The virus. PPE. Part 1

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Cockney said:
Hmm interesting. I think hotter temps was a banker expectation to kill it.
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Nobody really knows. The temperature in Iran right now must be as warm as our spring, but temperature may not be the key factor. Infections with the endemic common cold coronaviruses drop after early spring (for whatever reason), but SARS-CoV-2 may have an easier time of it because there will still be many potential hosts without any immunity at all.
 
Retune said:
The second one is still working for me (and I'm on a home network at the moment, so it's not one of Nature's paywalled articles). You could try copying and pasting the link rather than clicking it, or googling 'Mystery deepens over animal source of coronavirus'. Just noticed they've said DNA rather than RNA for the virus - should send them errata!
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2nd link works here, clicking ( ipad iOS 13)
 
Retune said:
Nobody really knows. The temperature in Iran right now must be as warm as our spring, but temperature may not be the key factor. Infections with the endemic common cold coronaviruses drop after early spring (for whatever reason), but SARS-CoV-2 may have an easier time of it because there will still be many potential hosts without any immunity at all.
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Tehran 20° max 12° min now, probably more like our summer :(. But people will feel cold probably.
 
Softshoe said:
Your stats are wrong and overstate the figure by about 92%. The figure given by Theresa May on 22 February 2017 was 25,000 but the actual number was about 26,000 between 2003/04 and 2009/10.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/473264/number-of-hospital-beds-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

That doesn't give any numbers other than to say that the number reduced by over 70 thousand beds in the UK NHS in the 10 years before 2009 and doesn't give any source for the numbers. According to FullFact, a UK based independent charity checking a variety of facts, the numbers are as I gave (https://fullfact.org/health/number-hospital-beds-falling/). Their numbers are sourced from the NHS themselves and should therefore be accurate. They even quote Theresa May as giving those numbers, giving a link to the live TV feed of her saying this at Prime Minister's Questions! The only difference seems to be that your source talks about UK beds and mine about English beds, perhaps the other 24 thousand were in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but that doesn't seem likely as Scotland only had 13,246 in 2017/18. According to the same site the basis of collection of the data changed in 2010 so the numbers are not comparable. Even the American website you are using notes that there was a break in reporting in 2010.

Sorry but I don't accept your original claim of over 50 thousand hospital beds lost under Labour in a 10 year period. The total number of overnight hospital beds in the English NHS has actually been falling almost constantly since the 1980s. This means that hospital beds have been reduced under both Labour and Conservative governments, in response to declining lengths of stay.
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At least we're all agreed on one thing.....there won't be enough.
 
Cockney said:
Hmm interesting. I think hotter temps was a banker expectation to kill it.
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Yeah, I remember thinking the way it was worded when they started talking about the peak vs encouraging a slower prolonged rise (later described as squashing the sombrero) they pushed the reason for delaying into the summer as mainly being a temperature thing but hid among that was the "relieving pressure on the nhs".
 
sphexx said:
This is fun: "EU moves to limit exports of medical equipment outside the bloc" . Are we inside or outside until transition ends? Never mind Uncle Donald will give us preferential treatment ... or maybe not :(.

https://www.politico.eu/article/coronavirus-eu-limit-exports-medical-equipment/
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That’s not the only potential problem. Here’s another ‘benefit’ of being outside the EU:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/14/coronavirus-vaccine-delays-brexit-ema-expensive
 
Anthony Costello, professor of global health and sustainable development at UCL and a former director of maternal and child health at the WHO:

The UK’s Covid-19 strategy dangerously leaves too many questions unanswered

'The public health response to a serious epidemic is laid out simply and clearly by the World Health Organization (WHO). Test intensively, trace contacts, quarantine and maintain social distancing. When Covid-19 got out of control in Wuhan, after three weeks of public health inaction, the Chinese authorities mounted a proper campaign to control the virus. They listened to the WHO. They tested extensively, setting up mobile testing centres, and getting the test result time down from four days to four hours. They cut the time from onset of symptoms to lab result from 12 to three days. They identified family clusters (the virus spreads mainly through extended close contact so family members are most at risk) and arranged isolation centres for contacts. Above all, they mobilised communities. They didn’t leave it all to messages and nudge behavioural methods. Yes, Wuhan was in lockdown, but across the country local authorities had high autonomy to help people abide by these best public health principles. This was not a terrorised population but one passionate about tackling an existential threat. They also used apps and smartphones to get messages across, to share information about local clusters and for data collection. Everyone in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, ordered their food online, and had it delivered. And the strategy worked. In seven weeks China stopped the epidemic in its tracks. It now reports only 10 to 20 new cases per day in a population of nearly 1.4 billion. Deaths have plummeted. Several other countries, including South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, have copied this strategy, with local modifications, with similar results.
...
The WHO policy – practised by China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong – is to keep things damped down until drugs and a vaccine are available. Vaccines are a safer way to develop herd immunity, without the risks associated with the disease itself. Is it wise or ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of uncertain future benefit?
...
The stated [UK] government policy is to allow 40 million people to become infected. This could mean 6 million hospital admissions, 2 million requiring special or intensive care, and 402,000 deaths if the chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty’s 1% estimate of mortality is correct. We can suppress this epidemic in the way that China and other countries have done. Then we can worry about how to loosen up, and hope that a vaccine comes onboard. But we need to act now. Every day of delay will mean more people become infected or die.'

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...egy-questions-unanswered-coronavirus-outbreak
 
Softshoe said:
Your stats are wrong and overstate the figure by about 92%. The figure given by Theresa May on 22 February 2017 was 25,000 but the actual number was about 26,000 between 2003/04 and 2009/10.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/473264/number-of-hospital-beds-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

That doesn't give any numbers other than to say that the number reduced by over 70 thousand beds in the UK NHS in the 10 years before 2009 and doesn't give any source for the numbers. According to FullFact, a UK based independent charity checking a variety of facts, the numbers are as I gave (https://fullfact.org/health/number-hospital-beds-falling/). Their numbers are sourced from the NHS themselves and should therefore be accurate. They even quote Theresa May as giving those numbers, giving a link to the live TV feed of her saying this at Prime Minister's Questions! The only difference seems to be that your source talks about UK beds and mine about English beds, perhaps the other 24 thousand were in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland but that doesn't seem likely as Scotland only had 13,246 in 2017/18. According to the same site the basis of collection of the data changed in 2010 so the numbers are not comparable. Even the American website you are using notes that there was a break in reporting in 2010.

Sorry but I don't accept your original claim of over 50 thousand hospital beds lost under Labour in a 10 year period. The total number of overnight hospital beds in the English NHS has actually been falling almost constantly since the 1980s. This means that hospital beds have been reduced under both Labour and Conservative governments, in response to declining lengths of stay.
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So Labour still reduced the number of beds by a greater amount over a shorter period, we'll just have to guess by how many in the 3 years previous to make it a 10yr period.
 
arclight said:
Alaska now has it's first case.
It is flaring up in Australia where temperatures are warm. That does not bode well for a summer respite here.
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Temperatures in Spain and Italy are already U.K. summer temperatures. There have been plenty of 25C days in Alicante already.
 
More than 10,000 armed forces staff put on standby over COVID-19. What for, to stop people fighting over toilet rolls and other goods? To simply be there as a back up to the police, if there is mass disruption etc? Sorry if this has already been mentioned already in this thread, but I did not see it in the large thread.
 
nilagin said:
So Labour still reduced the number of beds by a greater amount over a shorter period, we'll just have to guess by how many in the 3 years previous to make it a 10yr period.
Click to expand...

Even if your 'figures' are accurate (I very much doubt it after reading other reliable sources), cutting the number of hospital beds by a further 17000 is somehow justifiable because a previous government cut them? nice.
 
Retune said:
Anthony Costello, professor of global health and sustainable development at UCL and a former director of maternal and child health at the WHO:

The UK’s Covid-19 strategy dangerously leaves too many questions unanswered

'The public health response to a serious epidemic is laid out simply and clearly by the World Health Organization (WHO). Test intensively, trace contacts, quarantine and maintain social distancing. When Covid-19 got out of control in Wuhan, after three weeks of public health inaction, the Chinese authorities mounted a proper campaign to control the virus. They listened to the WHO. They tested extensively, setting up mobile testing centres, and getting the test result time down from four days to four hours. They cut the time from onset of symptoms to lab result from 12 to three days. They identified family clusters (the virus spreads mainly through extended close contact so family members are most at risk) and arranged isolation centres for contacts. Above all, they mobilised communities. They didn’t leave it all to messages and nudge behavioural methods. Yes, Wuhan was in lockdown, but across the country local authorities had high autonomy to help people abide by these best public health principles. This was not a terrorised population but one passionate about tackling an existential threat. They also used apps and smartphones to get messages across, to share information about local clusters and for data collection. Everyone in Wuhan, a city of 11 million, ordered their food online, and had it delivered. And the strategy worked. In seven weeks China stopped the epidemic in its tracks. It now reports only 10 to 20 new cases per day in a population of nearly 1.4 billion. Deaths have plummeted. Several other countries, including South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Taiwan, have copied this strategy, with local modifications, with similar results.
...
The WHO policy – practised by China, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong – is to keep things damped down until drugs and a vaccine are available. Vaccines are a safer way to develop herd immunity, without the risks associated with the disease itself. Is it wise or ethical to adopt a policy that threatens immediate casualties on the basis of uncertain future benefit?
...
The stated [UK] government policy is to allow 40 million people to become infected. This could mean 6 million hospital admissions, 2 million requiring special or intensive care, and 402,000 deaths if the chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty’s 1% estimate of mortality is correct. We can suppress this epidemic in the way that China and other countries have done. Then we can worry about how to loosen up, and hope that a vaccine comes onboard. But we need to act now. Every day of delay will mean more people become infected or die.'

https://www.theguardian.com/comment...egy-questions-unanswered-coronavirus-outbreak
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In relation to this, I found this graph quite enlightening.

FB_IMG_1584205892295.jpg
 
mex said:
Even if your 'figures' are accurate (I very much doubt it after reading other reliable sources), cutting the number of hospital beds by a further 17000 is somehow justifiable because a previous government cut them? nice.
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I suspect two different things are going on. when you were ill you used to be encouraged to stay in bed and ‘rest’ and weren’t discharged until you were ‘fully recovered’. Over the years this changed and you were encouraged to keep active and sent home as soon as possible which also helped avoid hospital acquired infections. Treatments got better and so on. These sort of things meant fewer beds were needed.
The other thing was cutback in money for non-medical reasons.
There doesn’t seem to have been any planning for the inevitable pandemic virus :(.
 
Personally I don’t see how any figures from the u.k apart from deaths can be accurate due to the non existence of testing .. a brother of a family member thinks he may have it ,coughing and temperature etc told to self isolate with the family for a week .. so no record available. . The much publicised drive through testing stations idea seems to have vanished under these new guidelines ( lack of testing kits ?) some one needs to get a grip on this it’s turning into a shambles
 
the black fox said:
Personally I don’t see how any figures from the u.k apart from deaths can be accurate due to the non existence of testing .. a brother of a family member thinks he may have it ,coughing and temperature etc told to self isolate with the family for a week .. so no record available. . The much publicised drive through testing stations idea seems to have vanished under these new guidelines ( lack of testing kits ?) some one needs to get a grip on this it’s turning into a shambles
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I’m confused, you were telling us that this is a man made agent and that you had knowledge that we didn’t. How can “someone” “get a grip” on that? Have you shared your knowledge with the authorities yet?
 
nilagin said:
I read (may have been fake news) last week, that Italy had been requesting medical supplies and the EU had been blocking it.
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Sort of true, Germany was restricting/controlling medical supplies they produced which resulted in Italy being unable to get supplies but that has now been sorted according to what I read. EU was involved in the unblocking.
 
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the black fox said:
Personally I don’t see how any figures from the u.k apart from deaths can be accurate due to the non existence of testing .. a brother of a family member thinks he may have it ,coughing and temperature etc told to self isolate with the family for a week .. so no record available. .
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It's possibly much the same in other countries.
I've be saying similar all along when it's compared with previous flu epidemics, who rang their doctor to tell them
they had flu, not me I just stayed in bed till it passed and got on with my life, so I wasn't a statistic and I bet a lot of others were
the same, so no real figures to compare it with
 
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Gremlin said:
It's possibly much the same in other countries.
I've be saying similar all along when it's compared with precious flu epidemics, who rang their doctor to tell them
they had flu, not me I just stayed in bed till it passed and got on with my life, so I wasn't a statistic and I bet a lot of others were
the same, so no real figures to compare it with
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What's a "precious" flu?:)
 
I have just placed ricardofarce on ignore .never have liked his attitude anyway :lock::lock:
 
Gremlin said:
It's possibly much the same in other countries.
I've be saying similar all along when it's compared with precious flu epidemics, who rang their doctor to tell them
they had flu, not me I just stayed in bed till it passed and got on with my life, so I wasn't a statistic and I bet a lot of others were
the same, so no real figures to compare it with
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We know that the UK is testing far fewer cases than some other countries. We are now only testing hospital patients, not other people, even if they have symptoms. South Korea is actively seeking out cases in the community.
 
boyfalldown said:
At times I’ve been far colder in Aus then I ever was in London.
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I knew you’d chip in Hugh :) . When I spoke to my niece who has lived in the South West WA for past 30 year, a few months back about possibility of bush fire affecting our relatives in Melbourne, she said “oh no, I don’t think so, it’s always raining in Melbourne” :D:D:D. I had to tell her about the Black Saturday fires (and she’s a volunteer firey:(). She constantly complains of cold and wet in the Winter but I know (because I checked) the temperatures etc would be unremarkable in our a Summer.
 
Petition to test NHS staff:

https://www.change.org/p/the-nhs-test-frontline-nhs-staff-for-covid-as-a-priority

'I have a dilemma.
I have a cough.

I’m a junior doctor, currently working in an emergency assessment unit. My cough is minor, and it’s March, so quite common to get a cough... but how do I know it’s not COVID? The truth is I don’t.
So now I have to ask... do I stay off work for 7 days, leaving a shortfall of staff and putting further strain on the already strained NHS, when the likelihood is that I don’t actually have COVID-19?
OR, do I go to work with my minor cough (as I would normally) and risk potentially spreading COVID-19 to all of the sicker patients I see on a daily basis?
This same dilemma is being faced by ALL NHS workers, including the cleaners (who are the unsung heroes in all of this!) Currently, tests are only being done on patients who require a hospital admission. This virus will cause minor symptoms for most people, and relatively young and healthy staff are most likely to fall into that category. The issue is the patients we treat are not healthy, they are frail and vulnerable. Ask yourself this- if your loved one needs hospital care for a condition not related to Covid-19, would you want them to be treated by staff who are likely infected with it? If not, please help us out here.
We WANT to stay in work. We are YOUR National Health Service. We are proud to serve but we need some common sense here...
I am petitioning for prioritisation of testing for NHS staff... so that those who need to stay away do so, with a clear conscience, and those who can work can do so, with a clear conscience.'
 
bass_junkie83 said:
Matt Hancock has insisted that creating so-called "herd immunity" in the UK against coronavirus is not part of the Government's plan for tackling the killer illness.

https://politicshome.com/news/uk/he...5/matt-hancock-insists-herd-immunity-not-part

If this is true then I really don't understand how any delay to implementing social distancing can be justified.
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I think I understand the principle of herd immunity. However, given the never ending movement of people all over the planet the herd is never just those living in the UK. The herd must the entire world population otherwise there cannot be herd immunity.
I suspect that the bozos in the press have locked on to this "herd immunity" term and made something else to be sensational about.
 
Retune said:
Now more cases outside China than inside, and on a very different trajectory.

View attachment 271976
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I have been following these graphs on John Hopkin's Uni website for a while and they are very encouraging. However, I think that we really need to see a long period of the infections actually dropping. I have to wonder if a sudden upturn will transpire. Let's hope not.
 
arclight said:
I have been following these graphs on John Hopkin's Uni website for a while and they are very encouraging. However, I think that we really need to see a long period of the infections actually dropping. I have to wonder if a sudden upturn will transpire. Let's hope not.
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What is encouraging?
 
So today I woke up to a bad cough and a temp of 38.3.

Thankfully no weddings for a few weeks
 
Retune said:
The second one is still working for me (and I'm on a home network at the moment, so it's not one of Nature's paywalled articles). You could try copying and pasting the link rather than clicking it, or googling 'Mystery deepens over animal source of coronavirus'. Just noticed they've said DNA rather than RNA for the virus - should send them errata!
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Thanks for getting back.

I've just tried your copy/paste suggestion and I get an Error message. Tried again and ended up with the link I included in one of my posts 'worldometer', the chart that shows the data re cases/deaths in every country. I then Googled it and the best I could get was the Nature.com which you said was a funded site. I read it ,though. I did get a short article on it from an Israel source which I have to sign up too. https://www.molecular-medicine-israel.co.il/mystery-deepens-over-animal-source-of-coronavirus/

Not to worry, though I see it's quite complicated and I did read (in Nature.com) what Sara Platto, who studies animal behaviour at Jianghan University in Wuhan had said. "The problem is not the animals, it's that we get in contact with them" She referred to how civets were killed en-masse when it was stated that they were the source of SARS. I recall highlighting this very issue and cited civets/SARS in rather a long post a couple of days ago about the Chinese 'traditional' medicine industry.
 
Retune said:
Hope you're feeling better soon!
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Thanks.

I haven't really socialised in the past few weeks, but did take my daughter to A and E with a suspected broken ankle last Monday. Just a sprain thankfully, but that's the only place I can think of that I could have picked it up.
 
KitsuneAndy said:
Thanks.

I haven't really socialised in the past few weeks, but did take my daughter to A and E with a suspected broken ankle last Monday. Just a sprain thankfully, but that's the only place I can think of that I could have picked it up.
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Hoping its nothing serious, and you're soon over it.
 
Sent home from my new job this morning, self isolation for 7 days as my daughter has been sent home from school with a cough,temperature and a sore throat. My wife has also been sent home from work (hygene tech in a dentist) for 7 days isolation.
 
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