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[COVID-19] General Discussion

Okay fine, so you a random idiot on the internet can hunker down with your tin foil hat and not go outside at all based on what is it again?

And I'll continue listening to people I know personally who are experts in the field, been actively involved in the UK response to the virus and one of the few people I trust implicitly.


Your case is incredibly thin.
 
Your case is incredibly thin.

That is the extrapolation of the 20% number the government published today.

Just because most folks (Joe Public) shrug their shoulders and don't think through what 20% actually infers, doesn't mean all of us are prevented from scrutinizing just what the fallout might be.


[and I'm not exactly hiding away nor supporting extreme isolation - but there is a leap from that to advocating mass gatherings.]


Oh, and one thing I'm becoming increasingly aware of (see Brexit or Climate for instance). Giving a precise and correct answer that contains numerous caveats is too complex for simple political minds to absorb. So where the 20% number comes from only Boris might know!
 
And you expert knowledge in knowing mass gathering should be stopped at this precise moment of time is based on what?

What about large places of work which don't have air conditioning unit designed specifically to stop the spread of infection throughout a building?

What you are advocating is creating a massive blow in the UK economy at a stage where risk infection is tiny, all but 2 cases within the UK can be traced to people travelling to/from known hotspots. Under any sensible measure that would be a gross over reaction.

As noted by the government, their advisors and experts there will be 'likely' point where those measures will have to be put in place but any sensible plan need to balance impact with risk.


If we get to 20% workforce infected the impact will be huge nobody is denying that and plans are being put place to minimise that as much as humanly possibly it is after all the likely worst case scenario. In general people should follow NHS advice (which similar to that I posted the other day), those at-risk of serious complications should attempt even harder to minimise their risk to exposure.
 
And you expert knowledge in knowing mass gathering should be stopped at this precise moment of time is based on what?

Statistics. Simple numbers.

Not to mention the history of it in China given the actions of the Chinese authorities.


What about large places of work which don't have air conditioning unit designed specifically to stop the spread of infection throughout a building?

What you are advocating is creating a massive blow in the UK economy at a stage where risk infection is tiny, all but 2 cases within the UK can be traced to people travelling to/from known hotspots. Under any sensible measure that would be a gross over reaction.

Being draconian early has a lesser impact than trying to compensate later on.

Thought experiment:

Shutting the entire country down now for 2 weeks vs. doing the same in July after an explosion in cases.

Now, because cases are still of relatively low number, there are only a few carriers. As they become symptomatic they and the (reduced compared to July) number of people they are in contact with can all be isolated. The facilities or manpower are available to house or service this number of people.

In July, it could be in the thousands if not tens of thousands. Too many for strict isolation, far too many for tracing and isolating folks in contact.

The July shutdown would be utterly ineffective, cost far more and achieve nothing. Whereas now, you'd essentially eliminate the virus in country and then just have to control points of arrival thereafter.


Note: I am not advocating a complete shutdown of the country. The above is just a fundamental illustration of how making a hard decision early will beat that same decision later.


It should be noted the Chinese sat on their hands through December and January - they then shutdown the country in February and still had ~80,000 cases with ~3,000 deaths.
Right now, we are in the equivalent of the Chinese December and are sitting on our hands. Is the govt going to wait till May before waking up?
 
Okay fine, so you a random idiot on the internet can hunker down with your tin foil hat and not go outside at all based on what is it again?

And I'll continue listening to people I know personally who are experts in the field, been actively involved in the UK response to the virus and one of the few people I trust implicitly.


Your case is incredibly thin.

idk man. An an American I'm inclined to listen to the loud wrong man than those who have spent their entire adult lives researching this.
 
Again everything your posting is pure speculation based on a non expert opinion without any knowledge of the subject area.

You are right to be cautious but what you are advocating no expert that I'm aware of is in agreement with you.
 
Just a different point of view from someone closer to the pointy end of this than I'd like to be. I'll have to be careful not to compromise identities so I'll be a bit vague. However, those putting faith in the NHS / Government to deal with this may be interested to know of my experience.

The media disclosed that a case of coronavirus had been confirmed at a school in our local area on February 29th. Upon hearing about the school involved my wife commented that she had been on a training course with staff from said school recently. Through social media (no official contact from Public Health England) it was confirmed (Sunday Mar 1st) that the member of staff involved had indeed attended the same training course as my wife (a day before the infected person decided to self isolate). My wife had been been effectively confined within a small room with the individual for a whole day. We rang NHS 111 and after a 45 minute wait were informed that we were in a queue and someone would call back (no advice was offered at this point). After 24 hours this hadn't occurred so we rang again (90 minute wait) to be informed that we just had to wait and be patient. Both my wife and I informed our respective employers, I was told to stay away and WFH for 14 days from initial contact and my wife was informed not to attend school until such time as the NHS / PHE made a determination.

After approx 33 hours at 2am this morning the NHS called back stating that my wife had been assessed as low risk and should return to teaching (no testing required). However, they mentioned that PHE should have been in touch as part of the initial tracing. This did not occur. Should my wife and I have not taken proactive steps, we'd have been none the wiser and would have been working as normal. If this is what "containment" looks like you're kidding yourself if you believe it's any other than window dressing. We're probably just one of thousands of contacts that require follow-up. I suspect the horse is already away to the races and bolting the stable door now will have little effect.
 
Again everything your posting is pure speculation based on a non expert opinion without any knowledge of the subject area.

I'm fairly versed in maths and statistics thank you very much.

I note no substantive reply to the blatant truth of the thought experiment.


Its a f**king slow motion car crash and I'm alarmed that Bozo thinks that preparing for an acceptance* of 20% of workforce being infected constitutes effective policy.


*edit for clarity: Preparing the public - never mind preparing the NHS - I've already demonstrated in less than 2 minutes why preparing the NHS for that degree of outbreak is an impossible task.
 
owever, those putting faith in the NHS / Government to deal with this may be interested to know of my experience.

Indeed.

NHS are swamped and the government couldn't run a f**king tap.
 
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Further to earlier.

At the moment, based on Chinese studies; 80% of cases are mild, 14% severe and 5% critical.
Severe being breathing difficulties, low blood oxygen or other lung problems.
Critical being respiratory failure, shock or multiple organ dysfunction.


If the UK is looking at:

8.3m of those 16-67 contracting it at any one time (proportion of workforce as per Bozo).
640,000 of long term sick/retired contracting it (same 20% proportion extrapolated from Bozo's statement).

5% of the latter is still 32,000 people. That is approximately 20-25% of NHS England's entire bed capacity.

That doesn't include the percentage of workforce needing acute care, or kids. Or those in the severe category. It also doesn't consider that those in the severe category will undoubtedly be needing acute care for longer than those with mild symptoms and "off from work".


You'd have to be very confident in your modelling techniques to veer far from a study of actual numbers derived a matter of weeks ago on a virus which is extremely young and not well understood.

As someone with an extensive background in numerical modelling; I certainly wouldn't be placing much confidence in modelled numbers right now.
 
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If numbers are your thing this data tells most of what you need to know:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

To be honest it's miserable reading. There's not much comfort to be had here. China is a relative success story but have imposed truly draconian controls to achieve that. The west lack the means or the will to accomplish that. Italy is looking really problematic. Good job a load of families didn't go there skiing and come straight back to their normal lives......
 
Okay so your very well versed in maths, think I've proven several times in this forum that I have a fairly competent understanding of statistics.

But here's the thing I trust those who studied modeling of viruses which is PhD level stuff and do it for a living. And I'm sure they have a very good idea of how trust worthy those models are and what level of accuracy they have.

But sure you with numbers pulled from news articles with zero model applied, no understanding of the pathology of the virus and no idea of how applied the two to raw numbers is going to prove all the experts wrong.


**** me no wonder Gove said this country has had enough of experts when supposed bright people think they know better than them.
 
Okay so your very well versed in maths, think I've proven several times in this forum that I have a fairly competent understanding of statistics.

But here's the thing I trust those who studied modeling of viruses which is PhD level stuff and do it for a living. And I'm sure they have a very good idea of how trust worthy those models are and what level of accuracy they have.

But sure you with numbers pulled from news articles with zero model applied, no understanding of the pathology of the virus and no idea of how applied the two to raw numbers is going to prove all the experts wrong.


**** me no wonder Gove said this country has had enough of experts when supposed bright people think they know better than them.

Hold on a minute. That's unnecessarily dismissive. There are two parts to Amiga's analysis. I'm not in a position to agree / disagree regarding measures to mitigate spread (I have my suspicions regarding the relative importance of "the economy" vs human lives but that's just me). However, modelling scenarios the government has publicised is surely a reasonable action?

Let's just take the 1% mortality figure that your informed friend agreed seemed reasonable (looks low to me given the figures out of Italy but hey I'm not a virologist). Let's just acknowledge upfront that 1% is approximately 40 x more lethal than swine flu was which caused significant impacts (https://www.nhs.uk/news/cancer/swine-flu-deaths-examined/) and approx 10x more lethal than seasonal flu. Then let's take Boris's pronouncement today regarding the worst case scenario the government believes is possible. To be honest I have no idea why he believes that's a reasonable position to take as on the face of it, it'll be catastrophic. As per Amiga's point 20% is a nice resonant figure. It could easily be picked out of thin air.............

Lets model it on ONS data (I'm assuming these numbers are good enough for you?)

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentan...mploymentandemployeetypes/timeseries/mgrz/lms

So we'll take that 33,000,000 (ish) and simply apply the 20% ill enough to be off work (benefit of the doubt, we'll assume no one is skiving). That's 6.6 million individuals. At a 1% mortality rate. That's 66,000 dead. 2% gives 132,000 3% gives 198,000

That's just the working population. Admittedly this is rough working as demographics do appear to play a significant role in the death rate as do underlying health issues. But the lower death rate in the working population may be reflected in a higher one in the elderly / vulnerable.

Public Health England have previously stated that seasonal Flu has killed on average over the past five years 17,000 per annum. It's not rocket science and you don't need to a be a world class virologist to see that Covid-19 is a different threat and it's not just "another flu".

As Amiga notes it not a case of simply being dead or alive. This virus makes a significant number of people very ill indeed. China and Italy seem to have between and 10% and 20% of active cases that are "Serious" or "Critical". Just using the lower figure that would mean that under the government's worst case scenario 660,000 people would require care. Using the NHS's own figures (https://www.england.nhs.uk/statisti...vailability-and-occupancy/bed-data-overnight/) there are approximately 130,000 beds total in the NHS. That's including maternity, mental health etc.

If the government's worst case scenario comes to pass there is little the NHS will be able to do. My own experience indicates they struggle to run phone lines. Quadrupling bed capacity with an ailing workforce (including NHS staff)? Good luck with that. Given that's the case, the requirement to avoid the worst case scenario would seem imperative to me. That means taking measures to ensure that the virus doesn't spread. Again I don't see that happening. We're seeing gestures but mass transit still runs, large public gatherings continue, international travel continues pretty much unfettered. Compare what the U.K is doing to what China has done to effectively contain their outbreak. Waiting until things get bad to start acting? In my view that's a poor strategy. It's also a strategy that may be informed by virology experts but it's obviously political in nature. Do you honestly believe if your friends said to government we could stop this now but it'll cut GDP by 50% vs letting it run seeing a million dead but only a 10% GDP hit that the political classes wouldn't make a determination based on both elements?

Finally, I usually appreciate your stuff but you're guilty of playing the man in your previous post. People are allowed to think differently. Suppressing opposing views by appealing to authority (regardless of how valid) is not helpful imo.
 
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I don't want get into the nitty gritty of applying stats to a worst case scenario. We'd all be guilty of making many assumptions with no worthwhile data. Plus you guys are trying to prove that in the worst case scenario things will be bad and nobody I think is denying that.

Effects on GDP are economic based not virology. Then as you rightly pointed out a political decision has to be made at which point does the economic impact outweighs the impact due to death. Not a fun decision for anyone and certainly not purely academic.

So what we are talking about at the moment is shutting down large scale gatherings of people for sporting events. Now there is likely going to be a point this has to happen. However the questions that need to be asked/answered, what are realistic chances that mass infections will occur? Is that risk higher or lower than normal commuters using mass public transport to attend thier workplace? Will putting those measures in place now actually slow the rate of infection beyond a negligible difference?

All stuff we don't have the data or the knowledge to even begin to comprehend. Sure we can go get the big ticket numbers apply some changes to low ball it but that's only basic impact analysis rather than actually working if doing this one thing with have any impact long term.


So here's a better test. When the EU referendum occurs how many experts spoke out and continue to this day speak about the huge negative impacts Brexit will have? Now how many experts now are speaking out saying the government is being wreckless at this present time?


You'll know when events and mass gathering should be shut down and government is running roughshod because people with actual knowledge will speak out. You forget these people tend to ******* hate Johnson and the Tories with a passion and if they could throw them under a bus they would.

I don't trust the government one iota.
 
Just heard on 5live the England Italy will go ahead behind close doors. All sporting events are behind close doors in Italy till 3rd April.
 
Just heard on 5live the England Italy will go ahead behind close doors. All sporting events are behind close doors in Italy till 3rd April.
Understandable but personally I'd rather it wasn't played than that. I know there would be difficulties rescheduling, but still.
 
I suspect it may be the only way to get the game done. Be interesting to see what the travel advice is by then. Currently there's no prohibition on U.K citizens just rocking up in Rome on the lash for the weekend (or any advice not to do so)............ The CDC advise Americans against all but essential travel....

It's not just in Northern Italy anymore.....

https://lab24.ilsole24ore.com/coronavirus/

I hope everyone stays safe.
 
Reported case an hour and a half from my campus.

I'm on immunosuppressants so that's a bit of a concern, but I'm perfectly healthy otherwise (orthopedic injuries aside). Campus isn't on shut down but we got an email telling us to wash hands and not touch our faces.
 

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