The virus. PPE. Part 1

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KitsuneAndy said:
Putting the economy first? Didn't believe the warnings?

I don't think we'll ever know unless there's a proper inquiry afterwards.

By tomorrow we're likely to have the second highest number of deaths in the world and I find that utterly appalling.
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Trouble is we have the biggest number of idiots out and about potentially spreading it still.
 
cambsno said:
Maybe if other countries had more deaths at the start we and others may have taken it more seriously.........
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We watched things unfold 2 maybe 3 weeks before it really hit us in Lombardy, the news portrayed it as a 'war zone' and a 'national tragedy', that should have been enough for us to think this s*** is real.
 
cambsno said:
Maybe if other countries had more deaths at the start we and others may have taken it more seriously.

I think it’s more complex than just saying is having more deaths than most is appalling. As one of the most populated counties in Europe, as well as being a major hub, plus density etc... it’s no wonder we are near the top.

For example we are 3rd in the obesity charts for Europe. That will have an impact based on initial analysis. All things being equal, that alone will mean we get more deaths than say France.

Number of deaths per million is more relevant anyway. Although we are near the top
Of that too.
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It all comes down to the fact that the government were sat on their hands for too long ummming and aaahing, ignored historical outbreaks of MERS and SARS, covered up their pandemic excercise from 4 years ago and put the economy before people.

As for your obesity statement, it's vague in and of itself. In your earlier statement you talk of complexities and the inability of accurate direct comparisons, then on obesity you make direct comparisons between UK and France on obesity related death from covid 19 :thinking::thinking:
 
donetello said:
Trouble is we have the biggest number of idiots out and about potentially spreading it still.
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I am a member on a few forums, one of them is a carp fishing forum, the majority of people on there are supporting an idea to email their local MP's to demand fishing is exempt from the lockdown rules.....because it's exercise! The country is full of selfish, uncaring fools.
 
tarric said:
Can some one explain this to me.
"Commuters will be asked to check their temperatures before travelling to prevent a second spike of infections when coronavirus lockdown rules are eased, it has been reported"

"Professor Jonathan Van-Tam said a “basic problem” with port entry checks was they would not pick up cases of people infected overseas but who were yet to display any Covid-19 symptoms. He said the virus had an incubation period of up to 14 days, meaning that someone with the disease could still “sail” through any screening as they would not necessarily show signs of a fever"

So for nearly six weeks of supposed lockdown we have let people arrive into the UK in there 10's of thousands daily without any screening or quarantining because the virus had a incubation period of up to 14 days so checking their temperature would have been ineffectual yet it is supposed to be effectual when people start commuting when lockdown rules are eased.
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While not being a supporter of the earlier port entry non screening, in the recovery phase of the virus the idea of people taking their temp before using public transport may actually be valid now that the R of the virus is under 1. I suspect that this will be linked to the proposed app to track peoples movements should indeed someone have a temperature but also if they do develop the symptoms later it's then trackable.

NONE of that means I agree with what happened at the ports for the last 6-8 weeks, I don't. I find it incredulous that the science continues to say that not screening those coming in wasn't statistically significant, while this may be true for statistitians, there's a difference between statistically significant and significant!
 
KitsuneAndy said:
Putting the economy first? Didn't believe the warnings?

I don't think we'll ever know unless there's a proper inquiry afterwards.

By tomorrow we're likely to have the second highest number of deaths in the world and I find that utterly appalling.
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We can not compare countries with one another.

The UK is currently running at circa 700 deaths per day and our lockdown is already failing - people are taking very little notice and breaking the guidance left, right and centre.

When the UK first went into lockdown it was the same - the news covered that first weekend and showed nobody cared about it.

Imagine trying to impose a lockdown in the UK when the death rate was below 100/day - no chance!

UK citizens probably hold their liberty higher than most in the world and generally hate to be told what to do - we are policed by consent and have no paramilitary police unlike most of the world - our Police can just not enforce a lockdown so we just couldn't have imposed this earlier.
 
It’s an avenue worth exploring, but routine temperature screening is a blunt tool with a number of false negatives/false positives [in medicine we’d call this low sensitivity/specificity]. The issue would be the asymptomatic carriers, and the subsequent impact on the R0.

The successful exits from this are limited, really. Lockdown for ever in some form... vaccine..... an effective treatment modality.... universal test and trace... herd immunity. There are huge issues with each one of those, and the final option may well be to ease lockdown and accept that this disease will slow burn with us for a long time to come. In the meantime, the lockdown has worked to a greater degree, and my colleagues and I expect it to be extended for as long as it remains viable.
 
I've not read the whole of the thread, but I get the impression from a lot of posts that hindsight is playing a large part in peoples rationale.

From my understanding, (and I may be wrong) the spread of the virus was underplayed, and not communicated in the way it should have been, China and the WHO seem to be complicit in this.
Certain countries took action outside the WHO guidelines and have since been proven to have been correct in their reaction. The world outside Asia was taken in by assurances it had been contained.

What people also seem to forget is that at the time the first case was reported (8th December), we were in the run up to a General Election, secondly we were, after the GE and into January, experiencing unprecedented rainfall, so maybe just maybe the all seeing "eye" of the government at the time was distracted, and without being political, I don't remember any party raising the issue in parliament at that time.
Only when the virus started to hit Europe, namely Italy, did we wake up.
People in this country didn't take it seriously until the beginning of March, I didn't notice the drop in sales in my shop until the week ending 17th March, I took it upon myself to close my shop prior to the government imposing a lockdown and offering the financial support packages, I know of a good many other shopkeepers who did the same.

What people are failing to mention is that the longer people don't heed the distancing and other regulations put in place, it not only puts the NHS at risk, and other people, it also puts peoples livilihoods at risk too.
I, like I suspect many others have put an awful lot of money into our business's, we could lose all that, simply by the lockdown being extended longer than it needs to.

So for everyones sake, do as you are told.
You are being asked to sit on your backside, and go out as little as possible, what is difficult about that ?
 
Stansthirdboy said:
You are being asked to sit on your backside, and go out as little as possible, what is difficult about that ?
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For those who can afford it that's the best advice. (y)

The problem is that several million people live in precarious circumstances and the tension between doing what the government wants and seeing their children starve is not going to be easy to resolve. I believe that it's the duty of the government to accept the need to do something to protect those people along with everyone else.

There will be time enough to assign blame when the problems have been taken care of. For the moment, the government needs to fix the problem they seem to have done their best to ignore: they must get money to the millions of people who are not receiving money in this country.
 
Donnie said:
wasn't statistically significant, while this may be true for statistitians, there's a difference between statistically significant and significant!
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Rant on:

Something which statisticians have been telling scientists for years !!

By strange irony, it was the journal "Epidemiology" in the 1980s that might have been amongst the first scientific journal to make a proper stand on this and made an attempt to stop scientists from using the meaningless and misleading measure of "statistical significance" in submitted papers.

They did, however, have to backtrack on this a bit in 1997, which in spite of being supported by statisticians, reaped a bit of a backlash from scientists, so they softened their approach to one of discouraging.

As an aside, the meaning of "significant" in "statistically significant" has nothing in common with the everyday meaning of significant, it's purely related to the probability of an event occurring and tells you nothing useful about the importance or scale of that event, and therefore completely useless as a decision making tool.


Rant off :-)
 
Stansthirdboy said:
I've not read the whole of the thread, but I get the impression from a lot of posts that hindsight is playing a large part in peoples rationale.

From my understanding, (and I may be wrong) the spread of the virus was underplayed, and not communicated in the way it should have been, China and the WHO seem to be complicit in this.
Certain countries took action outside the WHO guidelines and have since been proven to have been correct in their reaction. The world outside Asia was taken in by assurances it had been contained.

What people also seem to forget is that at the time the first case was reported (8th December), we were in the run up to a General Election, secondly we were, after the GE and into January, experiencing unprecedented rainfall, so maybe just maybe the all seeing "eye" of the government at the time was distracted, and without being political, I don't remember any party raising the issue in parliament at that time.
Click to expand...

The period in December before the GE is not really relevant. No government could have been expected to respond then, since nobody had recognised anything unusual was going on until a cluster of pneumonia cases was reported towards the end of the month (earlier cases were identified retrospectively) and the virus was not properly identified and sequenced until early January. There was then a period of a couple of weeks when China should have acted more quckly, not hushed up its whistleblowers, and been much more open about the probability of human to human transmission. The WHO can't be blamed for simply reporting the information they were getting from China, and by the 22nd they had done their own investigation and announced there was evidence for human to human transmission. By the end of January, publications had begun to appear in major journals about the severity of the illness, the WHO had declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, cases had appeared here and elsewhere, and countries from the UK to South Korea were applying the 'test, track and isolate' strategy that the WHO and other public health experts had advocated for decades. Every country outside China got the same information at the same time.

While South Korea continued with this policy, ramping up its testing and contact tracing efforts to cope with the expected demand and managing to suppress a major outbreak, policy in the UK took a different course. Rather than using precious weeks in February and early March to build up a strong capacity for testing and tracing, it was decided that, beyond a certain point, we would move to a 'mitigation' stategy where (as with a flu outbreak) there would be no further attempt to contain the epidemic. With out modest testing and contact tracing capacity exceeded, we had abandoned containment by 12 March. This, I think, was the big failure of policy, and it was compounded by the effects of NHS funding cuts over the last decade, and a failure to learn from our own pandemic planning excercises and the responses to SARS and MERS outbreaks in other countries. Between the end of our attempts to contain the epidemic and the start of the lockdown on 23 March (in reponse to alarming projections of the cost of relying on 'herd immunity'), tens or hundreds of thousands of people would have become infected.

This is not just about hindsight. Many experts were alarmed at the time the decisions were being made:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/uk-government-coronavirus-science-who-advice
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...st-britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-uk-expert-advice-wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...in-failed-prepare-mers-sars-ebola-coronavirus
 
Retune said:
The period in December before the GE is not really relevant. No government could have been expected to respond then, since nobody had recognised anything unusual was going on until a cluster of pneumonia cases was reported towards the end of the month (earlier cases were identified retrospectively) and the virus was not properly identified and sequenced until early January. There was then a period of a couple of weeks when China should have acted more quckly, not hushed up its whistleblowers, and been much more open about the probability of human to human transmission. The WHO can't be blamed for simply reporting the information they were getting from China, and by the 22nd they had done their own investigation and announced there was evidence for human to human transmission. By the end of January, publications had begun to appear in major journals about the severity of the illness, the WHO had declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, cases had appeared here and elsewhere, and countries from the UK to South Korea were applying the 'test, track and isolate' strategy that the WHO and other public health experts had advocated for decades. Every country outside China got the same information at the same time.

While South Korea continued with this policy, ramping up its testing and contact tracing efforts to cope with the expected demand and managing to suppress a major outbreak, policy in the UK took a different course. Rather than using precious weeks in February and early March to build up a strong capacity for testing and tracing, it was decided that, beyond a certain point, we would move to a 'mitigation' stategy where (as with a flu outbreak) there would be no further attempt to contain the epidemic. With out modest testing and contact tracing capacity exceeded, we had abandoned containment by 12 March. This, I think, was the big failure of policy, and it was compounded by the effects of NHS funding cuts over the last decade, and a failure to learn from our own pandemic planning excercises and the responses to SARS and MERS outbreaks in other countries. Between the end of our attempts to contain the epidemic and the start of the lockdown on 23 March (in reponse to alarming projections of the cost of relying on 'herd immunity'), tens or hundreds of thousands of people would have become infected.

This is not just about hindsight. Many experts were alarmed at the time the decisions were being made:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/uk-government-coronavirus-science-who-advice
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...st-britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-uk-expert-advice-wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...in-failed-prepare-mers-sars-ebola-coronavirus
Click to expand...

Have the NHS funding cuts had a real impact? I ask, as we have not run out of capacity by a long way, have plenty of ventilators etc... the only issue is PPE which I guess is poor short-term planning (should have been stockpiling in Jan). The only thing I can think of is the fact that many other procedures have been cancelled, maybe they wouldn't had they had more capacity?
 
Retune said:
The period in December before the GE is not really relevant. No government could have been expected to respond then, since nobody had recognised anything unusual was going on until a cluster of pneumonia cases was reported towards the end of the month (earlier cases were identified retrospectively) and the virus was not properly identified and sequenced until early January. There was then a period of a couple of weeks when China should have acted more quckly, not hushed up its whistleblowers, and been much more open about the probability of human to human transmission. The WHO can't be blamed for simply reporting the information they were getting from China, and by the 22nd they had done their own investigation and announced there was evidence for human to human transmission. By the end of January, publications had begun to appear in major journals about the severity of the illness, the WHO had declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, cases had appeared here and elsewhere, and countries from the UK to South Korea were applying the 'test, track and isolate' strategy that the WHO and other public health experts had advocated for decades. Every country outside China got the same information at the same time.

While South Korea continued with this policy, ramping up its testing and contact tracing efforts to cope with the expected demand and managing to suppress a major outbreak, policy in the UK took a different course. Rather than using precious weeks in February and early March to build up a strong capacity for testing and tracing, it was decided that, beyond a certain point, we would move to a 'mitigation' stategy where (as with a flu outbreak) there would be no further attempt to contain the epidemic. With out modest testing and contact tracing capacity exceeded, we had abandoned containment by 12 March. This, I think, was the big failure of policy, and it was compounded by the effects of NHS funding cuts over the last decade, and a failure to learn from our own pandemic planning excercises and the responses to SARS and MERS outbreaks in other countries. Between the end of our attempts to contain the epidemic and the start of the lockdown on 23 March (in reponse to alarming projections of the cost of relying on 'herd immunity'), tens or hundreds of thousands of people would have become infected.

This is not just about hindsight. Many experts were alarmed at the time the decisions were being made:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/15/uk-government-coronavirus-science-who-advice
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...st-britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/18/coronavirus-uk-expert-advice-wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...in-failed-prepare-mers-sars-ebola-coronavirus
Click to expand...

I don't read The Guardian, in fact I don't read or watch any mainstream news.
What I do react to is what people say on social media, and reports coming out of China that were removed from Youtube, reports that the first case of the virus has been traced back to October, not November as reported by the WHO.
Reports that the number of deaths being reported by the Chinese were not correct, u ntil it became apparent that they had to "go public" in January.

I also saw a report on Youtube that one case of infection was traced to a bus full of people, one man on the bus infected people up to 20ft away, which blows the 2mtr rule out of the water.

Now I don't know whether to believe the people on the ground, or British jounalists who don't have a good track record in reporting the truth, but thats just the cynic in me, and not realtive to your field of expertise
 
cambsno said:
Have the NHS funding cuts had a real impact? I ask, as we have not run out of capacity by a long way, have plenty of ventilators etc... the only issue is PPE which I guess is poor short-term planning (should have been stockpiling in Jan). The only thing I can think of is the fact that many other procedures have been cancelled, maybe they wouldn't had they had more capacity?
Click to expand...

The PPE issue is more down to the "just in time" mentality we have adopted, rather than stockpiling "just in case"
"Just in time" doesn't allow for the unexpected.
There is an excellent video on YouTube on the Mini factory that works on the "just in time" principle, one lorry is delayed on it's journey down the M40, and the whole production line is within seconds of coming to a halt, which if it did would cost the company thousands
 
Stansthirdboy said:
I don't read The Guardian, in fact I don't read or watch any mainstream news.
What I do react to is what people say on social media, and reports coming out of China that were removed from Youtube, reports that the first case of the virus has been traced back to October, not November as reported by the WHO.
Reports that the number of deaths being reported by the Chinese were not correct, u ntil it became apparent that they had to "go public" in January.

I also saw a report on Youtube that one case of infection was traced to a bus full of people, one man on the bus infected people up to 20ft away, which blows the 2mtr rule out of the water.

Now I don't know whether to believe the people on the ground, or British jounalists who don't have a good track record in reporting the truth, but thats just the cynic in me, and not realtive to your field of expertise
Click to expand...
If you want a reliable source of information on the virus that isn't part of the 'mainstream media', have a listen to this:

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

It can get a bit technical if you haven't done much biology, but you can hear expert virologists and doctors talking, unfiltered by journalists.
 
Stansthirdboy said:
The PPE issue is more down to the "just in time" mentality we have adopted
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As with monetarism, JiT was an example of short termism on the grand scale. Plenty of people pointed out that it was bad economics, bad engineering and bad business but the business school "experts" sacked disenters where they could and ignored them where they couldn't.
 
Retune said:
If you want a reliable source of information on the virus that isn't part of the 'mainstream media', have a listen to this:

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/

It can get a bit technical if you haven't done much biology, but you can hear expert virologists and doctors talking, unfiltered by journalists.
Click to expand...
I totally flunked Biology,

My ex missus reckons its pure luck we have two kids :cautious:
 
Stansthirdboy said:
The PPE issue is more down to the "just in time" mentality we have adopted, rather than stockpiling "just in case"
"Just in time" doesn't allow for the unexpected.
There is an excellent video on YouTube on the Mini factory that works on the "just in time" principle, one lorry is delayed on it's journey down the M40, and the whole production line is within seconds of coming to a halt, which if it did would cost the company thousands
Click to expand...
Car manufacturers have been running on a Just in Time basis for over 20yrs, probably more than 25yrs. It seems to run quite well.
The PPE problem is global, not just a UK problem. Whilst the Chinese were keeping quiet on their problem, they were buying up PPE. By the time the cat was out of the bag and they were in lockdown, they had the ventilators and most of the PPE required to kit out their temporary hospitals. A lot of PPE comes from China, so reduced supplies were coming out to supply the global need.
 
Uncle Fester said:
As I said, that was actually meant to be in the testing thread. Please forgive my mistake.

https://www.talkphotography.co.uk/t...ot-100-000-per-day.710313/page-2#post-8694610

I thought it was quite an apt response to the claims of 100k daily tests being achieved. Probably best that you make any further response there.
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TBH it's not a thread I've any interest in. I still check back here occasionally to see if anything pertinent gets posted, but most of the time it's just politics.
 
I see in the good old USA unmasked anti lockdown protesters have been shouting in the face of unmasked police and here in the UK civil liberties groups are worried about contact tracing apps. I fully expect large numbers of idiots to boycott any tracing app.

You couldn't make this up. What the hell is wrong with people? I think some are just too stupid to live and sadly they could take me and my loved ones into the next world with them.

WTF?
 
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woof woof said:
I fully expect large numbers of idiots to boycott any tracing app
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Perhaps they don't trust their government, and expect tracking information will be used for malign purposes, rather than just keeping tabs on those who've had contact with infected individuals?
 
woof woof said:
into the next world with them.
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One of the advantages of being an agnostic with atheist leanings is that I lean towards the non-existence of an afterlife. Imagine the horror of discovering you were stuck with the lunatics of this world for eternity...:runaway:
 
Stansthirdboy said:
I don't read The Guardian, in fact I don't read or watch any mainstream news.
What I do react to is what people say on social media, and reports coming out of China that were removed from Youtube, reports that the first case of the virus has been traced back to October, not November as reported by the WHO.
Reports that the number of deaths being reported by the Chinese were not correct, u ntil it became apparent that they had to "go public" in January.

I also saw a report on Youtube that one case of infection was traced to a bus full of people, one man on the bus infected people up to 20ft away, which blows the 2mtr rule out of the water.

Now I don't know whether to believe the people on the ground, or British jounalists who don't have a good track record in reporting the truth, but thats just the cynic in me, and not realtive to your field of expertise
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Ah YouTube that bastion of reliable trustworthy news..................................:LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL:
 
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jakeblu said:
Ah YouTube that bastion of reliable trustworthy news..................................:LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL:
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When the video being shown is by members of the public who are actually there and it's not edited, then yes it's more trustworthy than what the Biased Broadcasting Corporation push out.
 
Stansthirdboy said:
When the video being shown is by members of the public who are actually there and it's not edited, then yes it's more trustworthy than what the Biased Broadcasting Corporation push out.
Click to expand...

OH dear that just about says it all.

YouTube is a cesspit of misinformation, likely worse than any other social media platform, and to be brutally honest if you believe the garbage that is put out there then its no wonder you're so woefully misinformed. If they were subject to the same broadcasting rules and regulations as the BBC then most of their content would disappear overnight.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Perhaps they don't trust their government, and expect tracking information will be used for malign purposes, rather than just keeping tabs on those who've had contact with infected individuals?
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The Australian Government is working very hard to convince people this isn't the case. They obviously recognise that's the biggest barrier to uptake
 
jakeblu said:
OH dear that just about says it all.

YouTube is a cesspit of misinformation, likely worse than any other social media platform, and to be brutally honest if you believe the garbage that is put out there then its no wonder you're so woefully misinformed. If they were subject to the same broadcasting rules and regulations as the BBC then most of their content would disappear overnight.
Click to expand...
:LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL::LOL:

Carry on being a sheep
 
Donnie said:
It all comes down to the fact that the government were sat on their hands for too long ummming and aaahing, ignored historical outbreaks of MERS and SARS, covered up their pandemic excercise from 4 years ago and put the economy before people.

As for your obesity statement, it's vague in and of itself. In your earlier statement you talk of complexities and the inability of accurate direct comparisons, then on obesity you make direct comparisons between UK and France on obesity related death from covid 19 :thinking::thinking:
Click to expand...


I think the below video explains quite well how the different measures achieve a certain effect and why they had to be applied at certain times - remeber the Lockdown is very limited in the UK due to our society; we won't stand it or be able to enforce it.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCOkEXsfPoQ
 
Retune said:
I think I should make a Youtube video about the mysterious phenomenon of people with strangely familiar opinions who join specialised discussion sites, make a few token on-topic posts, then jump straight to the political threads.
Click to expand...

Indeed, there appears to be a glut of it lately.
 
Interesting that the bus load of people were being infected 20ft away, our office is being reconfigured so we are 6m away from each other. Perhaps 2m is only outside?
As for the tracing app, I too have misgivings about it, all well and good to use it now for this particular reason, but can we trust it will be totally removed subsequently?
As it happens I probably have no reason to care one way or the other but I have an uneasy feeling about being traced for no reason other than "because we/they can".
I am fully aware of many other reasons why it might be of great use, for say tracking criminals, terrorists etc and not being a liberal do-gooder I see benefits in it's application but I still have an uneasy feeling about widespread tracking.
 
Retune said:
I think I should make a Youtube video about the mysterious phenomenon of people with strangely familiar opinions who join specialised discussion sites, make a few token on-topic posts, then jump straight to the political threads.
Click to expand...
Marc said:
Indeed, there appears to be a glut of it lately.
Click to expand...
Perhaps they have a YouTube channel to promote ;)
 
woof woof said:
and here in the UK civil liberties groups are worried about contact tracing apps. I fully expect large numbers of idiots to boycott any tracing app.

You couldn't make this up. What the hell is wrong with people? I think some are just too stupid to live and sadly they could take me and my loved ones into the next world with them.
Click to expand...

How is this supposed to work when many people don't have smartphones and those that do won't have either bluetooth or wifi turned on all the time, I for one rarely do unless I need it
Many have pay as you go sims which charge for everything, mainly because they can't afford contract phones and
only use them if needed, they won't appreciate their monthly payment being eaten away by a govt app
So you could be stood next to someone who is a carrier and it won't register on the system
 
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