I really don't want to be away from home and certainly not overseas if I catch Covid-19; being ill on holiday, stuck in a hotel room or self-catering place, is awful.

I was planning a trip to Canada to see my 92 year old father but that's definitely a non-starter for some months.

The life of the Avios hoarder is that you have to book a year in advance - which I duly did last October, snagging flight to Japan during the half-term. I'm hopeful that we'll be between waves in October, but we'll see.

Even taking more account of the real time evidence from Italy later on would have helped. By Cheltenham it was clear the UK government's handling of the situation was going wrong. You are right to worry about the possibility of wave 2 but in a rapidly changing situation the government's priority must be dealing with the here and now. The only consolation I can offer is that things would have been worse if Corbyn had been PM. Nonetheless, our scientific experts have turned out to be poor communicators and it is not clear whether they have been better advisers. Possibly not. PHE and NHS senior management looks pitiful.

An important reminder about our numbers: everything is significantly lagged and we are essentially looking into the past and not at the present. The median incubation period is ~5 days and it usually takes about a week for the symptoms to escalate requiring hospital admission, where testing takes place. I don't know the lag between testing and getting the result, but I imagine it's another 2-5 days, so the numbers we get for those testing positive 'yesterday' really refer to those infected ~2 weeks ago!

This had been first documented in China and this is why the Italians have been producing these graphs including the grey area, which they think is the true representation of the contagion. Deaths are even more lagged (~21 days from infection). It's almost like looking at the stars!

I am of the same opinion - would prefer all were cancelled.

Trouble is NONE have been.. 2 are booked with Ryan Air flights only and one with Jet2 flight only... Refunds would be welcome as would refunds for the festivals that I have paid for in July. 

Feels a long time since we were both in Singapore doesn’t it? 

At the time of our travels there wasn’t a huge amount of evidence that this was going to become QUITE such a global issue. 

Sadly a few people on here were correct from the outset. Genuinely glad I made that trip as it could be the last for a while. 

Sturgeon stressed that this would not be a “true figure” and would be “artificially low” as officials change the way deaths are reported. [source Guardian]

Anyone know what is going on in Scotland?

They have probably gone with the German model of only reporting it as a Covid death if no underlying condition contributed.

Q was fastest out of the block so respect to him -  although I still think some of the initial measures he took were excessive. I think by Cheltenham the penny had dropped for most of us and we knew something massive was taking place. I feel it was at this point when the "armchair experts" actually were moving quicker than the cogs of government. A little bit like how the Met Office 30 dayer sometimes lags the latest trends which are apparent to us.

The main thing that seems to be happening with travel at the moment is that airlines etc. are trying to get people to rebook/accept vouchers instead of issuing cash refunds.

Yes, I think this is an area where the WHO has failed to provide clear advice and guidelines. Talk to people from Asia and they are perplexed and frustrated that we don't use masks in the west. My understanding is that overall the WHO sees it as beneficial, but they don't want the public to deplete the stocks and leave the medics under-equipped. 

Different countries seem to have different advice, the CDC is now officially advising Americans to wear one, same in Greece where the authorities say people should iron them daily (on both sides) and re-use them.

Q was absolutely correct throughout and yes I agree about the excessive measures too. 

I think there was an assumption by many (me included), that inter-community transmission wasn’t happening on a widespread basis outside China. Sadly, that didn’t last long. 

Is that actually true? I can find no reference to it in this discussion:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate.html

Breaking: Boris Johnson is in ‘good spirits’ after a ‘comfortable’ night at St Thomas’s hospital in London he does not have pneumonia.

I still haven't read this from a German source, it seems to be hearsay in the UK.

I think Q would have been equally frantic about any emerging virus epidemic. He wasn't around here during the SARS outbreak, which in terms of spreading globally, came to nothing, but I'd bet he'd have been equally hysterical. Same with Ebola.

Incidentally, I think that having lived through a few of these 'potential global pandemics' that have actually remained pretty much localised, most of us didn't expect CV19 to develop into anything like this magnitude, and this gas coloured our initial responses.

I don't think it's a conundrum at all. It is never morally justifiable to wish ill towards someone, whatever wrong you think they've caused. I find it odd that you think policies don't do harm to someone: if you put up taxes you do harm. I really think that's such a simplistic view as to be fatally flawed.

There's a time and a place for measured criticism; in the midst of a crisis is, IMHO, not the time for political point scoring. 

Deaths are now reported by the Registers of Scotland rather than NHS boards, so will include non-hospital deaths where the novel coronavirus was the cause of or significant factor in a death. This probably introduces a couple of days lag due to the process of registering deaths and collating the data, so we should have a meaningful figure tomorrow or Wednesday from what I've picked up.

Excellent news. Obviously he wasn't on a ventilator this morning.

I was on this forum during Ebola. From the outset this one looked alot worse, but I could have still easily been wrong and this could have remained in China. No one ever knows for sure, but if ever there was a candidate and everything.

Add the usual necessary caveat that we need to be focussing on trends and not the data for individual days.

One of the reasons I'm modelling confirmed cases rather than deaths. Deaths may be closer to the actual number but I'd rather have a consistent, representitive metric than one that has constantly switching methodologies. Confirmed cases will also have reduced lag so will be more 'up to date'.