COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[oakiecokie]

Wow, so yesterday we he had our first day with over 100 deaths and today we are nearing 200 in a single day.

If this doesn't hit home to people then nothing will.

The world is still full of knob heads I`m afraid,abu.It still wont deter those selfish bastards.

 

[PragueBlue]

The "underlying conditions" line is not particularly reassuring I think.

I mean seriously, who does *not* have something or other wrong with them at some point. Half the population are overweight or either Type 2 diabetic or on the road to it. How many people have high blood pressure? Or drink too much and maybe their liver isn't in tip-top condition? Not to mention the countless numbers with immune system issues for whatever reason.

As an overweight, high blood pressure, near diabetic old person who drinks far too much, I am strangely un-reassured.

Have they ever said what is classed as an underlying cause?

 

[Chippy_boy]

I think it was pretty much expected. It's only going to get worse for a few weeks.

Not really, it's a humungous 62% rise on yesterday.

Were that to be repeated daily for the next 2 weeks, we'd have 169,000 people dying on day 14.

 

[Mikeegrini]

A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future
An author in Rome describes what to expect based on her experiences of lockdown
Francesca Melandri
Published: 13:36 GMT Friday, 27 March 2020

The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks.

I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.

We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.

As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that.

First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do.

You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days.

You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it.

You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy.

You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…

You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest.

Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.

You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again.

You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training.

You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all.

You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules.

You will count all the things you do not need.

The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.

Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant.

Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month?

You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.

You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.

Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.

Many children will be conceived.

Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.

Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.

You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.

You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.

At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.

You will eat again.

We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

© Francesca Melandri 2020

 

[robbieh]

We're going to see 500+ death days before the end of the 3 week lockdown even if it's a massive success.

I have to say though, this has really put into perspective wars for me though - We're all sitting here rightfully shocked at 180 deaths in a day and worrying about how many we'll lose tomorrow - In WW2 we lost that many soldiers on average every single day for 5 years.

Or imagine waking up and hearing 19,200 had died in one day at the Somme.

WW2 total casualties we came in 16th with just under 500,000. What surprised me was China 15 million lost, only surpassed by the USSR.

 

[meltonblue]

Not really, it's a humungous 62% rise on yesterday.

Were that to be repeated daily for the next 2 weeks, we'd have 168,000 people dying on day 14.

It's better to look at the percentage rise in new cases, that will give more of an idea of how it will pan out of the next couple of weeks

 

[PragueBlue]

Not really, it's a humungous 62% rise on yesterday.

Were that to be repeated daily for the next 2 weeks, we'd have 169,000 people dying on day 14.

The 'experts' on TV have said it was tracking pretty much as they expected. There are going to be days with big leaps.

 

[i8rags]

Good god that's a shocking day on day increase!

Just been explaining on sky, that these are from the last few days whilst kin was contacted since the procedural changes. So probably best to add last three days and divide.

 

[abu13]

Key worker pal,or a worker that your employer has decided essential?

Not a key worker but we are supplying support for key workers, it's a bit of a dilema to be honest but it not being forced on us.

 

[Fame Monster]

Explain?

You already asked me to explain before.

I said the Gov't should have taken a different course of action, one that the rest of the world took, and one that the Gov't here have eventually taken after their initial strategy was exposed to be suicidal by Imperial College and borne out by deaths in other European nations and by deaths in this country now.

 

[kevin horlocks wand]

The 'experts' on TV have said it was tracking pretty much as they expected. There are going to be days with big leaps.

some egg head , I think the original imperial data chap, predicting April 5 as our worse day.

he was the chap who also now estimates 5700 deaths .

who knows.

edit , although I see brum airport is being prepared to be a morgue for 12k bodies. Grim.

 

[paulchapo]

We have been expecting a large surge of people being admitted to hospital and sadly dying from it I am sure I have read? That's why the huge temporary hospital has been set up in London. I'm not sure it's a surprise.

 

[PragueBlue]

some egg head , I think the original imperial data chap, predicting April 5 as our worse day.

he was the chap who also now estimates 5700 deaths .

who knows.

Horrific but much better than the 250,000 and 20,000 figures that have been mentioned. Let's hope it stays that low, or lower preferably.

 

[Chippy_boy]

It's better to look at the percentage rise in new cases, that will give more of an idea of how it will pan out of the next couple of weeks

No it really isn't.

The rises in new cases is governed by many things, not least how many people did we test, and who and where and when.

The number of deaths is a really reliable stat with no scope for misinterpretation. We are all hoping, praying and expecting that a +62% daily rise is a blip. It must be a blip. Deaths have gone up 10x in 9 days. That's "only" a 29% daily rise. Still terrible.

We also pray the +29% per day over the last week or two, will slow off as the social distancing measures people themselves implemented before the government asked us to, will start to pay dividends.

If not, then in two weeks time, based on +29% per day we'll have 6,000+ people per day dying. I am expecting it to be much lower than that. Let's pray its much, much lower.

 

[kevin horlocks wand]

You already asked me to explain before.

I said the Gov't should have taken a different course of action, one that the rest of the world took, and one that the Gov't here have eventually taken after their initial strategy was exposed to be suicidal by Imperial College and borne out by deaths in other European nations and by deaths in this country now.

sweden are perusing this , all schools and businesses open and public gatherings are fine. They are going full on herd as a strategy.

Herd immunity for us is a bi product as all experts believe many more have it in the uk than our numbers and if they recover then we will have some herd immunity.

The population has to build up some natural immunity and resistance in the general population. If you locked every single person In their room for 2 months when we all came out the virus would still be around.

 

[Tricky_Trev]

Have they ever said what is classed as an underlying cause?

Yes, high blood pressure is the most common one among covid-19 deaths. I’m sure I saw that in some data around a week ago. But it was so overwhelmingly the most common that I doubt it will have changed in the last week. People sometimes think underlying health issues means their lungs or heart were in a bad way anyway, but in a lot of cases it just means high blood pressure or diabetes. As common as that.

High blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, lung/heart disease are the main things.

 

[twosips]

A letter to the UK from Italy: this is what we know about your future
An author in Rome describes what to expect based on her experiences of lockdown
Francesca Melandri
Published: 13:36 GMT Friday, 27 March 2020

The acclaimed Italian novelist Francesca Melandri, who has been under lockdown in Rome for almost three weeks due to the Covid-19 outbreak, has written a letter to fellow Europeans “from your future”, laying out the range of emotions people are likely to go through over the coming weeks.

I am writing to you from Italy, which means I am writing from your future. We are now where you will be in a few days. The epidemic’s charts show us all entwined in a parallel dance.

We are but a few steps ahead of you in the path of time, just like Wuhan was a few weeks ahead of us. We watch you as you behave just as we did. You hold the same arguments we did until a short time ago, between those who still say “it’s only a flu, why all the fuss?” and those who have already understood.

As we watch you from here, from your future, we know that many of you, as you were told to lock yourselves up into your homes, quoted Orwell, some even Hobbes. But soon you’ll be too busy for that.

First of all, you’ll eat. Not just because it will be one of the few last things that you can still do.

You’ll find dozens of social networking groups with tutorials on how to spend your free time in fruitful ways. You will join them all, then ignore them completely after a few days.

You’ll pull apocalyptic literature out of your bookshelves, but will soon find you don’t really feel like reading any of it.

You’ll eat again. You will not sleep well. You will ask yourselves what is happening to democracy.

You’ll have an unstoppable online social life – on Messenger, WhatsApp, Skype, Zoom…

You will miss your adult children like you never have before; the realisation that you have no idea when you will ever see them again will hit you like a punch in the chest.

Old resentments and falling-outs will seem irrelevant. You will call people you had sworn never to talk to ever again, so as to ask them: “How are you doing?” Many women will be beaten in their homes.

You will wonder what is happening to all those who can’t stay home because they don’t have one. You will feel vulnerable when going out shopping in the deserted streets, especially if you are a woman. You will ask yourselves if this is how societies collapse. Does it really happen so fast? You’ll block out these thoughts and when you get back home you’ll eat again.

You will put on weight. You’ll look for online fitness training.

You’ll laugh. You’ll laugh a lot. You’ll flaunt a gallows humour you never had before. Even people who’ve always taken everything dead seriously will contemplate the absurdity of life, of the universe and of it all.

You will make appointments in the supermarket queues with your friends and lovers, so as to briefly see them in person, all the while abiding by the social distancing rules.

You will count all the things you do not need.

The true nature of the people around you will be revealed with total clarity. You will have confirmations and surprises.

Literati who had been omnipresent in the news will disappear, their opinions suddenly irrelevant; some will take refuge in rationalisations which will be so totally lacking in empathy that people will stop listening to them. People whom you had overlooked, instead, will turn out to be reassuring, generous, reliable, pragmatic and clairvoyant.

Those who invite you to see all this mess as an opportunity for planetary renewal will help you to put things in a larger perspective. You will also find them terribly annoying: nice, the planet is breathing better because of the halved CO2emissions, but how will you pay your bills next month?

You will not understand if witnessing the birth of a new world is more a grandiose or a miserable affair.

You will play music from your windows and lawns. When you saw us singing opera from our balconies, you thought “ah, those Italians”. But we know you will sing uplifting songs to each other too. And when you blast I Will Survive from your windows, we’ll watch you and nod just like the people of Wuhan, who sung from their windows in February, nodded while watching us.

Many of you will fall asleep vowing that the very first thing you’ll do as soon as lockdown is over is file for divorce.

Many children will be conceived.

Your children will be schooled online. They’ll be horrible nuisances; they’ll give you joy.

Elderly people will disobey you like rowdy teenagers: you’ll have to fight with them in order to forbid them from going out, to get infected and die.

You will try not to think about the lonely deaths inside the ICU.

You’ll want to cover with rose petals all medical workers’ steps.

You will be told that society is united in a communal effort, that you are all in the same boat. It will be true. This experience will change for good how you perceive yourself as an individual part of a larger whole.

Class, however, will make all the difference. Being locked up in a house with a pretty garden or in an overcrowded housing project will not be the same. Nor is being able to keep on working from home or seeing your job disappear. That boat in which you’ll be sailing in order to defeat the epidemic will not look the same to everyone nor is it actually the same for everyone: it never was.

At some point, you will realise it’s tough. You will be afraid. You will share your fear with your dear ones, or you will keep it to yourselves so as not to burden them with it too.

You will eat again.

We’re in Italy, and this is what we know about your future. But it’s just small-scale fortune-telling. We are very low-key seers.

If we turn our gaze to the more distant future, the future which is unknown both to you and to us too, we can only tell you this: when all of this is over, the world won’t be the same.

© Francesca Melandri 2020

Cheers, cutting onions here.

 

[kevin horlocks wand]

Horrific but much better than the 250,000 and 20,000 figures that have been mentioned. Let's hope it stays that low, or lower preferably.

I know he also reckoned between 1/2 to 2/3 of those would have died anyway .

 

[PragueBlue]

Yes, high blood pressure is the most common one among covid-19 deaths. I’m sure I saw that in some data around a week ago. But it was so overwhelmingly the most common that I doubt it will have changed in the last week. People sometimes think underlying health issues means their lungs or heart were in a bad way anyway, but in a lot of cases it just means high blood pressure or diabetes. As common as that.

Cheers.

 

[Fame Monster]

sweden are perusing this , all schools and businesses open and public gatherings are fine. They are going full on herd as a strategy.

Herd immunity for us is a bi product as all experts believe many more have it in the uk than our numbers and if they recover then we will have some herd immunity.

The population has to build up some natural immunity and resistance in the general population. If you locked every single person In their room for 2 months when we all came out the virus would still be around.

Ok, well 99% of the rest of the world.

I understand the theory of herd immunity and the Gov't's reasoning for not trying to suppress the virus straight away and having millions of people attend sporting, musical and other events all across the country, I just think it's absolutely suicidal when they could have bought the country more time to prepare for this when there's a shortage of essential medical equipment.