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While recognising no amount of funding would have prepared us, wouldn't we have been better prepared for this without 10 years of looking to reduce NHS capacity either through austerity or, at least in the short-term, Brexit? Part of the pre-election headlines Nicky Morgan admitting that current running of NHS would see 18,500 nurses leave over 10 year period. That may just be extending what was happening beforehand, and complicated by NHS being run by different parties around UK but the graphs chosen seem to suggest much greater investment beforehand. Why not join the EU scheme to bulk buy ventilators though?
Boris Johnson with aid of Dominc Cummings is not your usual center-right government. It's not like Theresa May was differing rather it's someone who had a desire to shake up politics and, reportedly, lead to Dominc Cummings saying “herd immunity, protect the economy, and if that means some pensioners die, too bad.” That's a story from the The Times.
The UK officially downgraded the COVID-19 threat last Thursday - but very few people seem to know that.
That isn't surprising as the decision received very little publicity, and if it had it would have made the government restrictions imposed since then much harder to justify. We have something of a Twilight Zone situation in Britain now with coppers throughout the UK trying, albeit half-heartedly, to enforce social distancing rules, while their colleagues in the Met Police in the nation's capital city, whose job it is to disperse gatherings, singularly fail to do so, or even attempt to.
Here's scenes from the London underground this morning - https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/112586...erground-busy/
The .gov guidance issued last week is here https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-con...us-of-covid-19 and also pasted beneath.
Status of COVID-19
As of 19 March 2020, COVID-19 is no longer considered to be a high consequence infectious diseases (HCID) in the UK.
The 4 nations public health HCID group made an interim recommendation in January 2020 to classify COVID-19 as an HCID. This was based on consideration of the UK HCID criteria about the virus and the disease with information available during the early stages of the outbreak. Now that more is known about COVID-19, the public health bodies in the UK have reviewed the most up to date information about COVID-19 against the UK HCID criteria. They have determined that several features have now changed; in particular, more information is available about mortality rates (low overall), and there is now greater clinical awareness and a specific and sensitive laboratory test, the availability of which continues to increase.
The Advisory Committee on Dangerous Pathogens (ACDP) is also of the opinion that COVID-19 should no longer be classified as an HCID.
The need to have a national, coordinated response remains, but this is being met by the government’s COVID-19 response.
Cases of COVID-19 are no longer managed by HCID treatment centres only. All healthcare workers managing possible and confirmed cases should follow the updated national infection and prevention (IPC) guidance for COVID-19, which supersedes all previous IPC guidance for COVID-19. This guidance includes instructions about different personal protective equipment (PPE) ensembles that are appropriate for different clinical scenarios.
What exactly does downgraded mean in this sense though? I assume it's just based on the government's/WHO's definitions, it doesn't mean that it isn't dangerous.
I assume to be high consequence the mortality rate would have to be over a certain percent. Even though covid isn't safe to have the mortality rate is still relatively low unless you are over 70.In the UK, a high consequence infectious disease (HCID) is defined according to the following criteria:
acute infectious disease
typically has a high case-fatality rate
may not have effective prophylaxis or treatment
often difficult to recognise and detect rapidly
ability to spread in the community and within healthcare settings
requires an enhanced individual, population and system response to ensure it is managed effectively, efficiently and safely
Covid's danger seems to be more from how easily transmitted it is.
The time to address what you say is when we know how the NHS coped at the time when it was under the most pressure. I accept that there would have been a different emphasis over the past decade with a Labour Government in power, but would it have made that much of a difference? We don't know yet and I'm more concerned for now about what seems to be poor planning in the immediate run up to COVID 19 arriving in this country rather than looking at things from a left v right perspective.
Your Party Sludge are a fkn joke. No matter who was their leader, you would have lost the election, but not by so much. Sir Boris is doing a great job, and his Chancellor Sir Rishi, is absolutely fantastic. We have the best Chancellor ever IMHO, but Sir Boris falls short of our best ever PM, Lady Maggie Thatcher 😁
My grandfather was sent into battle in WW1. by the useless Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, chief of staff of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) He, was lucky to come home minus one leg.
His great granddaughter has
answered the call to return to the NHS as a nurse. She left a NHS management post in England because of the pressure of work. She went to the private sector.
I sincerely hope she fairs better.. A lack of equipment means she has no faith
in Field Marshal Johnson.
Yes, I don’t think the term ‘downgrading’ should be taken to mean it was considered any less critical. To suggest that I think would be misleading. I believe Ebola and SARS (HCIDs) have much higher mortality rates but were also far less contagious. But overall significantly more people will die from the Coronavirus than that the last Ebola and SARS outbreaks. That’s my interpretation anyway.
So it's more a gut feeling than actual evidence then - not having a go, just curious.
You can only test people so many times - test say yourself now, clear. Next day you get it. Unless those tests are continuously repeated they are meaningless.
As for the herd immunity, the situation has been changing from day to day as more information is known about the virus. If the CMO had given advice and that had been ignored, I'd agree with you but frankly there's no evidence that is the case.
With regards to things changing, Ferguson has gone from the doom scenario of 250k dead to less than 20k dead with most people who may well have died regardless. Lockdown of a few days hasn't caused that revision, it's acceptance of the fact most people have probably had it without symptoms, thus death rate lower than expected.
My wife has a compromised immune system. As she went over the symptoms a week or so ago, it struck her that each symptom matched a virus she had back in December.
This thread has been brought to you by the colour red !!! Gave me a good laugh though and relieved the tedium of self-isolation. Thanks to all who participated.
The test for people who have already had it to determine if they have an imunity and can go back to work, and the test of those who show severe signs of having it are completely different. The emphasis is on tresting those with severe symptoms. The other test is being tested now to see it if works and if it does that will be rolled out next.
It really isn’t that simple. My company is one of several large medical companies who have launched a COVID-19 test in record time ... months !!! And that is thanks to the FDA massively relaxing the usual protocols. We hope to be producing tests in the millions by the end of March. Staff in the US and elsewhere worldwide have been literally working around the clock and it is incredible achievement, especially given the laws surrounding drug/medical testing and production. It’s just not as simple as do lots more tests. Mass testing has to be scalable, affordable and available, and that takes time!
You will have heard Chris Witty talking about the antibody test which tests for the presence of antibodies. This will tell whether you’ve had COVID-19, not whether you have it. The test we are releasing uses PCR to replicate RNA and will take around 4 hours. The testing equipment can only do a certain number of tests per hour and you need enough laboratory staff to run and validate the tests. That is a challenge in itself. My partner is a biomedical scientist and is presently on 14 day isolation. So the labs have challenges. Get more blood testing machines you might say. Again it’s not that simple as they must be delivered, installed and validated (that is my job). Again this takes many weeks per machine.
When you have a validated machine you then require the consumables to run the tests in bulk. Another huge manufacturing task and challenge. So it’s just not as simple to say we’ve had an extra month and should be able to do so much more testing. It just doesn’t work like that for a new virus!
I do not have subscription and therefore cannot judge nature of whole article but wonder if rest follows on from what you can see for free: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics...s-eu-pandemic/
Note that it was The Times that was most critical of Cummings and UK government's role in "herd immunity" plan and now Telegraph is writing this.Matt Hancock's department wanted to retain membership of the Early Warning and Response System (EWRS) as part of the EU-UK future relationship deal – but Number 10 said no, The Daily Telegraph has learnt.
Senior health advisers warned that exiting the EWRS – which has helped coordinate the response to the virus and played a vital role during the bird flu outbreak – would put public health at risk.
However, the British negotiating team, which reports to Boris Johnson, did not want to blur the UK's request for a basic, Canada-style trade deal, it is claimed. Every add-on requested by the UK would risk giving the EU leverage to demand post-Brexit alignment....
If you believe China have been effective, I've a bridge to sell you.
Anybody believing China's figures given their suppression of info about the virus initially, persecution of whistleblowers and indeed telling WHO in Jan there had been no person to person infections is a tad naive.
China have almost certainly disappeared many.
Singapore have done well, South Korea managed to come back from what looked like disaster, czechia have managed very well, Germany too.
Then Italy and Spain have had and are having a nightmare.