To be worried about Coronavirus part 7

[Jenasaurus]

As nearly full on the other one, Ill just leave this here and link to it on the other thread for when its full

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3834698-To-be-worried-about-the-Coronavirus-Part-6?pg=10&messages=100

This video from lovely Dr John Campbell, is very informative and in part reassuring he has suggested a lower CFR of 1% based on the figures he is constantly analysing

Here is a link to Worldometer Map for live updates

www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

and here is another link for news sources from BNO News.

bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus-cases/

People over 70 are most at risk. And those with illnesses like diabetes, hypertension. The death rates for people with those are high.

Checking in

I don't think there should be consequences for those that feel the need to self isolate their children from school and their places should be kept open/ no fines etc but I don't think closing schools at this point makes sense.

As a PP said, for a couple of weeks after half term might have made sense but I think the horse has probably bolted now.

@hasdisa There was little communication with the British citizens on the cruise ship. We know from that man who made daily podcasts that they kept being promised they would be taken off the ship, then nothing happened. If the delay in taking them off, a much longer delay than other countries, was for good reasons, you explain that.
I think it was clearly incompetence and not a planned strategy.

The UK Government has to realise that people directly affected by this virus can do podcasts and blog. That means they can't get away with telling us bullshit about how they have good plans in place, if the people actually affected can do podcasts giving us a very different picture.

And tbh being lied to makes me trust the Government even less. The British Government I suspect are not prepared at all and just hope the whole thing will blow over.

What went wrong is the government trying to do something but without upsetting the travel industry.

I know I will get jumped on here, because according to some posters all travel is essential, but the big masses of tourists travelling everywhere could have been avoided, at some cost, admittedly, but the cost of the spreading infection will be much greater.

It's a case of watching the pennies and paying pounds later.

Students should have been asked to stay away, or should have been isolated, and no wooly pleads to self isolate.

Sorry, but this is a mess of our own making.

I think they do grade based on distribution anyway. For example, if they decide that the top grade is 80% or whatever and nobody gets that, they will adjust the boundaries downwards I think

Grades are based on actual results. It is no good saying the top grade is 80% if the highest score achieved is 55%. Boundaries are adjusted according to top and bottom scores. Although I suspect my maths is way over simplified there!

It is a worry for Year 11 and 13 students.

I mean the Government hasn't even said people who need to self isolate have to be paid. Self isolating will not work if people have no money.

I don’t think schools will close - too big an impact when their parents then have to stay off work to look after them.

This really is a Catch-22, particularly for HCPs who will be working, lockdown or not. But there is no satisfactory answer: if we don't take drastic measures the situation is going to be a lot worse than it is in Hubei.

If we have schools open and teachers taking larger classes to cover absence, that's only going to last as long as the last man is standing. Also we're into the realms of teachers as childcare: it's hard enough to manage a challenging class of 30 when you have an established relationship with them. Doubling or tripling that is going to make it near impossible. We need some more creative, perhaps community-based solutions instead of thinking of school closures as impossible due to parents' working commitments.

If schools were shut I would definitely be prepared to help NHS workers with their childcare in some capacity.

Checking in. Dh is going out into a nearby city tonight for drinks with friends, I wish he wouldn't go, but he's not taking it as seriously as I am. He just says it's the media blowing it all out of proportion. I just think surely its better to avoid large crowds for now? I've barely left the house this week with young dc and being pregnant too, I'd quite happily stay home until it all improves.

One theory about why children suffer less is that they have fewer receptors/ a smaller receptor (apologies, I'm absolutely non-medical) for the virus to attach too so the infection is milder. There was a scientist talking about this on R4 a couple of days ago and I wish I'd paid more attention.

I took DS to the ED yesterday with meningitis type symptoms, high fever, cold feet, stiff neck etc (he’s made a massive recovery and is fine today). We were obviously in the children’s bit but the adults bit was like something out of a movie, people were sat in the corner on the floor to be away from others, about 1/4 of the room were wearing masks. Where did they even get the masks?!

We have recently travelled to a 2-3 hour drive away from a quarantine area but we haven’t actually been to an area of concern but it did cross my mind 😬 it was much harder to get through to 111 than normal - took about 10 minutes to get through.

I work for a scientific company. We have people flying around the world. We are already making plans in case we need to shut down. We hope not, but if we do we suspect we will be an early closure because of where many staff have flown to. Some staff fly to a different country every 2-3 days. If one of them have the virus it will have been spread to multiple locations.

@BentBastard I've already taken my son out due to his medical condition. His head teacher said she is going to ring the council to see if they can hold his place and send him work home. She said if not, they will take him off the register but let me know when the class is nearing capacity so we can make a decision as to keep him off or send him back.
I know the council will refuse though as they go by PHE guidelines and they currently state there is only very low risk.

I’m starting to feel really cross and hurt with a colleague
She’s our HR manager and keeps telling anyone who asks that there nothing to worry about as it’s no worse than the flu and spreading misinformation on Facebook about it being more likely to win the lottery than to catch it right now.

She told me I was silly for worrying when I’m pregnant, have an asthmatic husband and a young toddler who suffers with croup on and off.

I cancelled my recent flight due to worrying about it and she just ridicules me to everyone in the office.

I don’t fancy being quarantined whilst pregnant with a toddler in a hotel room
In another country let alone any of us catch it

@UnitDare Thanks that makes sense. I read smokers are more affected as they have more receptors.

Information from ACAS about paying employees off work. Will be a nightmare if people are only paid statutory sick pay.

If someone is not sick but cannot work because they're in self-isolation or quarantine

There's no legal ('statutory') right to pay if someone is not sick but cannot work because they:

have been told by a medical expert to self-isolate
have had to go into quarantine
are abroad in an affected area and are not allowed to travel back to the UK
But it's good practice for their employer to treat it as sick leave and follow their usual sick pay policy or agree for the time to be taken as holiday. Otherwise there's a risk the employee will come to work because they want to get paid.

@Nicecupofcoco Although I am worried, I am still going out.

Hopefully the COBRA meeting will discuss and address most of the concerns. There are ways around all of this:

-GCSE/A levels: delivered online to extent possible, explain the way grades are awarded on a stanine basis anyway, give teachers the option to use predicted grades at their choice/headmasters choice if eventual outcome does not reflect the child's potential

• guarantees for statutory sick pay/clear guidance on who is allowed to stay home due to long term health conditions
• clear guidance for future travel and travel insurance. The government could guarantee 70-80k lost in a bank account during the financial crisis. They can easily compensate everyone for missing their already booked holidays if it is in the public interest
• NHS: this is main concern. I have so many friends who are doctors. We really really really need to learn from the lessons China has learnt. The reason the rest of China is less affected than Wuhan. Remember the rest of China also sent in doctors out of solidarity and started treating patients early and differently
• NOBODY currently knows what the true death rate is. WUHAN will hopefully tell us more in a few weeks. Lots of critical cases haven't recovered yet

@Parker231 Luckily not now, but I have worked places where they only pay statutory and would have paid nothing unless forced to. Self isolation will not work.

Ofwarren, yes yours is exactly the type of case I was thinking of with my comments. I can completely understand why you would remove your child from school and strongly feel you should not lose his place under these circumstance. I hope that the COBRA meeting on Monday result in schools being given more flexibility for case by case decision on these type of situations

Reading in the guardian a first hand experience and he said he got hiv drugs very early on which makes sense given what they have said about how it works. I guess if you stop that side it’s easier to recover

@fucket

I think this would be a good idea rather than the current plans to relax class sizes - hardly a hygienic and conductive way to learn and increases risk of passing virus back to parents. Anyone else worried about impact of repeated exposure to children in schools too if we don’t develop full immunity to it?

Poor teachers too, can’t see they’re going to be happy with these plans. Where will they fit all these students. One mass lesson in the hall? As someone mentioned it will be down to last man standing.

We all need to work together to find solutions where possible there’s not going to be one answer.

I wonder if the US will have to make testing and treatment for covid 19 free? Surely they can't have sick people wandering the streets spreading the virus far and wide? The social costs will be even higher than the medical costs? Or am I just dreaming...

A couple of points about the US which now has local person to person transmission identified in Oregan, Washington state and California.

Trump has placed Pence as his 'coronavirus tzar'. Pencel was heavily criticised for his slow response to a HIV epidemic in Indiana when he was governor there. A report found that 90% of infections could have been prevented if he had acted sooner. This was because of his religious hard line on sex and having a lack of respect for science and evidence based medicine. He was more driven by ideology than practical pragmatic decision making.

He is also a republican who believes in small state and putting commerce before social good. So ideologically is opposed to state paying for things. He will quite happily allow the death of poor people chalking it up to gods will.

The other point about health insurance and many Americans lacking it, is that since Trump came into power and destroyed the Affordable Care Act, he also made it legal for the sale of 'junk insurance'. Junk insurance is insurance which isnt really worth it's cost. It might be cheaper than other schemes but it has a huge amount of exemptions and excess fees.

This means that even people WITH insurance may find themselves facing huge bills due to coronavirus. This was highlighted by the case if a man who went to China and returned with symptoms. He was tested for the disease at a cost of $3500 which he thought his insurance would cover. It came back negative but he still ended up with a bill if $1300. Imagine if you had a family of 4 and got stuck with this.

I don't have much hope for the US. Trump devastated the country's national pandemic response agencies. He's stuck a guy with a proven terrible record on epidemics in charge. Ideologically the republican party are about as far from you want in a pandemic because of their ideological beliefs. The poorest in us society don't vote republican and black Americans generally are in poorer health to begin with.

Statements coming from senior figures in government about a vaccine are that they want it to be 'affordable'. Affordable not free. By definition this means that some people will not be able to afford.

In other words they ideologically actively happy for COVID-19 to kill the poorest.

Looking at the world map of confirmed cases I’m really struck by Indonesia have none