, we would expect to see the epidemic to start to decline.
“However, our estimates are not to be read as ‘job done’. Rather, they should be used as motivation for us all to keep following UK government instructions. It’s imperative we don’t take our foot off the pedal. We must continue to stop transmission of the virus to reduce the burden on the NHS now, and over the coming months.”
The more technical blurb from the study:
We found a 73% reduction in the average daily number of contacts observed per participant (from 10.8 to 2.9). This would be sufficient to reduce R0
from 2.6 prior to lockdown to 0.62 (95% confidence interval [CI] 0.37 - 0.89) after the lockdown, based on all types of contact and 0.37 (95% CI = 0.22 - 0.53) for physical contacts only
I'm a bit concerned people had more reason to lie in the more recent survey now that there's a social desirability bias towards being good obedient citizens and not having had much contact! (And presumably a social desirability bias the other way in the previous survey - who wanted to admit being the kind of sad sack that has hardly any human contact when we were living in more normal times?)
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think
Obviously hindsight is an amazing thing, and I don't think it would have been possible to sell this to the public back then, but had we effectively closed our borders in mid January, insisting on 14 days isolation for anyone coming into the UK from anywhere, then we would now be still in a pretty much "business as usual" secario with zero cases.
I would imagine that if there is the slightest hint of a similar disease cropping up in the future, the government will slam the shutters on the airports within moments of hearing the news - keeping them open just won't be worth the risk.
The press are going to muck this up; the way they are planting in people’s minds that a lockdown is too much for people is going to have people relaxing way too soon. In Italy and Spain they had to lock down even harder when that happened and I think that may be needed here in the weeks around Easter.
The reporting on this is irresponsible, it should be more on the lines of how it is necessary and for the good of all. Otherwise this semi-lockdown starting to be taken less seriously is going to elongate the peak for a lot longer and any proper relaxation will be pushed to further into the summer.
https://twitter.com/brexitbin/status/1245488642010820609
https://twitter.com/DerbyChrisW/status/1245309762343964678
It's a media mauling in the press tomorrow. The Gov't need to get a grip of this or the goodwill is going to disappear.
https://news.sky.com/story/thursdays-national-newspaper-front-pages-11967169
(Skip to 9 and a half minutes in if you ever want to torture yourself with this. The minor uptick detected in car travel suggesting that a few people are starting to ignore the lockdown a wee bit more was probably the highlight of the thing for me - shows the difficulty in getting the timing and enforcement right.)
In person I've found Yvonne Doyle to be an absolutely excellent communicator. Not sure the lecture style really works well in this kind of context. I'm sure she'd have delivered her content better if she wasn't sticking to the slides (Ibefore now I've seen her just give up on a slideset and flick through them as background decoration while ad libbing very fluently...).
I think the biggest problem with the presser today is that Sharma just didn't have anything useful to announce, the medical side was largely a rehash of known ground and in the questioning neither of the speakers wanted to commit to hard targets when the press wanted to get them pinned them down which always results in frustrating viewing.
The lack of new stuff is one of the problems with daily press conferences. Viewers are going to be getting pretty fatigued so even if there is something new to announce there's not likely to be many people watching!
The same pattern has been seen everywhere else, and those figures in their own tell you nothing about the effectiveness of the lockdown.
"Wet markets—a continuing source of severe acute respiratory syndrome and influenza?
Prof Robert G Webster"
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(03)15329-9/fulltext
Looking at table 2, we see that out of 50 patients admitted to ICU (representing 26% of all inpatients so perhaps not far different to the situation chez Foxy) there were only 11 survivors (22%) compared to 39 deaths (78%). All three who received ECMO died; 31 out of the 32 who received invasive mechanical ventilation died; 24 out of the 26 who received non-invasive mechanical ventilation died; 33 of the 41 who received high-flow nasal cannula oxygen therapy died. The median ICU stay was 8 days (IQR from 4 to 12) for those who died and 7 days (IQR from 2 to 9) for those who survived.
Fingers crossed British ICUs don't end up like this. NHS Nightingale sounds like it is going to be brutal work:
Volunteers working at the NHS Nightingale coronavirus hospital have been told to prepare for the fact that up to 80 per cent of patients who are on ventilators will die, MailOnline can reveal.
Selfless heroes flocking to staff the emergency 4,000-bed unit in east London have been told to 'be prepared to see death', with a mortality rate of 50 to 80 per cent among those on ventilators.
Research suggests that each person infected with COVID-19 will infect just 0.62 other people - crucial to eradicating the virus."
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-is-cornered-and-will-burn-out-due-to-uk-distancing-measures-ex-who-official-says-11967018
If that number drifted back up to 1 (and pre lockdown, it’s estimated at 2.6), the lockdown would take 30 weeks to be effective, not 12.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2196-x
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an acute respiratory tract infection that emerged in late 20191,2. Initial outbreaks in China involved 13.8% cases with severe, and 6.1% with critical courses3. This severe presentation corresponds to the usage of a virus receptor that is expressed predominantly in the lung2,4. By causing an early onset of severe symptoms, this same receptor tropism is thought to have determined pathogenicity, but also aided the control, of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 20035. However, there are reports of COVID-19 cases with mild upper respiratory tract symptoms, suggesting the potential for pre- or oligosymptomatic transmission6–8. There is an urgent need for information on body site-specific virus replication, immunity, and infectivity. Here we provide a detailed virological analysis of nine cases, providing proof of active virus replication in upper respiratory tract tissues. Pharyngeal virus shedding was very high during the first week of symptoms (peak at 7.11 × 108 RNA copies per throat swab, day 4). Infectious virus was readily isolated from throat- and lung-derived samples, but not from stool samples, in spite of high virus RNA concentration. Blood and urine never yielded virus. Active replication in the throat was confirmed by viral replicative RNA intermediates in throat samples. Sequence-distinct virus populations were consistently detected in throat and lung samples from the same patient, proving independent replication. Shedding of viral RNA from sputum outlasted the end of symptoms. Seroconversion occurred after 7 days in 50% of patients (14 days in all), but was not followed by a rapid decline in viral load. COVID-19 can present as a mild upper respiratory tract illness. Active virus replication in the upper respiratory tract puts the prospects of COVID-19 containment in perspective.
https://twitter.com/StephenMcDonell/status/1245520233290334208
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_1997_United_Kingdom_general_election#1992
If the government does suffer it will be because of the impact to the economy rather than a lack of testing or PPE.
https://twitter.com/janinegibson/status/1244519429825802240
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
And again, not quite right - you can infectious after symptoms have gone; full recovery takes a bit longer.
https://twitter.com/andishehnouraee/status/1245513642319151110
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/04/02/national/health-care-collapse-warning-japan-coronavirus/
https://twitter.com/CNN/status/1245494921936678912
I don't think statistics matter much, what matters is when people start to feel pain themselves. That's why the economic impacts are more important, in my opinion.
Combine that with 10% of the workforce being off with suspect COVID19 (the figure in my Trust) and lack of staff testing, and we have a major source of onward transmission.