I'm just glad I don't have to make the decisions on this. On one hand we have the deaths from Covid 19 and the possibility of overwhelming the health service and on the other we have the threat to the economy as well as serious health impacts from the lockdown. I read a cancer surgeon saying the delays in cancer diagnosis and treatment caused by the lockdown could result in more deaths than the virus. The problems are so widespread, who knows where to start?

Obviously behind closed doors - will they test every person in the squad prior to the games I wonder?

Don't think this has been posted yet?

https://www.gov.scot/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-framework-decision-making/pages/1/


Basically it says we don't know when lockdown will end but it won't been soon.


I expect all the journalists at today's UK/English press conference to therefore ask, yet again, the same question many have asked every day for the past few weeks "when will the lockdown end"  

23.5K Tests completed

14.6K People Tested

4.5K Positives

616 UK Deaths

Another day with over 4k positive.

Of course. I quite like the guy, very British, sensible. You just suspect he is cautious. I am. We're Scientists and we don't like risks!

Is this because of the lockdown though or because people are scared to go to the hospital or the GP because they are concerned by how widespread the contagion could be? Why would that change if we lift the lockdown? 

We are not even testing properly, so many people might be assuming that hospitals and GP surgeries are virus hotspots. 

Agree, so much more traffic and general household activity around here too. Lots of family mixing taking place. Schoolfriends and young lovers meeting each other. We see whats happening in other countries where things are opening and football matches starting in Germany etc. And we want some of that too!

In countries that don't have strict state enforcement like here and US, it will break down and I have heard experts saying that its only effective for a limited period for this reason

Our lockdown has worked to bring down the daily deaths, though it could have been done 2 weeks earlier and saved thousands of lives

The point I was trying to make (admittedly poorly) was that the data is improving across the board. 

I would like to see a breakdown of who is actually getting infected now. Is it mostly working people, hospital staff, people using public transport stupid people who are ignoring the rules?

I would like to know how these people think they got infected. it would be so useful.

Incidentally, what proportion of people using the forum have actually been infected? Nobody, as far as I can tell. I wonder what that tells us?

Some treatments have been suspended, due to risk to the patient, but if this goes on for months, then the patient will die anyway!

A lot of lumps etc are going undiagnosed as people are scared of catching the virus and some don't want to burden their doctor

A Cancer specialist on BBC just now said if this goes on for months, about 50,000 could die over time - perhaps the same amount as the virus itself!

If it was brought forward by 2 weeks it would have  been brought in when rates were very low.  You argue that lockdowns have a limited shelf life, and with few deaths you could expect that shelf life to be shorter.

The shelf life would have expired  with low rates, leading to rapidly escalating rates and another attempt at lockdown ???  You ain't going to be saving deaths.  I'm getting increasingly sceptical   that anything will to be honest.

The 4K rate of infections  after a period of lockdown is dismaying to say the least

More people are being tested so the number will be higher? Is that correct?

Our lockdown is quite soft so infection rates will be higher than places where the govt didn't let you leave your front door

Lowest percentage of positive tests today for about four weeks, with the exception of one day which looks somewhat anomalous.

【23 April】14629 had coronavirus tests, 4583 were confirmed as positive, confirmed rate is 31.33%.

Check more details in the data dashboard https://t.co/SQw1mDRbBv pic.twitter.com/T2R5yQe8yV

— Peng Wu (@Egbert_PengWu) April 23, 2020

Miss Piggy taking it all in her stride! 

A lockdown two weeks earlier would still have lead to a mounting death rate for a while and the situation elsewhere in the world would show what could have happened. I think that both of these would have led to good observance for a while.

One thing which was interesting was to see that the infection rate seemed to be dropping markedly before the lockdown as people started doing self-distancing, fewer people travelled on the underground etc. There were stories about lots of people going out on the razz but i didnt see that, the photos of traffic jams and shots from telephoto lens down a wide 500 metre long path making things look more crowded than they were didn't necessarily lead to as much transmission as some people thought etc. There is the hope that with good hygiene, social distancing, working from home where able to, good contact tracing, more testing etc, that some sort of control can be provided. However, this control is likely to mean a high background death total IMO.

One thing I'm finding odd is the ratio of tests conducted to people tested. I could be wrong but wasn't it about 1.2:1 until a few weeks ago. Not it's around 1.6:1 and heading upwards? Do I smell a rat?

Yep, i would like to see this too. They must be gathering data on these people to try and understand where the lockdown is weakest and how measures can be put in place to address this if possible. Also, to try and understand if any of the things loosened in the first round of lockdown loosening will run into similar problems. Whether they would let us know, either to avoid problems for the government, or to avoid newspaper headlines proclaiming that 'everything is ok unless you do X' i don't know. Might be able to get an indication from what they do loosen (or try to tighten up).

I think that pnepaul is still a member of this forum and he got it quite badly. 

I was thinking exactly the same. Testing the same person 5 times a good way to 'achieve' 100,000 tests...

I suspect Q won't be happy.

Donald Trump contradicts health officials

President demanded the director of centres for disease control walk back his warning about a possible second wave of coronavirus.

US President Donald Trump has dismissed the possibility of a severe, second wave of coronavirus infections later in the year.

During a press briefing, he seemed to once again contradict his own health officials.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/donald-trump-contradicts-health-officials-200423083555500.html

Here we go:

"A leading Russian microbiologist has claimed the coronavirus is the result of Wuhan scientists doing 'absolutely crazy things' in their laboratory.

World renowned expert Professor Petr Chumakov claimed their aim was to study the pathogenicity of the virus and not 'with malicious intent' to deliberately create a manmade killer.

Professor Chumakov, chief researcher at the Engelhardt Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow, said: 'In China, scientists at the Wuhan Laboratory have been actively involved in the development of various coronavirus variants for over ten years.

'Moreover, they did this, supposedly not with the aim of creating pathogenic variants, but to study their pathogenicity.

..."

Here

This may in part be down to the problems with accuracy of the tests and the number of false negatives.