SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)

Zlatan 7 said:
And how are key workers meant to work then?
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I don’t know the answer. All over the world, schools have been closed completely without any loopholes. I just wonder why the UK government thinks their country is different. I am married to a key worker and I am working from home so it is working for us. I know that’s not possible for everyone so maybe any so called key workers with kids just need to stay at home.
 
ZupZup said:
A friend of mine who works at Dyson has just tweeted to say that they are halting all normal production to make ventilators for the NHS.

Apparently they have made several prototypes already which have all passed clinical inspection.
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Fantastic news. I stay away from Dyson products but will be buying them if they come through with this.
 
11101 said:
I have not been keeping track of that as there are far too many variables like demographics, public behaviour, hospital availability, medical competency etc.
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Eh? Surely keeping tabs on testing is just as bad if not worse given it depends entirely on political and financial reasoning. Not to mention many people have got/had covid19 and haven't bothered to be tested or asked to be tested and rejected.

Seems like a redundant stat to me ultimately.
 
RedSky said:
Eh? Surely keeping tabs on testing is just as bad if not worse given it depends entirely on political and financial reasoning. Not to mention many people have got/had covid19 and haven't bothered to be tested or asked to be tested and rejected.

Seems like a redundant stat to me ultimately.
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In Belgium you're only tested these days if you have a risk profile, show severe symptons or are a healthcare worker, so the total numbers of infected persons doesn't say much to me and is probably 5 or 10 times higher than it officially is.

It's the deaths and people on ICUs which interest me.
 
RedSky said:
Eh? Surely keeping tabs on testing is just as bad if not worse given it depends entirely on political and financial reasoning. Not to mention many people have got/had covid19 and haven't bothered to be tested or asked to be tested and rejected.

Seems like a redundant stat to me ultimately.
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If one country only tests 1 in 10 possible patients, and another country tests 5 in 10 possible patients, the ultimate numbers are worthless but the trend they follow will be accurate. Unless there is some step change in how the world is able to test for this it's unlikely to vary much.

Deaths would be much harder to model because a country's ability to isolate patients and treat them will change over time, probably at a different rate to whoever you compare them against, and when those deaths actually occur it will be influenced by things like age and health condition which are all different from country to country.
 
11101 said:
They are already miles off.

The UK broke 200 cases 17 days ago and will probably announce 6xxx cases today. After 17 days Italy had 12,500, Spain had 21,500.

Things need to take a serious turn South for the UK to catch either of them.
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Honestly, the value of tracking the number of cases in isolation at this stage is essentially meaningless to track countries. The number of cases simply reveals far more about the testing levels and protocols of countries than anything else. The limiting factor for the number of positive tests is not the number of people who have COVID-19, but it is the capacity of the countries to test people.
 
My elderly neighbour asked me to cut their back garden. I usually do it about every two weeks throughout spring and summer but have been avoiding them since Corona since this would probably kill them off.

They have no-one else really. What's the right thing to do here?
 
Shane88 said:
My elderly neighbour asked me to cut their back garden. I usually do it about every two weeks throughout spring and summer but have been avoiding them since Corona since this would probably kill them off.

They have no-one else really. What's the right thing to do here?
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I don't see the harm in you just cutting the grass outside and never entering their home or otherwise having contact.
 
Shane88 said:
My elderly neighbour asked me to cut their back garden. I usually do it about every two weeks throughout spring and summer but have been avoiding them since Corona since this would probably kill them off.

They have no-one else really. What's the right thing to do here?
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Can you hop over the fence?
 
Shane88 said:
My elderly neighbour asked me to cut their back garden. I usually do it about every two weeks throughout spring and summer but have been avoiding them since Corona since this would probably kill them off.

They have no-one else really. What's the right thing to do here?
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Yeah just tell him to stay indoors while you cut the grass. If you have to move through his home to get to the garden, do it quickly without touching anything.
 
I'd have to go through the house. I'll do it but I'm gonna tell him to have the front and back doors open beforehand.

Gonna treat this like a game of "the floor is lava" except everything is lava.
 
BeforeKeanetherewasRobson said:
Really?

Wife works at local school, head is speaking to every parent who turns up and if not happy with reply, sending them home. End of. Also asking them if they've told THEIR kids about behaving and doing exactly what they're told

There are less teachers/TAs but still need to maintain ratio and the fewer the school takes, the easier it is to social distance them. Hence head has said "my way or go home". As it should be
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I work for a private independent so things are slightly different. But our headteacher is trying to climb the career ladder is doing anything to carry favour with the board.

He even offered to take other schools vulnerable kids and open over Easter until all the staff team threatened to go on self isolation if he enforced it.

He's seeing this as an opportunity to get a few favours in his pocket and is showing no regard to his staffs wellbeing
 
MaxiPaxi said:
Yeah but you use the same entrance and exit presumably? You'll flick the light on and off, touch the door handles. Incidentally, I was paying attention to what I touch in the house and I've fecking gave up after a while -- it started giving an anxiety because I was literally touching fecking everything without realising really.
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Yeah the door handles is what I'm really worried about. Lights are all controlled by motion sensors in the communal areas
 
If school closures were always happening but timing was the factor, why weren't preparations made prior to the announcement? What the heck was the education minister doing for the last 2 month? Everything seems to be made up as they go along right now
 
Smores said:
If school closures were always happening but timing was the factor, why weren't preparations made prior to the announcement? What the heck was the education minister doing for the last 2 month? Everything seems to be made up as they go along right now
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Seems?
 
Arruda said:
None of that is true.

Let me explain you how things work in Medicine.

- Doctors treat patients, even when they don't know what they have. One of these conditions would be called "pneumonia of unknown etiology" or something to that effect. It happens pretty often, here and there.

- By mid-December doctors in Wuhan got concerned about a cluster of patients with this sort of pneumonia; on the 18th there were 8 patients identified. One patient isn't enough, neither are two... You, as a frontline doctor, need a reasonable amount of "strange" clinical cases to even realize something is wrong, so that the specialists who study this kind of outbreak can be called upon to act.

- Genetics, mode of transmission, epidemiology, take some time to study. There may have been many occasions where perhaps wrong decisions were made and time was lost but this is not only expected, it's unavoidable. It takes time to be sure what you're dealing with.

- China started imposing measures in Wuhan very fast, and by 23rd January the city was in full lockdown. This was insanely swift, given that the knowledge of the disease was still being compiled. The results are there for everyone to see. They contained it, after extending measures to other cities. They took maybe two weeks to decide this. When you compare the magnitude of the decision (Economics), and how long western countries are taking to make the same decisions, there is no way it's hypocritical to criticize western leaders. They were far slower, with plenty more information. Do you really think if the outbreak had been in one of these countries it would have been better contained than China? No way.

- After all this is done, "backtracing" allowed them to conclude that the first confirmed patient was in the 1st of December. This is hindsight. Not knowledge at the time. We may even conclude in the future that first patients were in October in some random village in the mountains. Without large clusters it would be natural they would have gone undetected on a national scale, let alone studied. This is why you "heard" of a virus in November. You heard it now, not then.

- No doctors were arrested, or at least there is no reasonable evidence pointing towards this. What we do know is that a doctor, named Li Wenliang, was among the first persons to understand the world-changing nature of the outbreak being studied and try to speak publicly about it. I don't even know if he realized this because he had access to higher-level preliminary information or just out of his own reasoning (just like many "early warner" doctors did a bit everywhere - including, modesty aside, me in my own country, at a much lower and quieter level).

- Li Wenliang wasn't arrested. He was called by local government officials and told to shut up. Then he returned to his normal life and work, util he got ill and died - in absolute freedom (well, as absolute as freedom can be in a country like China)

- Silencing someone may look more daunting because it came from an autocratic country, but from a Public Health perspective it may very well be reasonable. I wish my government did the same around here with all the naysayers that have been causing damage. In hindsight, in China they were wrong, but the principle is the same.

- There will be a gazillion of unexplained small things in here, after all it's China, we are very distant from them, even at a cultural and communication level. It's stupid to conclude from these failures that they could have contained this. It's expecting more from them than you expect from your own leaders. All that matters from politics here is how they relate to Public Health, and on this, the Central Chinese Government has been spot on (so far) and fast. Mostof those "silencing" issues came from local government, run-of-the-mill local crap leaders, which exist everywhere

- Lots more to be said, but it's tiring. I've been thinking of writing a well thought and referenced artocle about this, but have had trouble focusing.

[Opinion, not facts]
- Don't fall for Propaganda. Fake news of "8 arrested doctors" and country-wide cover-up have been popping everywhere for weeks, bit increasing severely now. For anyone who has been studying this for weeks it's pretty obvious what the goal is - deflect blame from western leaders, who were, with no exceptions, far more inept than the Chinese at protecting their people.
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Thanks for taking the time to post this. Its human nature unfortunately to need someone else to blame.

Personally my opinion of China and the chinese government has quite improved since this began, I think they had mapped and published the full genome sequence of this virus internationally by the 11th January? I don't know exactly what is involved in that process but the speed still seems mind-bogglingly quick from only a few cases of pnemonia in late December.
 
Shane88 said:
I'd have to go through the house. I'll do it but I'm gonna tell him to have the front and back doors open beforehand.

Gonna treat this like a game of "the floor is lava" except everything is lava.
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The sad part is that he probably values your visit for the company and somebody to talk to more than getting the grass cut. Try to check up on him over the phone/over the fence sometime soon if you can.
 
Camilo said:
To be fair, why is "made up" a criticism? Of course it's all made up, nobody really knows what's going on. We can all decide who guessed the best in a few months time.
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True, my criticism would be that many governments have been reactive rather than proactive in stopping spread.
 
horsechoker said:



I want to see Sadiq Khan threatening to send in the police with flamethrowers
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I get the london situation but what is the danger of two people playing table tennis outside ? The virus isn't floating in the air 24 hours of the day, people should be able to leave their houses at certain times. These clips just like look the local Italian mayors have a little bit of a mussolini moment. Also screaming at people to stay indoors but to then to run up to members of the public(Social distancing ?)isn't a good look.

Or am I missing something ?
 
Sweet Square said:
I get the london situation but what is the danger of two people playing table tennis outside ? The virus isn't floating in the air 24 hours of the day, people should be able to leave their houses at certain times. These clips just like look the local Italian mayors have a little bit of a mussolini moment. Also screaming at people to stay indoors but to then to run up to members of the public(Social distancing ?)isn't a good look.

Or am I missing something ?
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Considering the grave situation in Italy at the moment, it's paramount that people follow the restrictions otherwise the virus will continue to spread. So 2 guys playing table tennis might not be such a problem, it gives the impression that it's ok to be outside socialising. I imagine these Mayors are under a lot of pressure to keep the situation in their towns under control.
 
Suedesi said:
These fecking idiots
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Oh really?
You know that they can’t even fecking import life saving drugs and necessary medical equipment. There are sanctions.... because of.... don’t even go down this road

There domestically developed mobile app for corona virus for their citizens have been banned by google.... imagine!
 
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