I thought a headache was a symptom.

Where is the source for this?

If c19 is that widespread, 20 million is one in three, wouldn't one in three test show it?

I've got over my intial, lets be honest, panic. Panic happens for reasons of self protection, its a fight or flight response, and I am now isolated and waiting to see if I contracted it.

In the future I begin to think the course of action should be this:

The very vulnerable, those likely to be hospitalised,  are locked down on a permanent basis. The rest of us need (the younger we are) to brace ourselves for the next few weeks and then we need to get back to life but with strict social distancing and other strict measures. The intelligent will gradually get this, we need to help the thick as much as we can but they are at greater risk - and are a risk to us all.  However, we need a economy and we can't be shut down for ever. Those neither thick or intelligent are a problem. But, there will need to be an effort to stamp out 'I don't care', 'what will be will be'  ism - such attitudes will spread disease.

How long before govts get this? i don't know, I didn't get it until yesterday, i suspect they (we are all human) are in panic mode, once that passes, and if the initial disaster is over, change is needed and a new way of sustainable life needed.

Agreed John. 

The business minister was in total denial this morning on Sky news. These people are so far removed from reality it’s unreal.

Where have these figures come from other than Arcus’s posts? Given that so far in the UK there have been about 50,000 tests of which 48,000 have been negative, how can there possibly be 30% of the population infected?

I seem to recall Arcus saying a couple of weeks ago that 80% of the population would be affected (figure could be different but it was v high). I believe this was from a conversation he had with someone he knew.

Arcus' figures are highly implausible IMO.

The official figures given out were 4 out of 5 will be affected 

I believe the figures for South Korea, since they show the kind of pattern which might be expected as a country tries to damp down the fires of the virus - they still have smaller outbreaks flaring up. The figures China are releasing are a joke - given the size of their original problem, they should still be reporting hundreds, if not thousands of cases per day.

South Korea has reported 93 new cases of the virus in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of cases in the country to just over 8,400.

Having gone into work feeling a bit under the weather, with a sore throat (usually means a cold for me, not one of the symptoms for covid), I found my voice had gone really gravelly when I was speaking to the head!

She asked if I had a fever, I said I felt a bit off colour but couldn't check... and five minutes later (leaving me in the office) a thermometer was procured. It read 38.something and so I've now been sent home to self-isolate for a week - it's official now!

I'm more annoyed I can't sort out the utter cluster-mess of Google Classroom today than anything else... the sync script written by someone else in the Trust borked and removed all the kids from their classes yesterday night.

As I said a couple of days ago, there's no way schools can continue to run due to staff self-isolating. I can pretty much gaurantee that they will be closed by Monday.

Memo to Priti please

Mrs G is blood type O. Unfortunately I don't have a clue what I am because despite having a full blood cell count on the N.H.S they don't test type as routine. It's also not possible to self diagnose in the same way that something like blood sugar levels are.

I'm with you in thinking that is it complete bunkum. However, Arcus had spoken to an epidemiologist I believe. 

If you have it, you will recover Im sure and then become immune and very useful to society. That's my plan too. Catch it and become immune. I live alone like you and don't come into contact with elderly

Of course, I might die, but that's life! No one would actually notice or care if I did die

You shouldn't have gone in in the first place!

Some of the symptoms you describe suggest you may have this Darren. Get well soon.

One thing we have learned from Italy is that letting stuff leak out in advance is a bad idea. I would not be surprised if schools are closed from the end of this week, but we simply don't know.

Retron has alighted on the big problem in regions badly affected by the virus - staff self isolating. The school my grandchildren attend has no such problems as yet and could happily stay open until the Easter holidays under current circumstances, but for some reason, Worcestershire is a quiet county at the moment, unlike Wolverhampton and The Black Country, which are a hotspot in the West Midlands.

Reading comments here and elsewhere over the past week or so indicates closures are nailed on.

Worth checking out "medical school syndrome" which Shawn Achor talks about. Even very intelligent people with specialist knowledge are fooled into convincing themselves they have a disease when they study it.

The problem is that, as research shows, when we think about something as being unhealthy, it has an unhealthy effect upon us. That's why people oft en start to manifest the symptoms of the diseases they most fixate upon, and it's the reason first-year medical students get the infamous "medical school syndrome" in which they start believing that they have each disease they are studying. But this poses a significant problem for hospitals: How can you make people feel healthier in a place associated with sickness and disease?

Link to Oprah but he is quite well known and respected.

http://www.oprah.com/own-super-soul-sunday/shawn-achor-on-why-happiness-is-contagious/all

Get well soon Darren

Keeping schools open this long and allowing people to gather in crowded supermarkets and not ordering closures of businesses, is basically the herd strategy ongoing. If they really wanted to contain this, they should force people to stay indoors and deliver food to them, like in Wuhan. But job done. Virus is now endemic and will do its thing

Pay attention to the utter contempt & scorn on @BorisJohnson’s face as the context from @Peston’s questions dawn on him. What an evil crook. #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/SlNsd0jnuf

— Miffy Buckley 🏳️‍🌈 (@miffythegamer) March 17, 2020

One rule for the rich…..

Coronavirus: Harley Street clinic has sold 2,000 home test kits to celebs and wealthyhttps://t.co/Ino8vA6qVY pic.twitter.com/r9CzFZic49

— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) March 18, 2020

It's clear that stricter measures will be needed IMO if we are serious about halting the spread. They need to consider deploying the army IMHO. However, it will need to be managed very carefully because we have so few soldiers and it could become a farce.

What an irresponsible Tweet! Utterly shameless! Sweden, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan have all kept schools open.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-madness-of-torygenocide

"...

This is not that. This is not a scholarly exchange on the merits of ‘herd immunity’ or social distancing. This is the proposition that the Prime Minister is so wicked, sadistic and Machiavellian that he is, per the internationally recognised definition of genocide, acting ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’ by, inter alia, ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.

Let me be clear: if you believe this, you are a loon. A wack-job. Nuttier than an M&Ms spillage in a Snickers factory. The #torygenocide conspiracy theory is not the mutterings of a bus station wino but of apparently intelligent people unable to surrender a psychological crutch. That is, the reassuring conviction that their opponents are plainly evil, so evil they would perpetrate mass cleansing of the weak and vulnerable out of ideological callousness. Who wouldn’t want to lean on such a crutch? If those you disagree with are monsters, you no longer have to go to the trouble of disagreeing with them. You can simply pronounce them hostis humani generis and hear your analysis echoed in your political silo of choice. "