Year of the Rat fears over new Corona Virus

[Mossling]

A sudden rise in infections leads to the temporary closure of nightclubs in Seoul. Lebanon tightens the curfew it had earlier relaxed after cases rebound over the weekend. German leaders wonder if they are easing too fast, as the country’s parks fill up and its infection rate appears to accelerate.
Welcome to the next phase of the coronavirus pandemic. Curves are being flattened in many countries. The harsh lockdowns of the past few months, implemented to prevent healthcare systems from melting down, are gradually being rolled back. The economic and social toll of mass isolation is growing every day.

Scientists are not surprised by the bumps in cases in China, Iran and other places that have relaxed their lockdowns in past weeks. “It’s worrying, but it is to be expected,” said Ian Jones, a professor of virology at the University of Reading. “It’s an inevitable consequence of re-allowing social mixing.”

“The new phase will be living with Covid,” said Jones. “I don’t think the idea that you’re going to get complete clearance [of the virus] is realistic. It’s going to be there at a level, and the question is at what level. What community transfer rates are acceptable to society? And what mitigation strategies can you put in place to make these rates as low as possible?”

Among those strategies, he says, will need to be widespread and regular testing, the adoption of equipment such as masks as a standard accessory for leaving the home, and “as much social distancing as one can practically do”.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... -questions

[toucana]

How about llama antibodies ?
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2020/05/12/belgium-ghent-llama-antibody-coronavirus-robertson-pkg-intl-hnk-vpx.cnn/video/playlists/coronavirus-intl/

This story by CNN’s International diplomatic editor Nic Robertson recounts how a small research team based at Ghent in Belgium are pursuing a promising new lead involving antibodies found in the blood of llamas.

“Their binding entity is much smaller and much more stable” according to Bert Schepens of VIB-UGent Center for Medical Biotechnology.

Science director Nico Callewaert says that his team have scaled up from 2 to 20 staff in recent weeks, and that with animal toxicity studies pending, they may be looking at carrying out clinical tests by the end of the year

They hope that their llama antibodies when used in tandem with other antiviral research may be of particular benefit to elderly coronavirus patients.

http://www.vib.be/en/research/departments/Pages/VIB-UGent-Center-for-Medical-Biotechnology.aspx

VIB works in close partnership with five universities − UGent, KU Leuven, University of Antwerp, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Hasselt University and is funded by the Flemish government.

[Mossling]

First two graph's; deaths in England (population 55 million) after the peak of daily deaths.

Second two graphs are statistics for deaths and seasonal influenza in England and Wales going back over the years.
Check out 1999 and 2018.
Influenza type illnesses are major killers - and especially so for covid-19's main age group; the over 60s.

In a country of 55 million (England), by its peak, covid-19 had killed less than 1500 people under the age of 60 in its hospitals.

Did/Does that require SARS type measures?
What about seasonal influenza - the likes of in 1999 and 2018? - When it is killing the over 60s in high numbers, will we be on lockdown during that period also?

[toucana]

The simple answer is that deaths in UK from COVID-19 have stabilised recently precisely *because* of the dramatic lockdown measures enacted in the UK since 23rd March 2020. There is every reason to believe the death rate from COVID-19 would have been far higher in UK if such mitigation efforts had not been in place.

COVID-19 is significantly more infectious than seasonal flu and it it also more likely to result in hospitilisations, with around 69 hospitalisations per 100,000 people for seasonal flu as opposed to 162 hospitalisations per 100,000 for adults aged 65 or over according to CDC figures

https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html

The death rate from seasonal flu is generally estimated to be around 0.1% (USA estimates) whereas the case fatality rate for COVID-19 cases in US are said to be nearly 6% which is sixty times higher.

Researchers from Columbia University recently estimated that only 1 in 12 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. are documented, which they said would translate to an infection fatality rate of about 0.6%, according to The Washington Post. But even this lower estimate is still at least six times higher than that of the flu.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/antibody-tests-support-whats-been-obvious-covid-19-is-much-more-lethal-than-flu/2020/04/28/2fc215d8-87f7-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html

The other huge factor that needs to be considered is that there is currently no vaccine available for COVID-19, whereas there are effective vaccines available for seasonal influenza. No one can be immunised against COVID-19, and while flu affects around 8% of the population per year, somewhere between 50% to 60% of the population could become infected with COVID-19 according to a study published in THe Lancet on 30 March.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext

In the U.S., that would translate to 1 million deaths from COVID-19 if half the population becomes infected and there are no social distancing measures or therapeutics according to The Post article

Back on 21 March 2020 as the UK lockdown began, according to BBC reports at the time, the British government’s contingency planning for a major outbreak of Covid-19 in this country was based around a ‘medium to worst case scenario’ that might involve 80% of the population becoming infected, 2.3 million patients needing intensive hospital care, and around 500,000 fatalities attributable to the virus.

That was what the SIR modelling by the SAGE group predicted if the lockdown and social distancing measures had not been enacted.

If a second spike in COVID-19 infection rates occurs in the autumn (as many epidemiologists fear) then that will happen in tandem with seasonal flu infections. They are not alternatives, they will happen together, and our primary NHS medical care services will once again be under catastrophic stress and at the point of collapse, just as they were a couple of weeks ago.

[TheVat]

EIDD-2801 looking like it might be a contender. It can be administered in pill form, unlike remdesivir which has to be IV. And being a replication inhibitor, it may be more broad spectrum.

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/dru ... eb/2020/05

Although doctors and scientists are testing a vast arsenal of existing drugs and drug candidates in the fight against the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, EIDD-2801 stands out. It attacks the same viral enzyme, the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, as Gilead Sciences’ remdesivir, which the US Food and Drug Administration recently granted emergency use authorization, allowing it to be used by doctors in the pandemic. But unlike remdesivir, which has to be given intravenously, EIDD-2801 can be taken orally as a pill.

This means if EIDD-2801 is shown to be safe and effective, people could take it at home rather than in a hospital. That would allow EIDD-2801 to be taken earlier in the course of the disease, killing off the virus before it wreaks havoc on the body.

EIDD-2801’s other intriguing feature is that it appears to have a high barrier to resistance. Drugs can force viruses to quickly develop mutants that aren’t affected by the drug, which then makes the drug obsolete. But EIDD-2801 hasn’t prompted that sort of resistance in lab tests despite efforts to coerce such mutants to arise...

[Mossling]

Hi Toucana

The simple answer is that deaths in UK from COVID-19 have stabilised recently precisely *because* of the dramatic lockdown measures enacted in the UK since 23rd March 2020.

Yes, agreed, and so similar measures would work great for preventing the untimely deaths of seasonal flu victims too, don't you think?

However, I assume that seasonal flu will not be given the same level of seriousness as covid-19.

The covid-19 lockdowns are not therefore apparently so much about stopping deaths, but rather, as you go on to mention - about preventing the health services from becoming overwhelmed.

There seems to be a lack of clarity at times as to what the lockdowns are really about in this respect - are they about stopping deaths, or about staggering inevitable deaths... because those are two very different things from where I am standing.

COVID-19 is significantly more infectious than seasonal flu and it it also more likely to result in hospitilisations, with around 69 hospitalisations per 100,000 people for seasonal flu as opposed to 162 hospitalisations per 100,000 for adults aged 65 or over according to CDC figures

Yes, and I would add in "COVID-19 is significantly more infectious than seasonal flu and SO it also more likely to result in a higher number of hospitilisations..."

The death rate from seasonal flu is generally estimated to be around 0.1% (USA estimates) whereas the case fatality rate for COVID-19 cases in US are said to be nearly 6% which is sixty times higher.

We've covered this before on this thread. The 0.1% flu fatality figure includes assumed undetected cases, whilst the 6% covid-19 fatality figure does not include assumed undetected cases. There's little use comparing them in that respect. If we go with a moderate estimate, the comparison is more like 0.1% influenza to 2% covid-19. That's at present.

When you factor in stealth and contagiousness, then if seasonal influenza had the same stealth and contagiousness as covid-19, perhaps we would be seeing the same kind of fatality rate?

As you stated, the 2% fatality figure could still be a lot lower:

Researchers from Columbia University recently estimated that only 1 in 12 cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. are documented, which they said would translate to an infection fatality rate of about 0.6%, according to The Washington Post. But even this lower estimate is still at least six times higher than that of the flu.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/antibody-tests-support-whats-been-obvious-covid-19-is-much-more-lethal-than-flu/2020/04/28/2fc215d8-87f7-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html

If a second spike in COVID-19 infection rates occurs in the autumn (as many epidemiologists fear) then that will happen in tandem with seasonal flu infections. They are not alternatives, they will happen together, and our primary NHS medical care services will once again be under catastrophic stress and at the point of collapse, just as they were a couple of weeks ago.

Considering, as mentioned previously on this thread, that 70% of covid-19 deaths are due to previously existing health complications, after 2 years and 3 waves of virus do you think the situation will remain as severe as at first, or less?

Again, a virus that only really kills people over the age of 60 or already declining, and only a third of those victims over 60 seeming to have no existing complications before dying.... it seems that such a situation is not so much like SARS as it is like seasonal flu.

To be rationally fearful of the virus, then, if you are under 60 years old, you need to be as sick as, say, a diabetic. And over 60 years old, well you first have to catch the virus, and then if you are healthy, you have at maximum a 0.7% chance of dying once you've contracted it (if you take the moderate 2% fatality figure, and apply that to 33% of cases of 'seemingly healthy' over 60 year olds).

So basically, if you are:

* Under 60 years with non-diabetic-level of sickness = not really at risk from covid-19.
* Over 60 years old and no diabetic level health complications = 0.7% risk of death.

This is the apparent empirical situation that demands lockdown measures.

[Mossling]

SARS-CoV-2 and Coronavirus Disease 2019: What We Know So Far
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0817/9/3/231/htm

Until December of 2019, only six different coronaviruses were known to infect humans. Four of these (HCoV-NL63, HCoV-229E, HCoV-OC43 and HKU1) usually caused mild common cold-type symptoms in immunocompetent people and the other two have caused pandemics in the past two decades. In 2002–2003, the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS-CoV) caused a SARS epidemic that resulted in a 10% mortality. Similarly, the Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) caused a devastating pandemic in 2012 with a 37% mortality rate.
In late 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China were identified as with a novel betacoronavirus, first called the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) and often referred to as the Wuhan coronavirus. When the genomics of the 2019-nCov was sequenced, it shared 79.5% of the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV that caused the 2002–2003 pandemic [4] and the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses renamed the 2019-nCov as SARS-CoV-2 [5]. Patients began to present in November and December with various degrees of respiratory distress of unknown etiology and treated at the time as possible influenza infections.

Estimates of the severity of coronavirus disease 2019: a model-based analysis
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lani ... 73-3099(20)30243-7/fulltext

In the face of rapidly changing data, a range of case fatality ratio estimates for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) have been produced that differ substantially in magnitude. We aimed to provide robust estimates, accounting for censoring and ascertainment biases.

[...]

From an extensive analysis of data from different regions of the world, our best estimate at the current time for the case fatality ratio of COVID-19 in China is 1·38% (95% CrI 1·23–1·53). Although this value remains lower than estimates for other coronaviruses, including SARS24 and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS),25 it is substantially higher than estimates from the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.26
, 27 Our estimate of an infection fatality ratio of 0·66% in China was informed by PCR testing of international Wuhan residents returning on repatriation flights. This value was consistent with the infection fatality ratio observed in passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship up to March 5, 2020...

[...]

The reported proportion of infected individuals who were asymptomatic on the Diamond Princess did not vary considerably by age, supporting this approach, but future larger representative population prevalence surveys and seroprevalence surveys will inform such estimates further.
Much of the data informing global estimates of the case fatality ratio at present are from the early outbreak in Wuhan. Given that the health system in this city was quickly overwhelmed, our estimates suggest that there is substantial under-ascertainment of cases in the younger age groups (who we estimate to have milder disease) by comparison with elsewhere in mainland China. This under-ascertainment is the main factor driving the difference between our estimate of the crude case fatality ratio from China (3·67%) and our best estimate of the overall case fatality ratio (1·38%).

[toucana]

This has happened this morning in Weston-super-Mare a popular seaside resort in Southwest UK just 22 miles away from where I live.

An NHS hospital in a Somerset seaside hotspot has today been forced to stop taking new patients due to 'a high number' of coronavirus cases.

Weston General Hospital, Weston-super-Mare, dramatically announced this morning that it could not take any more admissions, including into A&E.

Health chiefs do not know why the hospital has had an influx of Covid-19 cases, with bosses warning all hospitals have 'frequent' changes in admissions.

But questions were today asked over whether the blame may lie on crowds who have flocked to the town to enjoy the sun since lockdown was slightly eased.

Thousands of people travelled to the South West and other coastal areas as soon as the government allowed nationwide travel again on May 13.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... cases.html

Crowds on Western-super-Mare promenade on 20th May

Sheer lunacy.

[Serpent]

There seems to be a lack of clarity at times as to what the lockdowns are really about in this respect - are they about stopping deaths, or about staggering inevitable deaths... because those are two very different things from where I am standing.

This may be a problem for a lot of people.

The position regarding the health-care system is not about staggering inevitable deaths, but slowing down the contagion, so that most of those, along with many other - deaths can be prevented. If all the hospitals and their equipment are overwhelmed by Covid-19 cases at the same time, several things will happen:
- many Covid-19 patients, who could be saved, will die, because they can't be treated
- many hospital staff will contract the disease and be unable to treat any patients,
- and more hospital staff and paramedics will die, so they'll never be able to save anyone
- many emergency patients will die, because there are no facilities or staff to treat their injuries, heart attacks, perinatal complications or kidney failure
- many patients being treated for other preconditions will catch Covid-19 and die

Quarantine accomplishes the following:
- the health care system has a little more time to prepare
- more scope yo follow contagion protocol
- at least some down-time for overworked medical staff
- the ability to increase production and replenish supplies
- and get equipment to hospitals that are usually under equipped
- a chance to keep track, report, record and follow the route the disease is taking
- time to develop tests, treatments and vaccines
- possibly time to develop natural immunity among those with mild or no symptoms,
- gradually reduce the number of people who pose a threat to the general public
- a slowing down of traffic and industry means fewer accidents
- at least the opportunity for vulnerable people to protect themselves

IOW - reducing the overall inevitability of mass deaths.

[TheVat]

What Serpent said. I will add...

The problem with treating CV19 like flu is that it ignores that influenza is visible in its contagious phase.
Flu sufferers have to be coughing and sneezing and etc to transmit. CV19 virus shedding can come from carriers who are not yet symptomatic. This is why death can tear through nursing homes, churches, meatpacking plants, etc. If you have flu, and you work in a senior facility, you call in sick when you are virus shedding. If you have CV19, you may feel fine and report for duty and kill 50 people who may have had some years left. No, they weren't robust individuals, but that has not, in our civilization, been taken to mean they are fair game and deserve no protection.

Let's put this in concrete, human terms: if my father, who had pulmonary fibrosis in his later years, we're alive now and still had his final decade before him, and I were choosing between happy capitalists and having Dad around, I'd choose Dad every time. We're a wealthy nation, we can easily afford to pay unemployment to laid-off workers and rental assistance, and we can bounce back. But from death, Dad can't bounce back, and we've lost a wise elder. Many CV19 victims were not at death's door already and they still had years to live and much to offer. Let's not make the coronavirus sound like some angel of mercy.

[Serpent]

We can't afford to be cavalier about this and pretend it's an ordinary flu virus. It's novel. Too many unknowns.

All those invincible young people out on the beaches and in the parks might think:
"Even if I catch it, it's no big deal." or, more callously:
"Old people can stay home; why should they put a damper on my summer?" or more cynically:
"They're a burden on society anyway - who needs 'em?"

What they don't seem to understand is that the virus mutates and if it gets ahead of the scientists, there is no predicting what it will do to whom in the next wave or the one after. People who think they'll get the sniffles and recover might end up paralyzed for life; their children may be brain-damaged. Seems to me, staying home a few months is preferable to those risks... But then, I'm no longer invincible.

[toucana]

For context - The local medical facility referred to in my previous post about Weston-super-Mare isn’t some cottage hospital with just half a dozen beds. It’s an NHS district general hospital with 261 beds, some 1800 staff, and a full A&E facility (ER to American readers) - which has just shut down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_General_Hospital

Weston-Super-Mare is a seaside resort town that has a population of around 76,000. But it’s also a popular sunset retirement destination for the over 60s, with around 20.1% of the population aged 65 or over, as opposed to a national average of 16.5%.

The prospect of having many thousands of COVID-19 mouth-breathers arriving for a May Bank Holiday vacation, and marching down the promenade shoulder-to-shoulder wearing nothing but T-shirts and speedos does not bode well.

[Mossling]

Yes, I think lockdowns for stemming the tide of new patients is highly necessary.

That will indeed stop unnecessary deaths.

My point was that even though we don't like all the covid-19-related or influenza-related death; we don't want our elderly relatives to die a decade earlier than we think they 'should,' governments have not been using lockdowns to stop those elderly relatives of ours (above 60 years old) from meeting an untimely death by way of influenza.

Yes, covid-19 is way more stealthy and contagious, and so perhaps that tips the balance somewhat regarding the influenza death age groups dying in almost the same proportions from covid-19 at a ' particularly strong influenza'-type mortality rate?

If covid-19 is indeed going to be as endemic as influenza into the future, however, and with not as much vaccine protection as has been hoped, then after these tidal waves of hospitalizations are over, does the whole world's way of life adapt to a more lockdown-oriented lifestyle as we have at present - just to save the remaining / newly vulnerable people from an influenza style death one decade earlier than we think they 'should'?

Yes, I'd lock down the whole world to allow my parents a decade more of grandparenting my kids, and I would also accept the role of world leader in order to control much more of my environment. But 'should' that be the case?

[Serpent]

We really need to get past this "save the old people" mentality. I suspect that conception has been driving a lot of the resistance to quarantine. (BTW, there is always resistance to quarantine, whatever it's for; some always make a claim to be exempt. Even heads of state.)
If it really were a matter of deciding whether to get the human population down to a more manageable, more economically viable number by culling the old, it would be a quite different discussion. It would still be a heated and multi-sided discussion, but different.
However, people in middle age and much younger, including children, die of this virus now. Once the old people are all gone, what do you suppose it will do to survive? It will adapt.
There is a pretty good chance it will eventually learn how not to kills its hosts. But it's stupid: doesn't make informed plans; has to go through the process of trail and error. Some of the errors will be very hard on the humans it's being tried on.

[TheVat]

I think some of the people who ask "why can't the old people be safely sequestered, so the rest can work and have fun? " don't grasp that the USA has a mix of poverty and lack of healthcare that means many elders must live with their extended families, often babysitting grandchildren for working class parents who cannot afford daycare. I've seen many cases, in this cohort, where an over-60 person gets CV19 and dies, due to circumstances that force them into contact with familial carriers. These were not people who were at the ends of their lives, or on the verge of being picked off by "bad flu. "

I would also point out that we're seeing many cases of relatively healthy elders who would unlikely have died of flu. CV19 has systemic effects, such as severe blood clotting, cardio problems, kidney failure, which are not seen with influenza. Recent cases of people in their 40s and 50s who suffer a major stroke or other disabling effect are also not appearing in the mortality stats, but I've seen reports showing them to be in the thousands. New Yorkers were recently shocked to learn that a 41 year old Broadway actor, Nick Cordero, had severe clotting and had to have his right leg amputated, while fighting a severe CV19 illness. Please, this is not "bad flu. " Flu patients in early middle age don't have limbs amputated. Cordero had no comorbidities, he was not diabetic, he was a slim healthy vigorous man. This. Is. Not. Flu.

[TheVat]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... e-covid-19

Interesting debate over whether having two copies of the e4 variant of ApoE gene could be an independent risk factor of getting severe Covid-19.

[Mossling]

I would also point out that we're seeing many cases of relatively healthy elders who would unlikely have died of flu.

How can you know that?

CV19 has systemic effects, such as severe blood clotting, cardio problems, kidney failure, which are not seen with influenza. Recent cases of people in their 40s and 50s who suffer a major stroke or other disabling effect are also not appearing in the mortality stats, but I've seen reports showing them to be in the thousands. New Yorkers were recently shocked to learn that a 41 year old Broadway actor, Nick Cordero, had severe clotting and had to have his right leg amputated, while fighting a severe CV19 illness. Please, this is not "bad flu. " Flu patients in early middle age don't have limbs amputated. Cordero had no comorbidities, he was not diabetic, he was a slim healthy vigorous man. This. Is. Not. Flu.

Yes, every different pathogen has its unique traits, doesn't it.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/symptoms/symptoms.htm

Most people who get flu will recover in a few days to less than two weeks, but some people will develop complications (such as pneumonia) as a result of flu, some of which can be life-threatening and result in death.

Sinus and ear infections are examples of moderate complications from flu, while pneumonia is a serious flu complication that can result from either influenza virus infection alone or from co-infection of flu virus and bacteria. Other possible serious complications triggered by flu can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscle (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure (for example, respiratory and kidney failure). Flu virus infection of the respiratory tract can trigger an extreme inflammatory response in the body and can lead to sepsis, the body’s life-threatening response to infection. Flu also can make chronic medical problems worse. For example, people with asthma may experience asthma attacks while they have flu, and people with chronic heart disease may experience a worsening of this condition triggered by flu.

People at High Risk from Flu

Anyone can get sick with flu (even healthy people), and serious problems related to flu can happen at any age, but some people are at high risk of developing serious flu-related complications if they get sick. This includes people 65 years and older, people of any age with certain chronic medical conditions (such as asthma, diabetes, or heart disease), pregnant women and children younger than 5 years, but especially those younger than 2 years old.

This evidence seems to counter your idea that "CV19 has systemic effects, such as severe blood clotting, cardio problems, kidney failure, which are not seen with influenza."

I have no bad intentions here, by the way, just a, messenger. It is a difficult time for everyone. I do think it's a good idea to stick to the science, though.


Nationalistic polarized stances between East and West are at extremes not seen for perhaps 40 years, and where there's panic and alienation to be indulged in, there are huge money making and privacy by-passing opportunities to be exploited. Please do not lose sight of that dimension to the 'narratives' we are encountering.

Socrates was killed for being scientific; logical. There'd been a failed military conquest to Sicily and then rule by the Spartans. Athens wasn't interested in Truth. They just wanted science to go somewhere else as they indulged in their continuing political games. As Hegel said; “We learn from history that we do not learn from history.”

I'm trying to be wiser.

[BadgerJelly]

This has happened this morning in Weston-super-Mare a popular seaside resort in Southwest UK just 22 miles away from where I live.

An NHS hospital in a Somerset seaside hotspot has today been forced to stop taking new patients due to 'a high number' of coronavirus cases.

Weston General Hospital, Weston-super-Mare, dramatically announced this morning that it could not take any more admissions, including into A&E.

Health chiefs do not know why the hospital has had an influx of Covid-19 cases, with bosses warning all hospitals have 'frequent' changes in admissions.

But questions were today asked over whether the blame may lie on crowds who have flocked to the town to enjoy the sun since lockdown was slightly eased.

Thousands of people travelled to the South West and other coastal areas as soon as the government allowed nationwide travel again on May 13.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... cases.html

Crowds on Western-super-Mare promenade on 20th May

Sheer lunacy.

These kind of reports are used to promote a certain narrative. It doesn’t take much quick searches to find reports of hospitals being both ‘full’ and ‘empty’ within the same period of time - this was happening LONG before covid.

Example: https://www.theguardian.com/society/201 ... -hospitals

This is not the fault of the current government either. The reduction of beds in NHS hospitals has been in steady decline for a relatively long time (with different governments in power).

I don’t blame people for going outside. I think it’s ridiculous to expect everyone to just stop everything and lock themselves indoors - a vaccine won’t happen for a long time yet. The initial statement was to ‘ease the burden’ on the NHS not to prevent deaths.

Unless the government is willing to actively quarantine people entering the country fro 14 days then it makes little to no sense to stop people going outside (because it will eventually spread anyway).

Note: I think people should stay at home and that strict quarantine measures be put in place. If measures are not put into place for the next 6-12 months then asking people to stay home is pretty stupid. Asking people to take precautions makes more sense.

[BadgerJelly]

Moss -

I am assuming you take it to be much worse than the flu?

Give that if it is ten times worse than the annual flu in terms of fatalities that would put the death toll at around 6 million by next January. We’re currently at around a third of a million (which is not too bad considering).

Again, I will repeat. MANY more than this die per year of heart disease yet no one is protesting and screaming about the burden processed foods put on the healthcare system or actively telling/asking/demanding that everyone take exercise everyday (perhaps even attaching monitors to measure people’s weekly activity and then fine them if they haven’t exercised enough - under the principle of ‘save the NHS!’).

Seriously the later would be far more effective in relieving pressure on the NHS in the UK.

[Serpent]

Give that if it is ten times worse than the annual flu in terms of fatalities that would put the death toll at around 6 million by next January. We’re currently at around a third of a million (which is not too bad considering).

Don't you ask why? A: Serious, enforced quarantine orders in most countries.

Again, I will repeat. MANY more than this die per year of heart disease yet no one is protesting and screaming about the burden processed foods put on the healthcare system

Except on public tv, which nobody watches unless it's running a lavish BBC production.
Of course, there are other factors:
- Processed food make lots and lots of $$$, some of which end up in campaign funds and lobbies.
- The patient-load is staggered over years and seasons, so that a huge influx of cardiac patients don't come in at the same time
- They don't need isolation, intubation/ventilation or special procedures
- and anyway, most of them are DOA.

Seriously the later would be far more effective in relieving pressure on the NHS in the UK.

Sure, but it might disturb the established balance of 'human capital'.

Seriously: What's your point?

[BadgerJelly]

In your case it would be not to bother clicking ‘display post’ ever again.

[Serpent]

That should work.

[Mossling]

Lol, touche.

I think badger was accepting the need for not overwhelming the hospitals.

But he seems to be arguing that if the same level of conscientious life-extending / health preserving thinking were applied to other aspects of society; smoking, drinking, junk food, air pollution, etc., then we would be seeing very different long-term plans than we have now.

England is past it's peak deaths of CV19, and who knows if continuing lockdowns will keep any future waves from exceeding that peak.

If the country were to open up completely tomorrow, and the previous peak would not be exceeded, then the ongoing lockdown rationalisation & mentality should be extended to other life-threatening aspects of society that 'prematurely kill' over-60s....

That does seem like a valid argument. Perhaps CV19 is bringing in a new conscientious era for human societies?



There's a whole bunch of stuff that could be tackled more conscientiously on this graph...

Ban smoking and air pollution? I'd certainly more happily endure that than lockdowns...

[toucana]

An update from a local newspaper has thrown more light on quite why the Weston General Hospital in Somerset shut its doors to all new patients last Friday.

https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/weston-general-closed-somerset-hospital-4165778

It wasn’t simply because the hospital was already saturated with COVID-19 patients either. The additional complexity according to a leaked NHS memo was that up to 40% of the 1,800 staff were testing out as COVID-19 positive, and were doing so in many cases asymptomatically.

The number of patients who had tested positive for coronavirus had also risen from 30 to 64 last week as well. In a 261 bed hospital that amounts to almost 25% of all the in-patients tetsting COVID-19 positive. Small wonder they locked the doors.

This was not a case of one particular underfunded and under-resourced ITU turning away patients as they may have done before at times of seasonal load stress. This was an entire hospital shutting down because they were facing an unmanageable operational scenario in the middle of a pandemic.

[Mossling]

Yes I assumed very early on in the epidemic that all hospital staff would become infected - given how contagious and stealthy this virus is. If one wears anything less than a spacesuit and spends enough time around infected people, basically you're gonna get it - asymptomatically or not.

Several times I've wondered whether I've contracted the virus myself - dry cough or the start of a fever; runny nose and sneezing. It subsided after a few hours though. But maybe I've 'had' the virus, albeit in mild form, and come out the other side. No idea; haven't been tested yet.

[Serpent]

But he seems to be arguing that if the same level of conscientious life-extending / health preserving thinking were applied to other aspects of society; smoking, drinking, junk food, air pollution, etc., then we would be seeing very different long-term plans than we have now.

If we were a sane species, we would stop doing crazy things.
And, in fact, people have protested against air pollution, wars, displacement of populations, homelessness, oppression of minorities, gun ownership and all those other causes of preventable human death on a large scale. And those protests are generally ignored in favour of business as usual.
See, "opening up the economy" means just exactly the opposite of protecting people from those other life-threatening activities. They want to bring back the air-polluting industries, the junk food revenues, more fossil fuel consumption, tourism and travel, smokestacks, contrails and car-clogged commuter routes.
That's The Economy as we know it.
Taking the toxins out of capitalism is like taking the salt out of seawater.

Perhaps CV19 is bringing in a new conscientious era for human societies?

There's some talk. We'll see how it transforms into action when it has to compete directly with the yearning to have it all back the way it was.

Ban smoking and air pollution? I'd certainly more happily endure that than lockdowns...

I don't know about the UK; in Canada and much of the US, smoking has already been banned in most public places and taxed into the stratosphere. Bans and limits and fines on commercial air/water pollution are an ongoing struggle in governments. These are hardly new notions! I understand that in China alone, more lives were saved by shutting down industry than lost to the virus.
What they're trying to accomplish with the lock-downs is the preservation of society so that it can, at some point, resume "normal" operations. If a pandemic is allowed to sweep the world unchecked, it would cause irredeemable collapse.

[TheVat]

I am besieged with work, but writing to say I will respond to latest posts and replies to my earlier posts. Meantime, here's an interesting and lively debate...

https://spectator.us/lockdown-wrong-mat ... ng-debate/

Both make good points, which I will try to address a few of here, by tomorrow at the latest. Or perhaps some of you will be moved to weigh in.

[Serpent]

Something I find difficult to address in every one of these conversations is the way they're so often framed as a trade-off between two scenarios/ alternatives as if it were the actual choice for somebody in charge to make.
Would you rather have 20 people die of this or 23 people die of that?
But nobody makes that decision: what they have to decide is far less clear in every aspect. While it's quite true that people who don't die of this disease will die of something else, the fact may be worth considering that they won't do it all in the same month and take a couple of nurses with them. And, of course, letting Covid-19 do as it likes wouldn't prevent any of the heart attacks and cancers that will also kill people. (Lockdown, however, might prevent a lot of industrial and traffic deaths - or at least defer those deaths to when we're all back to BAU)
Downloading infected people to poorly-run nursing homes is not an inevitable side-effect of quarantine measures: it's a problem built into the system. Redundant coal-miners in Tennessee do not become abusive or suicidal just because they can't get another tattoo - and what's been driving them to aggression and despair won't be cured by lifting the quarantine: that, too is an endemic problem --- A whole lot of pre-existing conditions that went unacknowledged for a long time are under a glaring light now, but they can't all be attributed to this one situation; nor would they have remained forever invisible if only no government did anything about the pandemic.
Of course it might have been handled in a less Draconian way - if the health-care authorities had implemented all recommended contagion protocols as laid out after the last covid outbreak https://www.cdc.gov/sars/guidance/i-infection/healthcare.html and if the health care system were robust, responsive, well supplied and equitably distributed in the first place.
Of course the outcome would have been better, with less disruption, if the people were disciplined and co-operative; if their leaders were organized, attentive and prepared for situations of which they had been repeatedly warned. https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/23/singapore-teach-united-states-about-covid-19-response/
But these comparisons break down as soon as you look at any details.
That's just off-the-top, without getting into some of underpinning assumptions being made in the debate (and elsewhere!) which might not really as fundamental or as true or as desirable as the participants seem to take for granted.

I'm still working my way though the particulars, but will wait for other opinions.

[TheVat]

Just no time to craft individual replies to Badge, Serpent, and Mossling, who all make strong points about the delicate art of interpretation of data. I am not saying, BTW, that flu doesn't also have complications for vulnerable cohorts. It's certainly worth asking if we can establish more solidly the difference in lethality between SARS COV-2 and influenza. I want to circle back to that, but not today.

In the Spectator article I posted earlier, I liked the moments of wit and humor from both Matt and Toby, and I think both had reasonable points regarding the sloppiness of statistics at this stage of the pandemic. I did find Tony's theory of falsified death certificates (likely this is a serious felony, and therefore a serious allegation) to garner a government check for the hospital, both specious (evidence?) and quite the insult to the medical professionals who work themselves to exhaustion keeping people alive. I've seen evidence, from various medical experts, that the death certificate problem goes in the opposite direction and have posted links somewhere on the website, iirc. Many deaths were of untested persons and logged as pneumonia, heart failure, kidney failure, and so on. This is why, and this cannot be stressed too strongly, that a different method of statistical capture is needed, like excess deaths. The CDC quite recently has made some statements on the importance of the ED metric over just using CoD on certificates. Another topic to circle back to.

Finally, Toby rests a lot of his theory (one rejected by epidemiologists) on the notion that lockdowns have no measurable effect, as if epidemiologists are sorely in need of a parallel universe with no lockdowns or else they have no method of statistical analysis or modeling. This is not really how epidemiology works, and Toby should devote more study to how it actually does.

My own reading is that lockdowns aren't necessary in locations where everyone agrees on honoring social distancing and mutual masking and universal testing and contact tracing is implemented. And where senior living facilities are truly quarantined and not subject to revolving door staffing. (again, more to say on this later)

And there are some countries with low mortality numbers due to there being very few people over the age of 70 in the first place. And few people with serious genetic diseases who haven't already been weeded out by the simple lack of a modern healthcare system. And few people who are so well fed that obesity and metabolic syndromes are even on the radar. The European lockdowns would make little sense there.

We can't make useful comparatives between, say, Uganda and Lombardy. Their whole epidemiologic pictures are quite different.

[Serpent]

I find the comparison of countries almost entirely invalid. Can you really find two nations with the same demographic and ethnic spread, the same general level of health, the same access to medical assistance, the same range of living conditions and education levels, the same percentage of homeless, unemployed and incarcerated, the same degree of epidemic preparedness, the same trust in authority cultural behaviour pattern?

As for the statistics, they are equally meaningless. By this time next year, there may be sufficient accumulated of data, reasonable (if estimated) adjustment for poor/late reporting, obfuscation, suppression, inflation, miscommunication, fraud and error, and some coherent method of assembling it all on a single standard. But it could take much longer.