This is absolutely, gut-wrenching awful:

• "We were expecting herd immunity to build. We now realise it’s not possible to cope with that," professor Azra Ghani, chair of infectious diseases epidemiology at Imperial, told journalists at a briefing on Monday night.


• "We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time."


• A suppression strategy, along the lines of the approach adopted by the Chinese authorities, "aims to reverse epidemic growth, reducing case numbers to low levels and maintaining that situation indefinitely".


• It requires "a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members"

If this is true, then the UK has lost a lot of valuable time and the lack of action over the last 2 weeks will have huge implications over the next 2-3 weeks. A tsunami is now probably heading for NHS ICUs and we can do nothing to stop it.

If they are around 70 and in good health the stats aren't that much different for them killing you.

Has anybody out there got any good news?

This is what the modelling team behind the 'herd immunity strategy' is now saying (realtime ICU demand is double what they were predicting before and we should be doing what Europe is doing):

• Overall, our results suggest that population-wide social distancing applied to the population as a whole would have the largest impact; and in combination with other interventions – notably home isolation of cases and school and university closure – has the potential to suppress transmission below the threshold of R=1 required to rapidly reduce case incidence


• We now find that school and university closure is a more effective strategy to support epidemic suppression than mitigation; when combined with population-wide social distancing, the effect of  school closure is to further amplify the breaking of social contacts between households, and thus suppress transmission.


• Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over.


• In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty around the limits of hospital surge capacity.


• In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.

Oh Dio mio.

They only had to look at what has been unfolding in other countries to realise their 'plan' was absolutely ridiculous. It really did not require Einstein to work it out.

Quite what these guys get paid for baffles me. If the average guy on a weather forum can figure it out and see the pitfalls then why can't highly paid 'experts'?

I agree but the govt is also responsible as the ultimate decision maker (and I am not saying this because I don't like Boris). We shouldn't lose any more time now, the decisions taken every day will have a big impact on what happens in the ICUs 2-3 weeks down the road.

Similarly to Europe, the govt should shut down almost everything as quickly as possible and ask people to stay at home.

People who read this thread should stop seeing loved ones who are elderly or with underlying conditions and should try to stay at home as much as possible.

• Belgium, Luxemburg, California, Ohio, Illinois, Massachusetts and Washington are initiating shut downs


• Ohio Democratic primary cancelled at the last minute


• The government of Singapore has accused the UK of undermining the global response to the pandemic and urged it to switch back to a containment strategy


• China national football league to restart on 18 April with spectators (!);


• China opens hospital for quarantining of foreign visitors from infected countries

...and the staff, of course. I really don't get why they don't just close the damned things ASAP.

I actually had a colleague of mine who's mentioned quitting to save his mum (he still lives with her, but he thinks we don't know as he finds it embarrasing. His mum is in her mid-70s with a long list of serious medical conditions - he is, in effect, her carer).

(There seems to be a feeling that perhaps, just maybe, they can drag this out for 2 more weeks and make it to the Easter holidays. The trouble with that is by then almost certainly most schools will have enough staff self-isolating that normal teaching will be impossible anyway - teachers and support staff aren't immune from picking up bugs in general. Not to mention by then at least another order of magnitude of cases will have happened, turning it from a "you probably don't know anyone with it" to "it's reasonably likely you do" thing.

It's laughable, really. The government guidance discourages me from going round a friend's house at the weekend, but I still go into a school in close proximity with 1700 children and 200 other adults each day!)

But the voices of reason here were telling us to be quiet and trust HMG and its scientists. We were told we were being ‘hysterical’

Some of us have been saying for weeks that a monumental debacle is coming in the UK. This is it.

You can see where this is going and its pretty much when and not if schools close so they should just get on with it.
I’m a little concerned about the ‘woolly’ stance on pubs and clubs as giving the public the responsibility to make the right decision hadn’t always been too clever. It’s almost as if HMG are disguising deferred culpability as the actions of a true liberal democracy.

Maybe as far as our government is concerned we should care less about democracy and demand action that will keep more of us alive.

I've had a poor nights sleep as well. I'll let you know later how the mood of our school is. Two staff off yesterday (all week).

This is the bit I don't get , you are right though they are desperately trying to get to Easter with this but then what ?

I listened to a Radio report this morning , they interviewed two guys in Oxford , they were carrying on regardless 

A girl around the corner runs a snooker hall , they are staying open because ……………………………...people stand 12 ft apart around a table WTF 

exactly that Neil , it wont work if people think the public wont go out ( not saying all ) then they are blinkered and live in a lovely world , sitting in a meadow with Julie Andrews singing the sound of music 24c and lambs skipping about , the world isn't like that