A point I made a few days ago and still not read anything about. What or where are the stats on how this is still specifically being transmitted, or from protecting an individual point of view. By this I mean are people being asked how they think they got it? I can't see many members of the public being coughed on. A massive majority are distancing. I suspect most are being careful with hand washing. So an exit poll of the infected is essential to see how they think they got it, whether they were still working etc.. If I were to somehow find I had it my exit poll would probably say " I suffer from hay fever and my eyes have been itching and I have rubbed them without thinking. I also suffer from dry eye so they water a lot. Perhaps I touched a some contaminated shopping package"

This sort of thing would prove immensely useful in a dossier moving forwards rather than the less specific wash your hands regularly and don't get coughed on stuff.

The other thing is we are not really using the entire population as a source of all sorts of useful feedback. There is information being told to us but nowhere to give useful feedback to the authorities. In fifty million people there might be some valuable ideas. Maybe even mine above?

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I think the leader of the Western Australian government said it most succinctly a couple of weeks ago. For now and for the foreseeable future we will only have hard decisions and many of them I wish we would never have to make.

Yes, I agree. But do you not think that each subsequent wave will have a lower acceleration rate because of what I said about awareness and self social distancing. Remember the current death rate is the end of the result of no control. The thrust of the Government policy has been to allow the NHS to function not to control infection per say, although of course there is a relationship between the two.

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That's spot on Nick, here is a post on this issue

 

 

I think there are still huge unanswered questions regarding the specific transmission routes and just how risky they are.

This information will be crucial when it eventually arrives. 

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Still too early, but the evidence starts accumulating that countries that took decisive action (lockdown and/or closure of borders) early in their outbreaks have (so far) avoided the exponential part of the epidemic and the subsequent surge of deaths. Greece, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Norway, Portugal, and most of central and eastern European countries, New Zealand and several more.

Countries that dithered and had a confused strategy like the UK are now paying a heavy price and as many have said, Britain could easily become the worst affected country in Europe with many premature and preventable deaths.

Even Sweden had banned mass events on 11 March, at the same time when we were still allowing football matches, indoor gigs and huge events like Cheltenham.

If a proper testing, contact tracing and isolation strategy isn’t implemented at the end of the lockdown, then I fear that Britain will have one of the worst economic hits too as we’ll be forced to have more lockdowns.

Let's hope it is "when" and not  "if". Thinking out of the box isn't this Government's strong point.

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Makes you wonder if the last general election wasn’t a bad one to lose!

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........... and even maybe longer term on the tourist industry - if we are perceived as one of the more high risk Countries to visit.

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That German study has attracted a fair amount of criticism by scientists in Germany who have identified 2 issues with it: they haven’t disclosed the details of the antibody test they used and whether they have verified its accuracy (it could have too many false positives) and they didn’t use a representative sample. It could also be picking up antibodies to other corona viruses.

Austria has done the first proper test of a representative sample of the population (with a sample of 1,500 people) using the more reliable (but still imperfect) RT-PCR tests and they have found that only 0.33% of the population had the virus in early April (0.12% - 0.76% at the 95% confidence level).

Iceland has tested ~10% of its population and has also found that 0.3-0.8% of the population had it at the time of testing. As I said last week, we still don’t know for sure, but it looks more likely that the virus is much less widespread than many people thought. I think that poor modelling study from Oxford might also have biased minds too much. As a reminder again, the WHO team tested randomly in the community in Wuhan in early and mid-February (at the peak of their epidemic, when people were dropping dead like flies) and they just couldn’t find the virus. It was one of the reasons they used to conclude that the strict lockdown was working and it just needed time to show in the numbers.

It’s certainly still too early to know, but if indeed the contagion is much less widespread, that would have profound implications:

• It shows how reckless the idea of herd immunity was and still is (imagine the number of deaths if most of the population was allowed to be infected). Even the 500k estimate from Imperial could be an underestimate if the NHS collapsed


• It suggests that a mass test, contact trace and isolate policy has a better chance of succeeding when the number of new infections comes down due to the lockdown


• If the above doesn’t happens, then ~99% of the population would still be available as potential hosts for the virus and a premature lift of the lockdown would result in new peaks/surges

 

Here are some more details on the Austrian study:

Less than 1% of the Austrian population is “acutely infected” with coronavirus, new research based on testing a representative sample of more than 1,500 people suggests.

The government-commissioned study, reportedly the first of its kind in continental Europe, was led by the polling company Sora, which is known for projecting election results, in cooperation with the Red Cross, the Medical University of Vienna, and other institutions.

The study made it possible to estimate the prevalence of acute coronavirus infections in Austria among those not in hospital at the beginning of April, and was designed to provide a clearer picture of the total number of infections, given gaps in testing.

The research, if replicated and confirmed elsewhere, would appear to scotch hopes of countries being remotely close to relying on “herd immunity” – where enough of the population is exposed to the virus to build up a combined immunity – as a viable policy option.

The study stands in contrast to controversial modelling by researchers at Oxford University who, in one scenario they examined, suggested most people in the UK might already have been infected with Covid-19.

Hopefully, moving forward, we can correct a few understandable wrongs which may have occurred at the start of the crisis, now we have the benefit of hindsight. 

It's important not to be incessantly negative and critical, but equally we need to recognise likely failings and plan ahead.  

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Today is 3 weeks since the lockdown (it was announced on the evening of the 23rd, but started on the 24th) and the real number of daily deaths should start falling soon. Due to the way our number is reported, I think we’ll get very high numbers on Thu/Fri (a reasonable guess is >1,200 deaths on each day). Hopefully that will be the peak, but we could easily get an even higher number on Tue/Wed next week.

It’s almost certain now that we’ll have more than 20,000 deaths in total (including non-hospitals deaths) and sadly even 30-50k total deaths don’t look that unrealistic.

Exactly and what has happened already will be examined in the future, it's more important to focus on what is happening now and the future decisions. The govt can't help itself though, they are still using spin and deflection instead of honesty, transparency and integrity. The challenge was and still is unprecedented for all governments and the public is crying for real leadership and honesty, but different leaderships have handled this very differently both in terms of communication and actual measures taken. Even the usually arrogant Macron acknowledged the errors made in France, while I still remember what the Greek PM said when he lockdowned early ('we are not prepared for this').

 

 

I have no confidence at all in the NHS app-ocalypse even though it will be using the Google / Apple API (if the NHS programmers understand what an API is of course):

Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University, said: “Personally I feel conflicted. I recognise the overwhelming force of the public-health arguments for a centralised system, but I also have 25 years’ experience of the NHS being incompetent at developing systems and repeatedly breaking their privacy promises when they do manage to collect some data of value to somebody else.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-tracker-app-needs-rules-warns-former-spy-chief-nqd9xtthx

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Surely, with all the tech brains in the world, in this day and age, we should be able to pull this off? 

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Well. I hold the Tory government responsible for the deaths of thousands who need not have died if the PPE and tests and lockdown had been done in a way like Germany, South Korea, NZ, Aus.

Little wonder they hide behind rhetoric and evading questions. The weight of guilt will cripple them all eventually.

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I’m not even sure we can compare death rates by country because some were not counting those who had underlying problems but tested positive.  I think Germany was one, which explained their low numbers. 

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We certainly should. There's no shortage of brain power in the UK! The problems (IMHO and I know others strongly disagree) are to do with the centralised structure of the NHS. I also would question the quality of their IT departments in general. I'm not making a blanket generalisation as I'm sure they have some outstanding people. 

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Doesn't "underlying problems" cover about 90% of the reported UK Covid19 deaths?

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3% of UK's care homes report 521 Corona related deaths. Do the math as they say. Shocking. Absolutely awful.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/uk-care-home-providers-report-521-coronavirus-deaths 

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That’s what I said yesterday and was criticised for it. 

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I'm not convinced we'll go above 1000 per day. They may be "bottlenecked".  

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From the BBC ticker:
"Sacked Pakistani workers left stranded in Gulf
Thousands of Pakistanis working in Gulf states have appealed to their government to fly them home, after they lost their jobs due to the pandemic.
At least 11,000 Pakistani workers, possibly many more, have been sacked over the past few days and can't return home because of restrictions. Some say they are running out of food and money.
Pakistan International Airlines is flying home 1,800 Pakistanis on Tuesday, out of about 40,000 who will be repatriated, mostly from the Middle East. They include 410 in the UAE, and 270 in Thailand and Japan, plus 400 pligrims in Saudi Arabia.
The numbers of foreign workers employed in the Gulf are vast. More than nine million Pakistanis, and millions of others from around Asia, are employed there. Pakistani workers abroad sent home more than $20bn last year and remittances are crucial to the country's economy".

While the world has problems on its own doorsteps, I really fear for these people. We returned home from Dubai on 7th March. Our resort seemed fairly quiet and staff there said it was because there were no chinese. What came over on our stay was the cheap Asian labour working on construction sites or in the hotels. They were getting a pittance compared to the amounts being spent by visitors, they could not really afford the cost of living. We learnt that employers there confiscated their passports, and were only allowed to return home if it was extremely urgent. The Asian workers usually worked for ten months, and returned home for 2.
I just hope the UAE are looking after these people as they run out of food and money, or there will be another catastrophe waiting in the wings.

Possibly.  It calls into question how we can compare country to country when the reporting isn’t consistent.  

 

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