....... unless you are elderly with underlying conditions. 

First sentence contains an unfortunate ‘balls’ up 😉

The strongest trend in that graph is probably that it's meaningless! Maybe replot it with one data point for each Monday and Tuesday averaged might help a bit.

Not good at all.

Tentacles Heavy Weather I think you meant.

Sorry they just jumped out at me when I read it. I assume you didn't mean testicles? 

Sorry to hear this Nick, there will be so many stories like yours. The ONS report finding double the mortality reported by the NHS  in the last week of March was also very worrying.

OMG yes I meant tentacles. How embarrasing

Yes, you make an excellent point. If left unchecked the exponential nature of mortality would destroy society. 

Thank God, I thought it was new symptom...

The virus loves religious types - they provide it with all the opportunities it needs (whatever the faith) - now we have the Bishop of Rochester urging the spread of the virus  (from the Telegraph):

"Open the churches for Easter – and give people hope

Michael Nazir-Ali shares on the profound psychological consequences of the lockdown and not being able to go to church. 

...

At the very least, we should be providing, rather than withdrawing, resources for strengthening and supporting people’s faith at this time. It is such a pity, then, that churches, and other places of worship, are not open for prayer. If it is true that church leaders themselves requested that they be closed down, now is the time to undo this mistake."

What he really means is: Open the churches for Easter – and give people COVID-19.

So much for accurate evaluation and having an open mind!! You haven't even read my post. I started by saying what you say about the origins in China, how bad it is and action should be taken. I haven't one single time blamed anybody else. I have highlighted where others haven't been brilliant either. You can't even bring yourself to admit the shortcomings of the response from the USA and especially that their President has been appalling. God knows what you would have said if the Chinese leader had acted like that!!

Read what somebody actually says before laying into them. 

Yes - two points on this

• The long term goal of China (global dominance through resource control, economic expansion, currency manipulation, divide and conquer on the the west etc. etc. ) has been obvious for years. But far as I can tell there has been no coordinated thinking or policy on how to counter it while accepting China as a major world player (which it now is whether we like it or not). Proper strategic thinking on this is needed now. Perhaps this virus will be the trigger for it.
  
  


• Trump has missed a huge opportunity on COVID-19. The US could have stood up, offered global leadership in resources, aid, research, logistics and so on. This would have recovered a vast amount of the goodwill he's lost under traditional allies in the last few years and would at a stroke have restored much of the US's reputation as the de facto world superpower and leader. But no, he's more worried about slagging off CNN, getting his son-in-law on the telly and stopping face-mask exports to Canada . Utterly depressing - the man seems incapable of any thinking beyond short term point scoring

I recall that late last year, some people were calling for the then leader of LFB to resign over the Grenfell fire tragedy because they deemed her to be responsible for her fire brigade not being able to save more lives that night. I thought that was unfair, because for me that was one of those cases you speak of when no amount of planning and preparation that the LFB could have done beforehand would have made much, if any, difference to events on that night.

Wrt COVID-19, many lessons will need to be learned from this crisis going forwards, not just by those in government and other positions of authority but by people in many walks of life. One lesson should be IMO that if there is ever, god forbid, and outbreak of this disease or anything similar in any country in the future, one of the first things to do will be so halt all international air travel in and out of the affected country or countries without delay. It looks to me as though mass air travel was instrumental in the very fast spread of COVID-19 across many parts of the world in the space of a few weeks.

Of course it was David - even Professor Neil Ferguson admitted as much on the Andrew Marr show - I quote:

"people were flying in and spreading the virus".

Could not be much clearer than that.

I wonder why people aren't setting fire to airport terminals rather than 5G masts.

Indeed. As Phil said last night in the previous thread, the Chinese should have moved to close their borders with all neighbouring countries thereby allowing no-one in & out of their own country once they had established with some certainty what the problem was and once they knew that this virus was a danger to life. It was their failure to do this which then led to it spreading to so many other countries in a relatively short period of time and has led the world to the god awful situation it is now in.

On its way...

Not at all, HW - it lifted the mood nicely.

I am reminded of the classical schoolboy "howler" about the hydra:

"It stands on its head and waves its testicles about to catch food."

All blokes will have done this kind of stuff at some stage...

Roger

p.s. Testicles of Death sounds like a Leonard Cohen song....

So...

Was it one of the all-time great auto-corrects?

Or something Mr Freud would be interested in discussing?