Not quite, Greece has higher lived density than the UK, 55% of its population lives in Athens (mostly in flats). They also had >100 schools visiting N.Italy in February.

Originally Posted by: xioni2 

Coronavirus lockdown protests has broken out across America, with some featuring flags and guns, according to this:-

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/16/release-us-anti-lockdown-protests-break-across-america-featuring/.

Surprised this hasn't been posted on UIA before!

Originally Posted by: ozone_aurora 

Here's a different take on things from Professor Johan Giesecke - https://unherd.com/thepost/coming-up-epidemiologist-prof-johan-giesecke-shares-lessons-from-sweden/

• UK policy on lockdown and other European countries are not evidence-based


• The correct policy is to protect the old and the frail only


• This will eventually lead to herd immunity as a “by-product”


• The initial UK response, before the “180 degree U-turn”, was better


• The Imperial College paper was “not very good” and he has never seen an unpublished paper have so much policy impact


• The paper was very much too pessimistic


• Any such models are a dubious basis for public policy anyway


• The flattening of the curve is due to the most vulnerable dying first as much as the lockdown


• The results will eventually be similar for all countries


• Covid-19 is a “mild disease” and similar to the flu, and it was the novelty of the disease that scared people.


• The actual fatality rate of Covid-19 is the region of 0.1%


• At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available

Originally Posted by: Northern Sky 

All good points, not sure about the last one but it's probably getting past 20% already, 50% is plausible in London

Originally Posted by: four 

Personally I think the idea that an effective vaccine will be available for manufacture by September is for the birds but as stated many times I'm a medical pleb. Bill Gates is saying 12 to 18 months and my guess is he will be closer to the mark. Nonetheless, if we assume the September goal is realistic the article below raises other concerns. 

Millions of doses to be made before coronavirus vaccine has been proven

The Jenner Institute in Oxford hopes to have a vaccine, and a million doses of it, by September, and possibly hundreds of millions of doses by the new year. This was “probably the most ambitious scale-up programme”, the institute said.

There are two UK vaccine factories; one, run by Seqirus, is capable of making injectable jabs. The UK drug giant GlaxoSmithKline is a leading manufacturer of vaccines but carries out the work at facilities in the US and Belgium.

“It’s something the government has realised for a number of years and is trying to address but this pandemic has hit us too early,” Professor Brendan Wren, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said

The government is fast-tracking the construction of a Vaccines Manufacturing Innovation Centre at Harwell, Oxfordshire, which had not been due to open until 2022. It is designed to make research vaccines for clinical trials rather than on a commercial scale.

Karl Simpson, a biologist who wrote a report for the government’s UK Vaccine Network, said Britain had let its vaccine industry “slip away”, adding: “If we want to make, say 100 million doses of vaccine, we’re simply not in the game any more”.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/millions-of-doses-before-coronavirus-vaccine-has-been-proven-h6ttf8bx9

Originally Posted by: Brian Gaze 

While the govt bears some of the blame, PHE also needs to shoulder its fair share. Much of this mess is due to NHS dogmatism and a failure to involve the private sector early enough.

The most sucessful countries, vis a vis testing, had one thing in common; very strong cooperation between the public and private sector. PHE outright refused, initially, to accept any tests or labs outside its remit.

Originally Posted by: Quantum 

This lack of PPE magic wand thing doesn't make much sense, on Twitter a UK manufacturer has repeatedly offered large quantitiies to the NHS but they don't even respond, they are being sold to other countries.
https://twitter.com/Richard12545678/status/1251252942671355910?s=20

Originally Posted by: four