Coronavirus - sick and tired of the hysterical scaremongering

[Ashtower]

I work in an office and I've overheard a number of people blowing the outbreak all out of proportion. One colleague has ordered facemasks off Amazon - we're in SE England ffs. I wish people would educate themselves (from reputable sources) and stop winding everyone up.

Of course, a healthy amount of caution is important but it's made me aware of how mass hysteria ie witch trials occurred in the past. Just takes one ignorant person with a massive mouth (yes I'm talking about you Sue in budgeting).

There are some things that you can't get over the Internet, such as haircuts.
After 12 weeks of isolation, can we expect our octogenarians to have long flowing manes like 1970s rock stars? A whole nation of Roger Daltreys is surely the scariest scenario of all.

Is this what is affecting the numbers in Italy? Just too many patients and they can’t all be treated?

No one yet knows but I've not heard any speculation outside of the large elderly population, the density of the outbreak and the fact that it languished undetected for a couple of weeks.

My hair wouldn’t look much different after 12 weeks 😂

I think in Italy there's a huge amount of interaction and contact between the generations, so there were also optimal conditions for it to pass from asymptomatic younger people to the older generation.

I think the main problem is the elderly population in Italy in certain areas and when the semi-shutdown happened all the younger, healthier people who may have had the virus ran to the coast to their holiday homes and infected the elderly.
What a lot of people don't seem to understand is THAT YOU CAN FEEL WELL AND STILL HAVE THE VIRUS and CHILDREN CAN HAVE IT AS WELL BUT SHOW NO SYMPTOMS so BASICALLY ANYONE CAN HAVE IT

I'm not shouting at anyone, just everyone who doesn't quite get it.

Well Larry, you're a braver man/woman than me posting your thoughts on here. I agree these are very interesting arguments and the philosophy is quite complicated. Maybe more people should watch that episode of the good place with the old runaway train (I think they made it a tram) dilemma.

It is a judgment and 3 months may be better. However we really don’t want people dying entirely untreated. Being locked down is not really like dying, especially if you know time is limited, so your calculation of person lives is not quite right. Watching movies, WFH or reading a book are not totally awful! It is the limitless nature that is depressing.

Let's agree to disagree!

I think that being deprived of human interaction, outdoors (our parks closed last night), cafes, museums, book shops, work, travel, coffee, family, and so on is a deprivation in the extreme.

At this moment, it's the idea of this deprivation that is driving us crazy because we're only a half-week/week in. It a few days or weeks, it will be the actuality of it.

I wonder how many people have NCed. I would actually have a lot of respect for people who came back and said they had realised the seriousness, or be interested to know if they are the ones still denying and still ambling round in big groups risking people's lives.

I have pneumonia and my GP believes it is overwhelmingly likely it's from CV. Tuesday/Wednesday I was so very ill and struggling for breath I seriously feared I would stop breathing, with my children in the house. I have never felt fear like it. I do have underlying health conditions and when I read about the minimising "well it's only the elderly and vulnerable people that are mostly affected" the word only feels so dismissive. If any of these people actually saw the effects first hand on real people I think they would rethink their attitudes.

If it really came to a point of choosing in an ICU who gets a bed and ventilator you let the elderly with no dependents die first

I suspect that is just what happens in Italy so it is tragic but not that tragic in the grand scheme of things

A few people now saying this might actually be quite different from the current apocalyptic scenario, including Nobel Laureate Michael Levitt and graph theorists have also backed this up. See here;

www.zdnet.com/article/graph-theory-suggests-covid-19-might-be-a-small-world-after-all

It's nothing like swine flu or any other flu. To those we have a small amount of immunity.

To this we have no natural immunity whatsoever.

But the majority of people won’t get it and if they do it will only be mild. Surely that’s some kind of immunity?

Well fuck the minority then, it's not so bad if we all die

The 'small world' theory makes sense and backs up the cancellation of events and closure of social venues

@WeWantSweet

The current UK death rate is 68%. Not mild for the majority at the moment.

www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

I still think that the panic isn't justified. And that the resulting humungous world economic hardship that will ensue as well as the shorter term damage to mental health will cause far more deaths. I also feel it places an even larger economic burden on the young who already faced paying for the last economic downturn. God help them, many of them already faced a future of having less than the boomers and generations before. I also think that people will not adhere to the strict guidlines for SI, not least because effective provision e.g. getting food supplies without going out has not been made. So it becomes hard to justify. I don't see it lasting more than a few weeks.

This video is interesting. I agree with the sentiments

SingforAbsolution the current UK death rate is not 68%!! You have read the figures wrong

The current UK death rate is 68%. Not mild for the majority at the moment.

What are you on about?

Well, this didn't age well.....

(And no, the death rate is not 68%, the infection rate will possibly be that though)

not least because effective provision e.g. getting food supplies without going out has not been made

The govt announced working with suppliers to provide delivered food parcels.

When was this @VanGoghsDog? Really? All I've heard is supermarkets reserving deliveries to the vulnerable and it already looks like might not work so well. I haven't caught up with tge news today though.

That. The.

The current UK death rate is 68%. Not mild for the majority at the moment

I see where you get that figure from but what you need to factor in is that it is 68% if resolved cases. Bearing in mind that cases are only being tested when hospitalised. So out of 5683 tested positive, 135 recovered and 281 died, that means that the other 5267 are still being treated. It's still a scary figure but not as scary as 68% suggests.

But the majority of people won’t get it and if they do it will only be mild. Surely that’s some kind of immunity?

The majority of people will get it. They are predicting 60-80% of people will get it. That's most definitely a majority.

Those who don't are not immune, they are just lucky, or hermits, etc.

As for it being mild - yes, that's its MO, it's mostly mild, so it can spread very easily because we don't know we've got it or had it while we are busy passing it on.

Those who only have mild symptoms are not immune, they just fight it off better because they are stronger, younger, less unhealthy in other ways, their immune system reacts well. A strong immune system can overreact by the way and kill you all on its own!

There is NO immunity for this. It mutated from an animal virus and our human systems have no way to recognise it and create immunity - hence the govt "herd immunity" strategy was claptrap.

To this we have no natural immunity whatsoever

This doesn't make sense, as the scale of infection varies from asymptomatic to death.