COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[jay_mcfc]

https://www.euromomo.eu

Europe monitors mortality already. note this years flu season has been exceptionally mild.

Cheers. I'll take a look.

 

[Chippy_boy]

Incidentally Jeremy Hunt was on the TV just now and when asked why the the government had stopped widespread testing previously, he said that (in terms, I cannot remember the exact words) "whilst we were accepting that 60% of the population were going to get this, widespread testing was less important. But since we changed tack - and we were right to change - then we need to resume and scale up the testing".

So there we have an open admission from a government minister about the change of strategy a couple of weeks ago. No more of this "the strategy is still the same" horse shit.

 

[paulchapo]

I have just listened to some government minister on GMTV and it is pretty obvious by his wishy washy conflicting answers they are still pursuing this herd immunity theory. He as good as said anyone can go out to work if they can't work from home. Loads of construction workers going on as normal and still thousands of people treating the so called lockdown as one big jolly. Who can blame them as the government seemingly can't stick to one plan? When it goes to rat shit they will say we tried but too many didn't listen.

 

[Eds]

I am a Director of a medium sized construction company and I want to get this out here right now before people get the wrong impression.
We as a company have been lead by the government guidelines on this and confusion reigns. We have some of our supply chain closing but we are being asked to carry
On - we work all around the UK including several sites in and around London- our labour force are being turfed out of their accommodation , they cannot share with their colleagues and their families at home are beyond concerned.

This is becoming a huge game of who blinks first between Contractors and Clients playing contractural poker.

It’s fast becoming a fucking right mess and we feel that the industry is being hung out to dry by politics here.

Interesting article online from Building Magazine which also says it’s a big game of poker because nobody wants to be sued for failing to fulfil contracts. You might have thought some common sense and leniency might apply in the circumstances but apparently not.

 

[Gabriel]

I wonder if Iceland will be an interesting place to see how it develops. It currently has 648 cases, 2 deaths, 595 active, and 13 critical. With a small population 364,000 of(ish) and presumably nobody able to get on/off the island, I imagine they'll ultimately be able to test the entire population; its health service is well-funded and good. I know nothing about this, of course, but just interested to see if one small place might quickly reveal more data for us all.

 

[AcceptedWalnut]

Spoken to my actual manager this morning and I fall under the vulnerable colleagues list so he's sent me home to isolate for two weeks and go from there. I'm still going to contact my GP and ask for his advice once the deadline for these letters has passed.

Thanks for your advice guys, I feel a little less worried now I'm not mixing with the general public for a while.

 

[kevin horlocks wand]

I don't know mate, and maybe when this is all over we will look back and say we did everything right.

I just cannot see it myself. I think we are going to end up like Italy or worse, and we had every opportunity to not have been. I think it stems from our inaction in the early stages 2 or 3 weeks ago, and I am convinced at that time we were thinking that everyone is going to get this, and that they didn't want to have people milling around at the peak period of infections - imagining that people would get bored of any measures introduced too soon, and then compliance would drop. So they accepted the rising infection rates whilst we did bugger all. And then they realised the catastrophic overloading of the NHS that would result, and the huge numbers of excess lives that would be lost and so changed tack. But only after precious weeks were lost.

I posted previously that our daily death rate was probably mulitplying by 10x every 8 or 9 days. Sadly I was wrong. It's been every 6 or 7 days. So a couple of weeks of not doing enough, makes a 10x to 100x difference in the daily death rate. Which is why we'll be seeing 1,000+ people dying every day over the coming days. Terrible, terrible and very sad.

There will need to be the inquest of all inquests when all this is over.

there will be an inquest but the real mess of this and why it has become global is the “experts” all said global travel was ok and did so until very recently . We had people travelling all over the globe passing it from infected area to clean area and so on and so on. As soon as started to spread from Wuhan the whole of China should have been locked down and flights and travel in and out stopped. If it spread into japan then japan’s borders should have been shut down. When Italy was infected Italy’s borders should have been shut down.

The Sunday times were still saying there are daily flights into London from China and Italy and three flights a week from Tehran. How can this still be happening. Manchester airport has done zero checks on anyone coming into the country. Absolutely none through this.

we won’t know whether out response is right and even if deaths increase ( as they will in the next few weeks ) we won’t know until 3 or 4 weeks from now what affect it has.

South Korea was spiked by a religious cult early doors hence that initial spike. That’s why it looks like they now have it under control , but it’s because it is being compared to the super spreader cult early doors.

 

[denislawsbackheel]

They haven't at all. The Chinese weren't running these wet markets for these animals prior to the 1970's, that's the point.

And when humans moved around, taking their pathogens to new worlds, the indigenous died out. See Incas and Native Americans being virtually wiped out by Smallpox and Flu.

and their pathogens like syphilis killed Europeans.

 

[Rammy Blue]

I agree that it's unlikely the current infection rate is anywhere near 50% of the population. But if the majority of those 90k tests have been done on hospitalized people, it gives us no indication at all on the rate of asymptomatic infections. If you've shown no symptoms at all (or even mild symptoms), you haven't been tested.

Ok, not really had a chance to post this over the last couple of days since I found out so bear with me and I’ll be interested to hear views.

I went on a golf trip, mentioned it on here, 2 weekends ago between Sat 14th and Mon 16th, to a very remote place in the hills on the Welsh border.

There were 11 of us in total, staying at a lovely country inn that we regularly stay at.

One of the guys, who I went to school with, lives in Australia and flew back to Oz on the evening of Tues 17th. Straight into isolation, as per their recommendations, and tested on Thurs 19th.

He got his results this week on Mon 23rd, and he is positive for Coronavirus.

He is super healthy and fit, one of the fittest 50 year olds you’d ever meet. Only had mild symptoms of a dry cough that started on Tues 17th, the day he flew back to Oz. Completely fine now, just had a few days of slight cough, no other symptoms or illness.

So, fair to say, he must have already had the virus when all 11 of us were together for the full 3 days.

He shared a room with one guy, he shared a car from London there and back and stayed at one of the other guys houses either side of golf trip. We had close quarters drinking and dinner for 2 nights running, played 3 rounds of golf together, etc etc.

We all got told of the positive result on Monday evening, via the WhatsApp group, and sure everyone will understand we were all quite shocked.

Now, not one single person out of the 10 of us who were with him is showing the slightest of symptoms, other than the usual hypochondriac stuff of cough here, sneeze there, headache every now and then etc etc

From first contact, today is now our day 12.

I just don’t understand, and would love one of these antibody tests to be able to see if I’ve had it and just been lucky to get a mild strain if that’s correct that there are different ones out there.

Thoughts?

 

[denislawsbackheel]

As I’ve said about five times this morning. Humans haven’t lived in close proximity to these animals and their pathogens for the last 200,000 years. As such, we can’t deal with their viruses and pathogens.

rabbits were introduced into the UK in 1066.