COVID-19 — Coronavirus

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somapop said:
Perhaps the lower figure of flu deaths can be attribute to more people taking up the flu jabs during the winter? Seems to be advertised more and more each year.
Hard to disentangle all this tbf.

It’s even busier out there today. Can see traffic lightly building up (though it’s also a case of road construction back at it...which in some respects makes sense).
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As the flu jab this year is at best 50% effective I doubt it.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6907a1.htm
 
BandWP said:
My Da is in his 60's and hasn't got a clue about metric.
He says Miles, yards, feet and inches. Gallons and pints, stones pounds and ounces etc.
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im somewhere in the middle. I do live in the world of feet and inches, stones and pounds.

but having been a games programmer for years, All worlds in video games ( that i've heard of ) everything is in meters/Centimetres as it makes everything infinitely easier for scaling things.

but when I saw the guy from Game of thrones doing the weight lifting, I saw he was 205cm height and had to go and convert it to feet and inches to get a proper feel for it.

its very odd.
 
The Light Was Yellow Sir said:
It comes down to trust really George. Nothing more and nothing less. If they can’t engender trust then how can they expect the rest of us to follow? The easiest way of doing that is just by being truthful. For example, in January, the UK had developed one of the first C-19 tests. One thing we do have is a very high level research base and every public health threat, similar to this one, is always Test, Track, Trace and Isolate, as quickly as possible. By February, despite the WHO repeating and repeating this mantra, we decided to not bother with it. We went from trying to contain it to trying to delay it. Aren’t you at least curious why we chose that path, especially as now, less than 2 months later and following at least 30000 deaths, our strategy is moving towards, Test, Track, Trace and Isolate?
Johnson talked, on Monday, of transparency, of learning lessons every day, which is all they all needed to be saying from the start. Then, four days later, we have the ‘testing target day’. People on here saying how we should give them credit for achieving when, in reality, they’d just lied again. It’s not great for building up the aforementioned trust.
If he’d said that we’ve put in a huge effort, almost got to 100k, a target we set to galvanise the system, and going forward we learned a huge amount which will enable us to increase the testing capacity week on week, he’d have had no criticism from me, as the ‘target’ was never a critical milestone. What does matter is that they couldn’t be straightforward at a time when the country needs unambiguous leadership from our government. We all need to be able to trust them and we need to be able to trust them all. If they tell us that 1 metre distancing is as good as 2, we need to believe them. If they tell us that masks ‘make no difference’, we need to trust them. Opening this business, or that business, we need to believe that the science and the interpretation of that science is believable. It’s not rocket science, it’s much more important than that and we deserve a leadership team that treat us like adults and in whom we can trust, I’d have thought.
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I think they made it pretty clear that the UK did not have a medical test manufacturing base like Germany or South Korea.
Also, for some reason, PHE did not want to use university lab testing to extend this beyond 10,000 tests a day either. (I await the eventual enquiry as to why - probably PHE's reluctance to so anything out of house).
We have thus built, in a month, a medical testing capability mostly in government labs from scratch. Amazingly quick in the great scheme of things, but I'm not sure it was the right approach.
 
denislawsbackheel said:
As the flu jab this year is at best 50% effective I doubt it.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6907a1.htm
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It helps thats for sure.

if you go back to this graphic I posted earlier, you can see a spike for 2015 at the start of the year. this was a year the flu vaccine predictions were wrong so it didn't have as much effect.

UkDeaths.jpg
 
When we abandoned the test, track and trace somebody mentioned a lack of infrastructure. In normal times in the UK it usually takes a week for a blood test to come back. In France there are private ‘laboratoires’ dotted all over the place In every town and village. The doctor will send you there and routine tests are done in no time, surely this must make track and trace so much easier to organise. It isn’t really the time to say it, but surely some of these crucial tasks should be hived off to the private sector. The NHS in it’s present state is surely not sustainable and they do tend to be protective of areas that may be should be let go.
 
SWP's back said:
That’s because between Jan 1 to March 31st, there were only 1,700 hundred CV-19 deaths. Then look how many died in April (over 25,000).
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Sure, i got that. My point is that doesnt mean that 40,000 'really' died between jan 1st and march 31st.
 
A bit more meat on the bone re the various rates we are looking at...

Cases in Germany likely to be 10 times higher than official number, researchers conclude
More than 10 times as many people in Germany have probably been infected with the coronavirus than the number of confirmed cases, researchers from the University of Bonn have concluded from a field trial in one of the worst hit towns.

The preliminary study results, which have yet to be peer reviewed for publication in a scientific journal, serve as a reminder of the dangers of infection by unidentified carriers of the virus, some of whom show no symptoms, the researchers said.

The readings come as Germany took further steps on Monday to ease restrictions, with museums, hairdressers, churches and more car factories reopening under strict conditions.

About 1.8 million people living in Germany must have been infected, more than 10 times the number of about 160,000 confirmed cases so far, the team led by medical researchers Hendrik Streeck and Gunther Hartmann concluded.

“The results can help to further improve the models to calculate how the virus spreads. So far the underlying data has been relatively weak,” Hartmann said in a statement.

The team analysed blood and nasal swabs from a random sample of 919 people living in a town in the municipality of Heinsberg on the Dutch border, which had among the highest death tolls in Germany.

To arrive at their estimate, the researchers put the town’s number of known deaths from Covid-19 relative to the larger estimate of local people with a prior infection – as indicated by antibody blood test readings – and applied the rate of 0.37% to country-wide deaths.

They also found that about one in five of those infected showed no symptoms.
 
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