It won’t be long before Sweden implements lockdown. Their cases and deaths are increasing.

The US medical system rightly comes in for much criticism but I draw your attention to this:

DR. BIRX: And I think — you know, we are worried about groups all around the globe.  I mean, I don’t know if you heard the report this morning.  There’s 8,000 ventilators in the UK.  If you translate that to United States, that would be like the United States having less than 40,000 ventilators.  We have five times that amount.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-15/

We had two months to prepare.

If I was wrong about anything it was expecting it to hit sooner. January and February could have been used to plan and prepare.

Wasted months.

Reading between the lines it appears the government is now desperate for the private sector to dig the NHS out of the terrible hole it is in over testing. It seems the main challenge is overcoming bureaucracy. Private labs apparently have plenty of capacity but integrating into the hopelessly centralised system is proving very difficult. 

I agree with the comment. The UK has for decades pursued a policy of driving manufacturing off shore and defunding centralised services. It has left us ill prepared and without any tools to rectify the situation.

Globally, the situation is ludicrous. Putin is making capital out of sending masks and ventilators to the USA.

Govt. is desperate for the private sector to dig it out of the hole it is in over defunding the NHS. The NHS could buy from any private lab it wished if it had the freedom to make spending decisions and funds to do so.

 That is basically a smokescreen as private testing could be put underway in 24 hrs . You have people in positions who are so used to spending years to get anything underway and cannot think outside the box.

​

Coronavirus patients more likely to die may have ventilators taken away

Quote

 

Coronavirus patients may have life-saving treatment withdrawn if others with the virus are more likely to survive, according to new guidance issued to UK doctors. Health workers could be forced to make "grave decisions" should hospitals become overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients, the latest advice from the British Medical Association (BMA) states. The document warns that decisions around rationing scarce resources, such as ventilators, could determine whether large numbers of patients will receive life-saving treatment or not.

The deaths of another 563 coronavirus patients in the UK were announced on Wednesday, the country's biggest daily increase since the outbreak began. A total of 2,352 people with COVID-19 are now confirmed to have died in the UK.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has admitted testing for the virus needs to "massively ramp up" after criticism of the government's approach to it.

 

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-patients-more-likely-to-die-may-have-ventilators-taken-away-11967204

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There is nothing, inherantly, stopping the NHS from outsourcing to the private sector to do more extensive testing. However, the decades long fear of privatization has led us to an NHS that sacrifices efficiency for ideological reasons.

The NHS is an abomination, it needs to be torn down. After this is done, the entire thing has to go and be replaced by something that actually works.

One for RobN to savour, now that this is reported on the BBC (previously he dismissed the reports because he did not want to believe them - apparently being negative about China is somehow "racist" in his mind):

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-52130552

"China has approved the use of bear bile to treat critically ill coronavirus patients.

The National Health Commission has recommended the use of Tan Re Qing - an injection that contains bear bile, goat horn and herbs - to treat patients with Covid-19.

But there is no evidence the mixture has any medicinal value.

Bear bile, which is produced in the liver and stored in the gall bladder, has been used in traditional Chinese medicine for hundreds of years and fetches a high price in the illegal international market.

The move to approve its use has angered animal rights activists and comes just weeks after the country banned the sale of wild animals for food."

And yes this is the reason testing in the UK went from being the best in Europe to basically the worst.

The NHS refuses to accept help from our private sector, refuses to use tests developed independently because of efficacy fears (rather than just testing to see if they work).

By contrast other European countries are making extensive use of their private sectors. Hell, some countries like Finland just send samples to South Korea to get it done for them.

This is the consequences of a beurocratic, necrotic NHS that shuns the private sector at every opportunity. The US, which started off abysmally, is now world leading in terms of the tests it can do. When the US system is doing better than us you know how much of a crapfest it is.

The NHS has to go. Enough is enough, the religion must end.

Funnily enough I have just come off the phone to a Swedish support technician in his thirties who works for the company I am contracted to. He told me he is working from home (not yet mandated in Sweden) because he is recovering from Corona Virus - I asked him to describe the symptoms - he got a temperature of 39 degrees over three weeks ago and started coughing (classic symptoms), a week later he started coughing up blood and had to take to his bed with severe chest pains - he is now recovering and working from home - took him three weeks in total and he was not tested, but clearly had it. He sounds very croaky on the phone - lives in Stockholm.

And for people that think 'throwing money at it' will make the problem go away. It's obvious that it won't now. The amount of government funding being thrown at this crisis is the highest it has been since the 2nd world war. No amount of money can solve such a salient decadence. 

Why do brits think the NHS is so wonderful? I just don't get it. And there also seems to be a notion that even if we accept that the NHS is riddled with these structural flaws that our healthcare proffesionals are so superior to those of every other country that it compensates for it? Yes many NHS workers are dedicated, hard working and very well qualified. But what's the implication? The Germans are lazy and incompetent? No, clearly not.

I don't know if this is true, I thought private hospitals and Doctors are now being co-opted? Even before the crisis, the NHS used the private sector a lot?

But this will be the excuse the Tories need to move to social insurance

What's really so bad about social insurance? Why is there such an implied gasp when anyone says that?

Most modern western countries use social insurance, most have better healthcare than we do.

And no the Tories won't. The NHS is such a sacred cow that no one will ever touch it. Eritrea will have better healthcare before we rethink the NHS.

In fact has there been a single party in the last decade that has suggested restructuring the NHS?

No. Every party on every spectrum from Labour to the Tories, from the UK communist party to the BNP, and all the wierd centrists in between all think the NHS is wonderful.

Maunder’s post about his Swedish colleague made my blood run cold because it tallies with anecdotal evidence that many of those who recover suffer permanent lung damage (my healthy neighbour being a good example).

Normal flu isn't a picnic when it comes to lungs, either. I know after I had it (in 2009), it took weeks for my lungs to feel normal again.

That said, it's way too early to be assuming the damage is permanent, as nobody on earth will have recovered from covid-19 for more than a few months.

https://www.rte.ie/news/coronavirus/2020/0402/1127958-cabinet-covid-19/

By way of comparison with UK testing, our testing levels seem to have fallen back to 1,500 in recent days. It also appears that there was some degree of "finessing" of our previous testing figures. So these problems certainly aren't solely UK issues. You will note from the article above that we even have even copied your tactic of promising "jam tomorrow" with assurances that testing will be back to 5,000 a day soon.

The lack of reagent seems to be the issue here but it seems that moves are afoot to remedy this problem.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/ireland-s-pharma-industry-gears-up-to-make-key-ingredient-for-covid-19-testing-1.4218334

London now has more deaths than Wuhan at the same time of the outbreak

Article in The Times:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/japan-bans-foreigners-amid-coronavirus-surge-fears-3r9gnxpc9

"Japan has admitted that it is on the brink of a disastrous rise in cases as its experts reproached it for an “extremely inadequate” response.

Governments across Asia, having weathered the initial outbreak of Covid-19, are preparing for a second wave, spread in part by their own citizens travelling home from abroad.

China has admitted having more than 1,300 asymptomatic coronavirus sufferers that had formerly been excluded from its tally, contrary to the policies of the World Health Organisation.

..."

There is also an article on whether warm temperatures and summer sun will help - this is a little more reassuring - the virus is most active at temperatures below 20 degrees:

"...

“Coronavirus disease . . . has established significant community spread in cities and regions along a narrow east-west distribution roughly along the 30-50 N’ corridor at consistently similar weather patterns of average temperatures of 5-11C, combined with low . . . humidity,” they wrote. In other words, it spreads in places like Britain.

...

For coronavirus in Britain, the reproduction number is somewhere between 2.5 and 3.5.

In their paper, researchers from Beihang University calculated the reproduction number for all 100 Chinese cities with more than 40 cases. Then they looked at the weather.

For each degree change in average temperature, the number fell by 0.04. This is indeed good news for Britain, but not great news. In August, we can expect the reproduction number to drop by about 0.6 or, by less than the present uncertainty we have on its value. So it might fall to somewhere between 1.9 and 2.9. This will not come close, in other words, to tipping it below the magic figure of 1.

..."

Here:

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/will-the-summer-save-us-from-coronavirus-probably-not-7pn0h0l6g

Which is absurdly ridiculous, since it means believing the nonsense figures from China.

Multiply the Chinese official figures by between 10 to 50 and you will be nearer the mark.

Yeah, you keep saying and keep deluding yourself. 

Um, this is exactly what Justin did a month ago. And it's not about hindsight. You don't need hindsight to be ready in terms of PPE and ventilators, even more so when your own drill has identified this.