Marching steadily and inevitably towards an epidemic...

[Lycidas]

Does anyone else feel that we're heading straight for a public health crisis in the UK, but that there's no collective will to avert this?

The message at the moment seems to: 'we're not at the stage of...' Surely by the time we're at 'that stage', it'll be too late to do anything/

• We're not at the stage where we need to stop flights from anywhere.
• We're not yet going to discourage large gatherings.
• We're not at the stage where we need to discourage handshakes.
• We're not going to close schools/universities 'yet'

etc

And now latest from Chris Whitty, about anyone coming from Italy needing to self-isolate, but apparently "only people who have got symptoms need to self-isolate."

Hasn't it been established that people can have/pass on the virus while asymptomatic? What's the point of this?

It all just seems too little too late. It seems like they've decided everyone's going to get this so the only thing they're going to do is manage the messaging.

I was reading today about their ideas of how to manage it, and one of the ideas was just to let it happen!

Ostanovka, I also read that Boris Johnson had said that, and I was horrified! I think the government has made a conscious decision to prioritise the economy over saving lives. For example, surely to goodness it is not sensible to visit Northern Italy at the moment if you don't have essential business there, but Foreign Office travel advice only says this for a few specific towns. This means people with pre-booked holidays there won't be able to get a refund, so may still be tempted to travel.

That's really worrying but not that surprising that this government would put economics above health. It's like we are back in the history books

But surely you must keep the Economy going or else people will lose jobs, homes etc........

@BMW6

Yes but if we prioritised health sooner the long term impacts to both health and the economy could be mitigated. Instead we se to be prioritising short term economic impact over health and that will likely have much more far reaching ramifications.

Totally agree. I was listening to some guy in Washington and they've gone from 2 people having it to 39 people having it and 10 dead in something like 2 days.. I'll seer if I can find the link

Bump. The government will get crucified over this and it will cost them dearly in political terms.