Re: Winning the Covid-19 war

Posted by Port-Na-Storm on
URL: http://uk-hbbr-forum.61.s1.nabble.com/Winning-the-Covid-19-war-tp4031334p4031442.html

I wouldn't be complacent about the numbers. The UK death rate attributable to influenza in 2017/18 was 23,408.

And you are right, these numbers didn't make many headlines.

But they are results for an infection which we have a vaccine , with a high take up amongst vulnerable people and which behaves in a way that is pretty well understood.

Covid19 is a whole new ball game.

The 11,000 or so deaths so far are in addition to the normal flu figures.

Early estimates were projecting a 1% mortality rate. That is circa 500,000 people in the UK alone.

Herd immunity doesn't start to kick in until 80% of the population has been infected, by my dubious maths that means over 400,000 people have to die.

Neither Social Distancing nor The Lockdown are a cure, they are simply a method of slowing down the infection rate so the NHS can just about cope.

If the number of infected people goes up or the NHS starts to crumble through sheer exhaustion we are in even deeper shit.

Flattening the curve doesn't make it go away.

A vaccine is a year away, then we need mass compulsory vaccination for it to work. And who knows whether the virus will start to mutate.

I would invite you to read this article, outlining how we got to where we are and what the consequences of doing nothing would be. It is very well researched and comes straight from reuters.

It's a bit long and you really need to read it all the way to the end, but then what else have you got to do?

Stay Safe People.

Grum.

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-path-speci/special-report-johnson-listened-to-his-scientists-about-coronavirus-but-they-were-slow-to-sound-the-alarm-idUKKBN21P1X8?il=0

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---- Jeremy [via UK HBBR Forum] wrote ----

This might seem a bit harsh, but I don't believe that the number of deaths is that significant.  The core problem seems to be that, if we had done nothing the NHS would have been overwhelmed in a short period of time, leaving us with virtually no health care system.  We saw just how close Italy (which has around twice the number of hospital beds per head of population than we have) came to this, with people lying on the floor in corridors being treated.  Had we had the same volume of hospital admissions that Lombardy had then our hospitals would have been brought to their knees pretty quickly.

The infection rate now seems to be under a degree of control; over the last few days the number of daily new cases hasn't risen at anything like the rate that it was before lockdown.  It seems that the lockdown measures are working to just about allow the hospitals to cope, but I don't know how much longer they can carry on working the way they are at the moment.  There's only so long that people can work 12 hours on, 12 hours off, before fatigue starts to really impact on their ability to work safely.

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