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

cyberman said:
Its not though. Its not a Brexit negotiation. It all comes down to how to halt the spread of the virus. Restarting the econony is just the result of that.
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How isn't it? During this lockdown businesses are at risk of disappearing, jobs lost, the longer it goes on the more jobs and business disappear.

After the lockdown is over, those jobs won't suddenly return over night?

The risk of people breaking down mentally due to the financial impact is huge, suicides will and probably already have happened due to what is going on.

11101 said:
It's not really. Not yet anyway. Deaths from Covid far outweigh anything else at the moment.
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At the moment being the key part of that.

I agree, a longer lockdown is needed, but I see it from the otherside too. A guy with a business which isn't making his usual 10k per month, now on 2800, and getting into more debt. He isn't being helped, things are going from bad to worse for him. I can understand why he would want lockdown to end.

I think lockdown could end, if we could trust people to be sensible.

If lockdown ended, I'd just go about business as I have for the past couple months, I'm social distancing at work, not meeting up with people anyway. I'd basically still be on a lockdown.

Idiots gonna idiot no matter if we say there's a lockdown or there isn't.

I know it's not ideal as it will make the NHS task more difficult again, but that's just how it is.

The only other option is a more strict lockdown which we cannot police anyway.

Just my opinions guys, don't go off the rails cos I CBA to argue.
 
Sparky Rhiwabon said:
If Garden Centres are being allowed to open (random) then I don’t see why things like Golf Courses shouldn’t also open (for all). They are more outdoors than Garden Centres and there is no need to get within 2 metres of fellow golfers. I don’t play golf so I am not biased either way.
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I don't understand the whole garden centre thing tbh, they're horrible stuffy places which are humid and be an ideal environment for a virus to thrive surely?
 
TheGame said:
Have you seen the idiots at the weekend, it may be a simple slogan but more idiots will interpret it to do whatever they want and put more people in danger.
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Not sure they need a slogan to do that. They have been doing it all along in one form or another.
 
worldgonemad said:
Just seen this posted from the other day . As others have commented on Brazil seem to be heading into very dark times . Absolutely harrowing if the clip is genuine.

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Their daily numbers already look horrible, but it appears they are in for far far worse. Do they even have a lockdown or does their moron in charge still think this is a hoax?
 
Penna said:
Yes, it's an improvement. Lowest daily number of new cases since 6 March, lowest daily number of deaths since 9 March. We've had our slight easing of restrictions now for 7 days. The end of next week will be more illuminating.
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Hope it goes well. They might expect some increase. It is how big that increase is and for how long.
 
Penna said:
Yes, it's an improvement. Lowest daily number of new cases since 6 March, lowest daily number of deaths since 9 March. We've had our slight easing of restrictions now for 7 days. The end of next week will be more illuminating.
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UK would be best to stay as it is for a couple more weeks to see how the countries easing out of lockdown fare.

Easing ours now seems a stupid idea, seeing as though 2 more weeks could give us a lot clearer view of what to expect. Seems we are just following other countries, but early. By the time results of other countries are in (2-3week) it'll be too late for us if we have already lifted the lockdown.
 
fergies coat said:
You do realise that a serious economic crash will cause more death than this virus ever will? So what do we do? Stay indoors in the fear it might kill us?
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Of course the economy and jobs are important, the Government cannot keep paying the wages it is but just going out there and relaxing everything at once is not an option. There needs to be a balanced approach which is of course easier said than done.
 
DomesticTadpole said:
Hope it goes well. They might expect some increase. It is how big that increase is and for how long.
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Cheers - quite a few regions seem to have it well under control now (two deaths today in our region, one yesterday). Down in the south it's a better picture, too. However, taking into account the time it takes for people to show symptoms I think it's too early to tell yet.

From 4 May people were allowed to return to their home region, as many had been unable to do that for almost two months. That may make a difference.

edit - I agree with you, @One Night Only. I can't understand the timetable in the UK, they were virtually 3 weeks behind Italy and Spain. I thought nothing would be relaxed until the end of this month. I'm assuming that Boris is seeing the fact that people are chipping away at the edges of what's allowed, and is trying to take control in some way.
 


dwd said:
So will we be allowed to go visit family or not? I'm so confused. I'd like to go take my 9 month old daughter to see my parents for the first time in 3 months, they've missed almost a third of her life, time we won't get back. I don't understand why I can't do that, at a safe distance of course, but it's perfectly fine for me to walk around within 2 metres of people or go to the supermarket rammed with people I've never met in my life.
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You could walk near your parents house and have them meet you on the street in a spacious spot, we've had plenty of nice days to do that. Make it look like a happenchance meet. I see oodles of people stopping and chatting at distance on verges etc. Also see plenty of people walking and stopping at the end of someones driveway or front terrace. Just park up near your parents house and walk to the front of your parents and see each other outside.
 
Posted at 17:4117:41 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52601754
Eight fined in UK after birthday party
Eight people have been fined for breaking lockdown regulations after a fight broke out at a birthday party attended by 40 adults and children.
Police in Bolton, near Manchester, broke up the brawl on Saturday evening, but some of those involved refused to leave and began to deliberately cough and spit.
Seven people were detained on suspicion of being drunk and disorderly and breaching lockdown measures.
Greater Manchester Police said they were later handed fixed penalties. Another person was not arrested but fined at the scene.
 
One Night Only said:
How isn't it? During this lockdown businesses are at risk of disappearing, jobs lost, the longer it goes on the more jobs and business disappear.

After the lockdown is over, those jobs won't suddenly return over night?

The risk of people breaking down mentally due to the financial impact is huge, suicides will and probably already have happened due to what is going on.



At the moment being the key part of that.

I agree, a longer lockdown is needed, but I see it from the otherside too. A guy with a business which isn't making his usual 10k per month, now on 2800, and getting into more debt. He isn't being helped, things are going from bad to worse for him. I can understand why he would want lockdown to end.

I think lockdown could end, if we could trust people to be sensible.

If lockdown ended, I'd just go about business as I have for the past couple months, I'm social distancing at work, not meeting up with people anyway. I'd basically still be on a lockdown.

Idiots gonna idiot no matter if we say there's a lockdown or there isn't.

I know it's not ideal as it will make the NHS task more difficult again, but that's just how it is.

The only other option is a more strict lockdown which we cannot police anyway.

Just my opinions guys, don't go off the rails cos I CBA to argue.
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Because Corona has factual desths behind it. We know what it brings. Using broad stokes with guesses to suicides like its comparable to this global pandemic just doesnt stack up.
A lot of businesses shut before the lockdown because of a lack of traffic. Theres a few polls released last week stating how fearful the public are with opening up too early, that does not go away. Especially in a country thst hasnt the virus under control.
Theres countless businesses that are already doomed to fail, they just dont know it yet and are being saved with this lockdown
 
Guys, I am as harsh of a critic of the government as anyone, but this is a really complex decision that we don’t know enough about. Anyone asking for a full lockdown or to open up is doing so disingenuously, as we don’t have access to the information that we would need to make that decision. As of now the government want what is best for the UK. As in, they aren’t going to want thousands more dead than needed and they also don’t want the economy to crash. This is a time for anxiety at the moment but after a disastrous opening to this corona virus, all we can do now is wait for seven.
 
fergies coat said:
You do realise that a serious economic crash will cause more death than this virus ever will? So what do we do? Stay indoors in the fear it might kill us?
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There is no universal rule that recessions lead to more deaths overall. It has been looked into a number of times and nothing as conclusive as that has ever been established. It's been said by a lot of people in this thread with absolute certainty but that's just not the reality. Different estimates using different methodologies have gotten different answers.
Though the question of the overall impact of recessions on mortality remains unsettled, experts disputed Mr. Trump’s claim that an economic downturn would be more deadly than a pandemic. (The White House did not respond when asked for the source of the president’s conjecture.)

“All these effects of economic expansions or recessions on mortality that can be seen, e.g., during the Great Depression or the Great Recession, are tiny if compared with the mortality effects of a pandemic,” said Dr. José A. Tapia, a professor of public health and economics at Drexel University who has written several studies on the topic.

It is difficult to disaggregate the impact of an economic downturn on health and mortality from other factors. Those who become unemployed do tend to have higher levels of depression and bad health. But for the general population, studies have found that death rates from other causes — cardiovascular disease, respiratory diseases, and traffic and industrial injuries — were either unchanged or actually decreased.

For example, a 2012 study found that suicides did increase during the Depression of the 1930s, but the death rate for car accidents decreased and no significant effects were observed for 30 other causes of death in the United States. A 2009 study found that mortality actually decreased across almost all ages during the Depression. Researchers last year also found that mortality rates overall declined from 2005 to 2010, a period that covered the deep recession that ran from late 2007 through mid-2009.

In comparison, projections from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that deaths from the coronavirus in the United States could range from 200,000 to 1.7 million.

Mr. Trump is right to be concerned about the trend of increased suicides during recessions, said Aaron Reeves, a professor and sociologist at Oxford University and the lead author of a 2012 study that estimated an excess of 4,750 suicides in the United States after 2007, coinciding with the recession. But in a scenario in which workplaces and businesses reopen and social distancing is more limited but people continue to wash their hands, Mr. Reeves said, “my sense is that this virus would almost certainly kill more people under those conditions than suicides would.”

Moreover, it is not inevitable that a recession would lead to excess suicides. In countries and American states with adequate social programs in place, the impact of economic downturns can be reduced.
“There are some choices that governments have about how you potentially offset the consequences of recessions that may come,” Mr. Reeves said, pointing to the $2 trillion economic package passed by the Senate. “Trump could put in place more to protect those people if he’s worried about suicides.”

Experts also warned that the argument about whether to stave off a recession or contain the coronavirus was a somewhat false choice. If efforts to mitigate the coronavirus abate and cases and deaths spiral out of control, the economy would also be affected by self-imposed lockdowns.

The mental health effects of high levels of unemployment during a recession, too, would have its parallels if the United States suffered colossal loss of lives. That would bring about “communal bereavement,” where there is widespread distress and feelings of loss even among those who do not know the deceased, and its associated health risks, said Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley.

“I’d rather contain the epidemic first and then take my chances with the recession,” Mr. Catalano said. “Humans control recessions; mindless nature controls epidemics. It’s just bad medicine to mix epidemiology and economics right now.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/us/politics/fact-check-trump-coronavirus-recession.html

In 1922, a pair of sociologists at New York’s Columbia University were poring over 50 years of US economic and mortality data, when they noticed a surprising result. Lean times in the country’s history didn’t correspond with more deaths, as they expected. In fact, the opposite was true. More people — babies included — died when the economy prospered1.

William Ogburn and Dorothy Thomas were sceptical enough to delve further. Would accounting for a possible lag in time between the downturn and the rise in deaths change the outcome? Or perhaps deaths had simply been recorded more rigorously during boom times? No, and no. Their peculiar finding seemed to hold.

About a decade later, data from the Great Depression, which hobbled the US economy for much of the 1930s, pointed to a similar conclusion2. “After several years of severe economic stress, the gross death rate has attained the lowest level on record,” wrote Edgar Sydenstricker, a social epidemiologist with the US Public Health Service, in 1933.

Even numbers from the global financial crisis of the late 2000s follow suit. José Tapia Granados, a health economist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has calculated that death rates in Europe dropped faster during this downturn, known as the Great Recession, than before the crisis hit3. The trend held even in his birth country of Spain4, where unemployment topped 20%.

“Everyone was expecting a strong increase in mortality. Again, it was the opposite,” he says. Now he calls the link between recessions and lowered death rates, “almost as strong as the evidence that cigarette smoking is bad for health”.
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00210-0
 
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PepsiCola said:
You shouldn't really talk about things you have no understanding of.

Getting on with it will just nullify the sacrifices everyone has made thus far.

Edit - just to educate you further. We still have no idea the impact this virus has on children. People are also catching the disease twice. Thus its thought the virus may remain dormant in the lungs, like tuberculosis, before becoming active again.

Allowing the virus to spread again will just overwhelm the NHS. Where services are taken away from things like cancer treatment.

Then when the population is ravaged, what good would it do to the economy? Or mental health.

This little Britain, blitz mentality is fecking idiotic.

But let's get on with it ay.

The tory cnuts are about to ease lockdown this evening. I'm certain we shall see a second peak due to stupid street parties that have taken place lately.
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i agree with you but not on the bolded part. We have a pretty good idea on how it effect kids. They dont take much harm from this, but they still get it and transmit it to others. There Will sadly always be some cases who differ from the norm though, as with all things.

And they also have no evidence that the virus reactivate.. The cases from South Korea was ”dead” virus they found and the same people who did the first reports came out later to say that after looking closer on those cases it made them surer that you gain some form of imunity.
 
One Night Only said:
At the moment being the key part of that.

I agree, a longer lockdown is needed, but I see it from the otherside too. A guy with a business which isn't making his usual 10k per month, now on 2800, and getting into more debt. He isn't being helped, things are going from bad to worse for him. I can understand why he would want lockdown to end.

I think lockdown could end, if we could trust people to be sensible.
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It's not great for business owners but they're still alive. That's what everybody seems to forget. Who gives a shit if you can't afford a new car this summer? This virus is killing people in the thousands, and it's got the potential to kill millions of Covid and non-Covid patients when hospitals are overwhelmed if it's allowed to run free in the population. For all the people who think the economy is bad now, wait and see it if death numbers really take off.

I disagree that we can trust people. Many people already think they know better and that number is growing every day. Half my family in the UK has decided from this weekend lockdown is over for them and they've all been sending grandkids to each other, if we weren't related i would tell them what idiots they are.
 
redshaw said:
You could walk near your parents house and have them meet you on the street in a spacious spot, we've had plenty of nice days to do that. Make it look like a happenchance meet. I see oodles of people stopping and chatting at distance on verges etc. Also see plenty of people walking and stopping at the end of someones driveway or front terrace. Just park up near your parents house and walk to the front of your parents and see each other outside.
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Are we even meant to be doing that though? My parents live 10 miles away so it's like a 20min drive, not sure I should be doing that either way but at some point some people are going to crack and to be honest I am almost at that stage. So frustrating when you see neighbours having their grandkids over for the day once a week, and not for childcare either.
 
One Night Only said:
I don't understand the whole garden centre thing tbh, they're horrible stuffy places which are humid and be an ideal environment for a virus to thrive surely?
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I don't get it either tbh, they're hardly essential, but the two nearest me are almost completely outdoors tbf.
 
BootsyCollins said:
i agree with you but not on the bolded part. We have a pretty good idea on how it effect kids. They dont take much harm from this, but they still get it and transmit it to others. There Will sadly always be some cases who differ from the norm though, as with all things.

And they also have no evidence that the virus reactivate.. The cases from South Korea was ”dead” virus they found and the same people who did the first reports came out later to say that after looking closer on those cases it made them surer that you gain some form of imunity.
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The above comes from professors at my medical school and doctors in my family.

It's still a very novel disease. We dont even have a full grasping of its pathology.

Ofcourse the above may not be true but serves to highlight we still dont understand enough about the disease to just "get on with it"
 
BootsyCollins said:
i agree with you but not on the bolded part. We have a pretty good idea on how it effect kids. They dont take much harm from this, but they still get it and transmit it to others. There Will sadly always be some cases who differ from the norm though, as with all things.
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For now. But life's a lot longer than the last 3 months, and we don't know what the long term implications are of ever having this disease even if you get through the initial infection without any/many symptoms.

If I had children, I definitely would prefer they were in the percentage of people that never caught this at any point irrespective of their current risk profile. Same for my family and friends.
 
SilentWitness said:
Therein lies an issue for me. We've constructed something as a society (the economy) and led people to believe that it has more value than human life.
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Yes. And not just is it more valuable than life, it is beyond human agency. If it wasn't, you could decide that the population needs x amount of food and other essentials and y amount of consumer goods and tailor production and distribution to match that for the duration of this pandemic, while slowing down o stopping other work.

Brwned said:
There is no universal rule that recessions lead to more deaths overall. It has been looked into a number of times and nothing as conclusive as that has ever been established. It's been said by a lot of people in this thread with absolute certainty but that's just not the reality. Different estimates using different methodologies have gotten different answers.
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I've seen that paper before but I'm a little skpetical about this since the great depression death rate (due to things like starvation) did climb up but apparently wasn't recorded properly. of course, that was a prolonged collapse over years.

Cash surrender payments of individual insurance policies tripled in the first three years of the Great Depression, with insurance companies issuing total payments in excess of $1.2 billion in 1932 alone. When those funds were depleted, people would borrow from family and friends, and when they could get no more, they would simply stop paying rent or mortgage payments. When evicted, they would move in with relatives, whose own situation was likely only a step or two behind. The added burden of additional people would speed along that family’s demise, and the cycle would continue. This situation spiraled downward, and did so quickly. Even as late as 1939, over 60 percent of rural households, and 82 percent of farm families, were classified as “impoverished.”
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And from your article:
She knew that many negative effects could stem from unemployment, income shock and vanished investments. A study published last March linked the Great Recession with high blood pressure and high blood glucose levels in Americans13. Losing a job when a business closed increased the odds of developing a stress-related condition such as hypertension, arthritis, diabetes or psychiatric disorders, according to a study14 published in 2009. And the effects might linger.

The Great Recession has also been tied to outbreaks of infectious disease. The abandonment of home swimming pools during the foreclosures that followed the crisis helped to trigger a nearly threefold rise in cases of mosquito-borne West Nile virus in Kern County, California16. And part of Greece’s response to the economic downturn — cutting back on mosquito spraying and needle-exchange programmes — resulted in a return of malaria17 and a doubling of HIV infections18.
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There is clearly some number of months beyond which a shutdown does more harm than good, but I think we're not close to it yet, and better planning could help extend it.
 
“I consulted across the political spectrum and across the four nations”

Later tonight: “We weren’t ever consulted”
 
Pexbo said:
“I consulted across the political spectrum and across the four nations”

Later tonight: “We weren’t ever consulted”
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Sturgeon was already distancing Scotland away from the new slogans at the press conference earlier.
 
'World-beating testing' klaxon.
 
England: "You know what, testing a few more people a day might be a good idea."

Germany: "Hold my beer."
 
Johnson's prolixity is sure second to none in politics.
 
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