I'm still a bit shocked we waited until we did. My office had shut down a week earlier and had prepared us for home working a week before that. If they could see it why couldn't the government?
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I think people are becoming complacent aswell. Be it boredom or stubbornness but I get the impression not everyone is on board yet.
We’re still on exactly the same trajectory as Italy 14/15 days behind, all be it Lombardy has taken the brunt of it but look at London.
It’s going to get stricter in the next week or so.
Your workplace (with it's supposed contacts in areas that happen to be hotspots for the virus) is hardly unique.
Practically everyone who could work from home was working from home by the Monday before schools closed.
It was very obvious that the schools would close Friday with most parents at home working. So, the UK avoided the Italy and Spain examples of kids being sent to stay with grand parents for a week or 2 before parents were kept at home.
Can you imagine if we'd closed down a week earlier? We'd still be seeing the same figures (because of incubation) and people would now be getting really fed up. We're already seeing it happen now, and we've only been in lockdown 10 days.
Not puppets dancing but they certainly haven't had all powers of decision making devolved to them, this was always a balancing act between the economic effect (shorter term and longer term) and lives lost given our level of preparedness. The cso or cmo doesn't make those decisions, they are employed by the people who do.
That is my way of explaining why we were out of step with the who and the majority of the world for so long. The only other explanation is that we aren't as good at this stuff as we think.
The right steps at the right time but still leaving us with a lack of testing equipment, a lack of ventilators, lack of PPE but a full Cheltenham Festival and Wales/Scotland 6 Nations only called off on 13th of March and not following UK government advice. These things all take time to obtain but we had warning with first UK case at end of January.Quote:
The Government script:
‘We’ve taken the right steps at the right time’
-Dominic Raab March 30
‘We’ve taken the right steps at the right time’
-Matt Hancock April 2
Paul Johnson: https://twitter.com/paul__johnson/st...50443411726336
Personally, I would say the best advice is to spend less time watching TV news which is sensational and not very good. Personally, I view this Covid outbreak as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic. In this case we have had 8000 deaths this last year in the at risk groups viz over 65% people with heart disease etc. I do not feel this current Covid will exceed this number. We are suffering from a media epidemic!
It only won't exceed this number because we've all been isolating for 3 weeks already. If we were going about life as normal the deaths would be over 10 times that. That's not sensational, that's a fact.
There's also the pesky detail that we have a flu vaccine and the fact that hospitals don't get overwhelmed by people with flu during flu season.
"I view this as akin to a bad winter influenza epidemic."
Yeah that's why countries have closed the borders and have 90% of the country working from home.
That's why we've had to put hospital beds in the EXcel and the millenium stadium.
That's why Dyson are making vetillators.
Do you really think if it was just a bd flu epidemic this would all be happening?
It's written by Professor John Oxford, who a Google search reveals as an expert on the 1918 flu. Looks like Wales Bales has got some very clever plan up his sleeve.
https://novuscomms.com/2020/03/31/a-...r-john-oxford/
I would agree with you to a certain extent that watching The News a bit to much isn't helpful for some, it's the only thing happening at the moment and i do find that some of the coverage isn't really news, just the media repeating themselves for the sake of it, It is important but saturated to the point where it seems that there must be a competition to see which reporter can do the most concerned expression. I get it, things aren't great at the moment.
It works the other way as well with individuals who think that they know something that everyone else doesn't. There's nothing wrong with people having opinions but there is something wrong when people who have an agenda with biased opinion are using the internet to spread bullshit that the stupid and already converted lap up in spades. I've spent more time on here recently than usual, but it seems that some people are living there life on the internet repeating the same things as they did yesterday, they lose credibility in my opinion, it's not healthy.
Meanwhile, teachers have started dying from CV. The first one I've heard of by us, reported today. Wouldn't suprise me if there are more. Schools are a great place to incubate disease and spread it about.
The contextQuote:
But a second piece of good news is that the Chinese are lifting their social distancing and the country is slowly getting back to normal. At the same time, an Australian Mathematical model paper is published which clearly predicts that compliance with “social distancing” must be 80 or 90% otherwise it will not work. My friend Peter Doherty in Australia has reminded everyone that the positive effects of this intervention similar to which we are trying to do here) will take 2 weeks to filter through to fewer deaths etc, so do not expect instant results! Incidentally Peter has ‘form’ because of his Nobel Prize! There must be 80-90% compliance.
More young people are showing serious clinical problems during infections particularly if diabetic and overweight. So, the problems are not confined to the grandparents who seem to be behaving themselves at least as regards social distancing!
Don’t the U.K. usually have around 17,000 deaths from flu per year? We’d have that in a month if people weren’t taking the current measures.
In 18/19 flu season it was less than 2000.
The biggest difference between this virus and the flu is the number of people that require hospitalisation. about 1-2% whereas for covid-19 it is something like 15%, which is what is causing the healthcare systems to become overrun and then the mortality rate spikes.