Indeed, it's very difficult to manage this and there is already a debate in Greece between not opening their borders this summer (and issue vouchers for 2021 etc.) and opening in July-October only and relying on mass screening of tourists (esp if a reliable antibody test becomes available by then).

Edit: I just checked their numbers and they are crazy, they have a population of 10-11 million people and last year they had 33 million foreign visitors (mainly during May-Sep).

I honestly can't believe many people will want to travel this summer. In fact the tourist industry would probably end-up losing money by opening up and having to pay wages. 

I suppose we are what 25 days after lockdown so with those getting symptoms up to two weeks later, then deteriorating and needing hospitalisation up to ten days later is about then. You would think we should start to see a downturn of new cases any time now. I wonder what the longitude is of people lasting once they are in hospital. Could be it can span quite a well hence the levelling but still high death count.

Again with most numbers, I have lost confidence in ours plus overseas as well.

Not sure if this has been posted already but this study draws different conclusions. Who knows what the truth is?

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/coronavirus/antibody-study-suggests-coronavirus-is-far-more-widespread-than-previously-thought/ar-BB12OGQc?ocid=spartandhp

Yes what was available in reporting certain types of figures certainly aren't up to scratch when reporting stats for pandemics! I can see a review of these as well, though to collect what the leaders need to make important decisions based on these numbers now should not be rocket science.

You would of thought that London should be showing an even higher rate of new infections then the rest of the country with this you mention.

If anyone is interested I believe this is the source code to the IC model:

https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/covid19model

I don't know enough about R to really gauge this. The code doesn't look terrible but it's by no means spotless either (standard check: search for "TODO" in the source, look for magic numbers sprinkled about and so on).

There are clearly a number of internal parameters which are used to simulate various situations and then you set each of these for various countries and use this plus various historical data to simulate the effect of various actions on the disease spread. I think if you are technically minded you can build and run it via docker.

One thing I noticed is that there are no obvious tests of the model. I may be missing something or they may not have made them available. I have some indirect experience of financial modelling and I have always dealt with systems with hundreds of thousands of test cases and large regression test suites which are run almost continually to make sure you aren't breaking anything. I don't have any experience on how this works in this field but I'd be interested to know how confident they are that the code is an accurate reflection of their theoretical model.

There is some description of the model here https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-13-europe-npi-impact/ although this link is now nearly 3 weeks old.

An aircraft carrier is very unrepresentative of a country's population, the crew does most things in very close physical proximity and it's impossible to isolate large number of infected sailors, so it's almost the perfect ground for the virus to spread.

The very high percentage of asymptomatic cases and the absence of deaths is probably related to the very young and healthy population on the ship.

They'll be seeking to perpetuate the idea that public healthcare should be supported only by charitable donations.

The bit right at the end where the idiot plod mutters "show some respect"...

I was brought up to believe that respect has to be earned.

And donning a uniform isn't 'earning respect'.

(nor does being a gobby youth with a gangsta ego, by the way)

Totally agree on both those points Saint! 👍🏻

Yes you find yourself not listening to them. Anything of note is already out there 'courtesy of the press'.

He said the word 'encouraging', but does it mean those beds are free because people have died.

Yep, this is the most important and clean metric, we are clearly past the peak now. We really need to put a lot of resources now on a mass test and trace programme for later in May.

It seems after the shock of hearing these kind of numbers from Italy, it's considered the 'norm' perhaps. Yes those numbers are real people. It's hard to take in still what this is all about, what is happening. Just so much focus on PPE, end of lockdown. It's grisly but perhaps there needs to be more attention on the dead and what families are going through, not numbers real people.