In a non-representative sample of 30, where the virus was already in the workplace. 

Hit the nail on there. This is all about increasing NHS capacity to cope with the here and now and future waves and is giving time to build and equipe all the nightingale hospital around the country.Also all other illnesses and health problems have not suddenly disappeared because of cov-19 and I expect capacity has had be dramatically raised to be able to continue with the usual health issues.

Once the nhs is up together and ready then the restrictions will start to be eased as long as it is ready in 3 weeks time.

The other factor is the economy and to be honest we cannot still be in this situation in say 6 weeks time/end of may at the absolute maximum!!

I fail to see how there will ever be anywhere near 100k people a day to test particularly with reduced cases as the lockdown starts to work.   Unless you are going to randomly waste them on people not displaying symptoms to get the numbers up? 

There will be a lot more testing of social care workers and care home residents in the coming weeks , but that won't push up the numbers that much. 

So testing of symptomatic  NHS staff/social care workers, the people they live with if symptomatic (as per new guidance) and NHS patients /care home residents with symptoms. But who else?   Possibly could include people  at home who have contacted 111 with symptoms  but they would need to get to a test centre which might be problematic . Most people won't need to contact 111 and will be under the radar.

I dont think there should be an obsession about test numbers but the social care staff and service users should have been done sooner. 

 

 

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It’s surprising how many people don’t realise the 19 relates to the year of discovery.

I saw another online spat with someone saying how the previous 18 COVID’s hadn’t caused a problem 

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A few thoughts on the last few pages, which may or may not be of interest.

Herd immunity. The number of people who have so far had covid-19 and so have immunity is thought to be relatively low. The percent required for herd immunity is high. From what i have read, a relatively optimistic scenario might be that 6% have so far been infected and 60% is needed for herd immunity, so we would be talking about 10 times as many people having to die before herd immunity is achieved. As the numbers are likely to be worse than that, immunity may only be limited, some people may not fully recover, the strain on the NHS will likely mean that there will be lower ability to deal with, say, cancer patients, this means that the death toll could be much higher. Of course, along the way we may get improved treatments but we don't know that.

Lockdown - like many others i don't expect much to change tomorrow. Its possible they may do something like allow people to visit garden centres in the same way that we can go to supermarkets at the moment. Its also possible that they may set out what will be unlocked if we keep the infection rate down over the next 3 weeks to keep our spirits up. Perhaps overthinking this but if we were to see the number of new cases decrease quite rapidly over the coming weeks then, rather than speeding up the release of the lockdown then there could almost be an argument to slow it down. If a few more weeks could lead to it almost being eradicated then that might be worth a go rather than go for the release of lockdown and then reimposition. I suspect that seeing what happens to other countries will play a big role though, they probably have lots of theories about what should work and they will be interested to see what actually does work.

Have there been any questions over the number of healthy under 40s who have died/been seriously ill? And following on from that whether there are any patterns to these people, eg occupation, BMI?

Yes I would agree many of the schools plan complete deep cleans and painting and decorating new carpets and building improvements to name a few during the school summer holidays which many have already been arranged.

It’s usually a busy work place at the school during this time I have no request to try to rearrange contractors at this stage.

 

Good post and I agree with most of it.  Regarding the bit in bold, that might be a pipe dream unless we completely close our border (or at least perform some checks/quarantines). 

With regarding under 40’s, I’ve just found out that one of the mums from the kids class at school has recovered after being in intensive care for 10 days.  That’s certainly put the wind up me, as she seems healthy, jogs regularly etc.

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My school's had a deep clean, apparently, over the Easter holidays (term starts again tomorrow, but it'll be all done online for now - teachers will show up during their lessons on Google classroom, answering questions and chatting to the pupils).

I strongly suspect the deep clean won't have extended to the computer rooms and I'd be astonished if anyone had actually gone into the IT office... I think we last had a cleaner in there in 2010, as we usually just clean up after ourselves (we all feel a bit awkward about having cleaners coming in, in the same way we would at home!)

 

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 That works both ways though as there is no study with any weight which says there is no, or very reduced immunity to Covid -19. The timescale is too short as yet. it would be a highly modified coronavirus which realised no immunity to future infection.

 There are reports of people testing positive after Covid -19 but there are questions . Was the first test right and even if becoming re-infected are there any symptoms?

 Too much conjecture at the moment from the armchair epidemioligists

Yes Darren done in summer at mine every single carpet (30 classrooms all office and all other remaining carpets)has to be washed every single hard floor including Toilets and clock rooms have complete buff also school hall complete buff and seal and many other things also covered in the procedures of a deep clean.

Very busy time.

 

Yep, it was me putting an optimistic slant on things! If we can get cases down to a relatively small number then hopefully the authorities can focus around those cases with testing and really help to stop the numbers coming back up again that much. Almost eradicating was probably too strong an expression but in such a situation there would be the potential to really lessen the effects significantly for some time - it is why some people favour a stronger lockdown now. I agree that international travel will be a big problem, some other countries have insisted on people self-isolating when they arrive in the country though.

JFF model is back. Major overhall.

Main changes: Decided to use pillar 1 and assume test is not saturated before March 27th (so no weighting applied after then). This is the most consistent way to do it. Because of PHE wrongly reporting Pillar 1 only as total cases before April 10th it did screw my model up so I've had to adjsut all the basic parameters to get it to fit to the pillar 1 data prior to that and after March 27th. As a result it has slightly different predictions but not drastically so.

For example the old parameters predicted a peak on April 5th, whereas this says the peak was on April 9th.

Anyway here it is. No bumps in the model curve now because not weighting by testing.

 

https://i.ibb.co/nL2ysTH/jffnew.jpg 

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France have reported 4,560 new cases and 1,438 new deaths. Deaths are both hospital and care homes.

924 of the deaths are in care homes
2,287 of the new cases in care homes

I for one am terrified of schools going back before we have a proper lid on this. I don't see how they and we won't get infected as a result. The thought of having to roll the covid-19 dice and hope you don't end up dead/with lung impairment is just horrendous. Especially when you look at SK, NZ, Aus and realise it didn't have to be this way.

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I completely agree with you on this Nick. 

There's no reason to assume there wouldn't be immunity lasting several months -  it will inevitably gradually decline and the challenge might mutate
If re-infected the immune system would still recognise the threat and deal with it more promptly than if it were unknown.

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I don’t think they will Nicky many Grandparents help out and pick many of the children up after school because many of the parents can’t do it for what ever reason also believe it or not my primary school as probably others are also very funny about who picks those children up and will refuse until it is safe to let them go you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to understand the virus risk of extend family picking those children up.

Think that is called memory B cells? Act 3 times as quick to produce many more antibody next time.

Think Peter touched on this a while ago

 

Another aircraft carrier badly effected by CV19, the Charles de Gaulle has urgently returned to base with 668 of its crew testing positive so far, 31 hospitalised and 1 ventilated. 

 

That is pure gold.

 

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When I see these reports of our sophisticated fighting machines disabled by COVID-19 I'm forcibly reminded of the H.G. Wells' novel "The War of the Worlds" where the aliens and their seemingly invincible technology are  "slain, after all man's devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth".

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Surely random testing is exactly what we should be doing? How else do you get a view of how many people are affected?

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Hard as it may be for dyed in the wool Tories to accept, but here is another epidimiologist explaining how the government go t it so badly wrong in late Feb/ early March, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/uk-government-coronavirus-science-who-advice

and as a consequence of that criminal decision to delay acting, thousands of people are dead and tens of thousands more are grieving, in our once proud nation. The failure to act was IMHO driven by greed and fear that it would make them unpopular.

I believe the cabinet remain hamstrung by the same moral and mental deficiencies as earlier this year, and as a consequence, they will lurch to another grave mistake - opening things up too soon, which will result in thousands more unecessary deaths and more misery.

Again, they will be driven by greed and fear, and again the cock-womble cabinet will get it wrong, at a terrible cost.

 

 

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Is there no  limits to this man's idiocy ?  

... I was going  to add something else, but it would probably get me banned ......

 

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Your conclusion of what that paper says is correct.  The research shows that SARS-Cov2 does not act like HIV.

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