It is quite astonishing that anyone could still be claiming that the infection fatality rate could be as low as 0.13%, seeing that even taking only confirmed cases into account 0.09% of the population of New York City has already died. And we may be only halfway through the first wave.
So far from the "research" of these people being publicised online, I should think a very good case could be made for them to be confined in padded cells.
I don't find it astonishing. We're in a truly terrible place with no clear and quick way out. If the mortality rate is tiny it follows that we are close to mass immunity already - since millions will have had it and barely known they were sick. This is a devastatingly attractive notion. It's up there with the magic money tree and life after death. If anything I'm surprised how few believers it has garnered.
He claims to be an academic epidemiologist, though. And he thinks that the infection fatality rate can be only slightly bigger than the percentage of the whole population of NYC who have already been killed by the virus, at this early stage ...
Its ridiculous. Peoples' idea of the mortality of this virus are still being shaped by Chinese lies, even now. Of those known for a fact to have had it and recovered 21% have died worldwide. If you strip out China its much higher. Anything else is a guess on how many others might have had it.
The UK really isn't helping in this respect because we don't even record how many have recovered..
@kinabalu, how can I make sense of this exchange when you remove all the earlier posts relating to it?
I always just leave the one I'm replying to. Do most people leave all of them? I'll do that too from now on if it's the norm. But anyway, not missing much in this case. @BannedInParis has some insight into what Spanish flu 2nd wave outcomes specifically tell us about how the Nightingale(s) will be used for Covid. Sounds interesting so I was hoping to squeeze it out of him.
Thanks. Most people do indeed leave the earlier exchanges to view under "show previous quotes". I fairly often find I need to open up an exchange to understand how the discussion has gone. When we had that phase of Vanilla not collapsing the threads it was useful to cut out intermediate stuff for simple legibility, but thankfully that glitch didn't last more than a few weeks. There is no need now to hide the intermediate stuff.
OK. So test that right here, right now.
I must admit I always leave the quotes in as far back as they will allow. That seems to have changed recently. Previously there was a fair tight letter limit before you had to start cutting out previous quotes. In that instance I always used to cut out everything except the immediate posting I was replying to. This was because I was too inept at trying to just cut out a certain number of quotes and always ended up with the quotation system all screwed up. Now I notice you can keep a much larger thread.
The Treasury has announced the extension of the UK’s job furlough scheme, which will now run an extra month until the end of June to “reflect continuing social distancing measures”
The scheme, which allows firms to keep employees on the payroll with the government paying cash grants covering 80% of their wages up to £2,500, was originally set for a three month period between March and the end of May.
The Treasury said the Chancellor would “keep the scheme under review and extend it if necessary.”
From the Guardian live blog.
If nine million workers are indeed furloughed then somebody on line calculated that that little policy will cost the taxpayer (if there are any left), 18 billion pounds a month.
A month.
Part of the problem is that far more employees have been furloughed than the government expected. The guidance was to carry on working but work from home where possible. Instead, employees have been furloughed left, right and centre. The longer lockdown goes on the more difficult it will be to get people back to work because they will have become accustomed to being paid to stay at home (as Peston pointed out the other day). This is partly why polls show that lockdown is well supported by the public.
The government is going to find getting out of lockdown far more difficult that putting us into lockdown. And it will get more difficult the longer lockdown lasts.
To blow own sax this is what I predicted would happen even if Sunak didn't. Furlough is a very tempting proposition for many businesses that actually have the reserves to carry on for quite some time without laying people off.
9 million was the expectation of the government when they put in place the scheme. Do we have the actual figure? Is it really a lot higher than that? I don't think so.
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The UK really isn't helping in this respect because we don't even record how many have recovered..