COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[Marvin]

Today's media briefing will be interesting. Yesterday the media was very friendly but they need to ask questions today about suppression v herd immunity.

presumably the whole world is going through the same debate behind the scenes?

If the conclusion is mitigation/herd immunity is the way to go, I'd be surprised but people are rational and they know their subject better than we do so one must trust. I would however like some more justification for adopting 1918 strategy in 2020!

 

[Ban-jani]

China, Singapore etc do seem to be returning to a degree of normality. There are reports that reinfection is low. A second wave is apparently less likely as this is not influenza. If we bring in measures like France etc we can support businesses and people. Basically treat this as a one off ‘war’ cost, focus on suppression and be vigilant once we come out of the other side and see where we are with vaccines etc.

I’m not saying this will be over in a few months as it is likely we will have to modify and adapt our behaviour for a long while yet but it is possible to combat this and use the Far East countries as a model as much as we can given the cultural differences.

You are maybe right mate but I think it’s incredibly difficult to know.

China is still in lockdown in a lot of areas, with a huge number of people not yet out and so when they’re released, who knows?

 

[George Hannah]

I’ve deleted the post whilst I re-read the report.

edit: it says at peak, we’d still need 8x as many ICU beds as we currently have. Which isn’t the same as my original post that I’ve deleted.

“In combination, this intervention strategy is predicted to reduce peak critical care demand by two-thirds and halve the number of deaths. However, this “optimal” mitigation scenario would still result in an 8-fold higher peak demand on critical care beds over and above the available surge capacity in both GB and the US”

Doesn’t that mean 125,000 deaths?

I'm not sure their prose style is sufficiently precise - the sentence is ambiguous. If they wanted to say 'no matter what measures are taken there will still be more than 100,000 deaths in the UK' they could have easily done so.

 

[The Light Was Yellow Sir]

this simulitis is a tricky cove!

Isn’t it just.

 

[alexmcity]

Today's media briefing will be interesting. Yesterday the media was very friendly but they need to ask questions today about suppression v herd immunity.

presumably the whole world is going through the same debate behind the scenes?

If the conclusion is mitigation/herd immunity is the way to go, I'd be surprised but people are rational and they know their subject better than we do so one must trust. I would however like some more justification for adopting 1918 strategy in 2020!

I think the rationale was that we couldn't contain the spreading anyway, so better try to protect the vulnerable and hope that the healhy ones will develop immunity which will help during the expected 2nd wave. And this will help save the economy to boot. Problem is that neither the testing capacity nor the ICU capacity are sufficient for such a strategy. Besides, the expected 2nd wave and the expected immunity are based on speculative probablities than hard facts. So, the suppression strategy is the only realistic now, as the ICL study concludes.

 

[aguero93:20]

A big hole that the Government needs to close is testing.

frontline staff in the NHS need testing and they are focusing on priority-testing but they need to move the testing outside the NHS to private labs and use the emergency services, students and other people outside the NHS to get the resources they need. Testing is the way you find asymptomatic people who are spreading it, and you catch the transmission chain earlier. The WHO are highlighting this. No one outside of South Korea seems to be doing this work but it should be the key. I expect the NHS feels it doesn't have the resources to do it but society does. That's a government job to re-allocate.

As I've said before, wartime level of resource allocation. Not happening yet though.

 

[George Hannah]

Well you are getting there. The obvious question then is why did we not use the data from the virus ‘which seems to be a law unto itself’ to begin with? It didn’t start here. We saw the response in China and elsewhere. Their response was based on the actual properties of the virus. We rejected their response as flawed because our modelling based on a generic virus told us it was flawed. Our ignorance of the actual virus allied to our arrogance that we were right and knew better than those currently experiencing the problem is probably a debate for less pressing times.

The learning process is a changing process.

 

[BobKowalski]

They have adapted the strategy by bringing them in sooner, not by bringing in measures unforseen previously.

I didn’t say they were unforeseen. The Govt always had scenarios prepared for more restrictive measures. My point is that they had to bring them in sooner than planned as the strategy was switched from mitigation to suppression as our initial modelling was in error. This was evident over the weekend when the mantra of ‘herd immunity’ was suddenly ditched and why yesterday we were not fully on top of the economic impact of what we were asking people to do nor did we have measures to announce that would mitigate the economic impact.

I have specifically said we adapted our strategy. We adapted it to reflect new data which made our initial assumptions redundant. This is not a criticism. I expect people to change the strategy if the data demands it.

The criticism would be why was not actual data on the virus used in the first place? If we didn’t have access then why were countries and organisations privy to the actual data not heeded more? There could be good reasons for not doing so but that is a debate for later.

 

[Oohvonkyvonky]

I work outside, but next week I am booked on a course which will mean I am in a classroom with about 20 people for a whole week for 7 hrs aday... plus I have never met. My missus is a diabetic and in the 'at risk' group. I have told my line manager that I dont think it would be wise for me to attend, as government are saying dont socialise etc. Well to me being around 20 people is socialising and is not part of my normal work. I was hoping my boss would take us of the course but he isnt really interested in our health.

That's a ridiculous approach from your boss and the training company! This is the recommendations from ACAS https://www.acas.org.uk/coronavirus
You could just say someone in your family has it - Then you wont be obliged to go?!

 

[George Hannah]

Yeah you’re not wrong.
Grim times ahead mate.