Worried about coronavirus thread 23

[ofwarren]

Welcome to thread 23
Here is a link to the previous thread
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3845520-Worried-about-coronavirus-thread-22

I feel that they have given up trying to delay it in UK. Perhaps they are right and the best thing to do if your are high risk is to quarantine yourself for a few weeks and wait for everyone else to get it and for there to be herd immunity. I plan to stay indoors most of the time as I am high risk and hope I don't catch it from DC.

I am not necessarily surprised that Shetland has cases- but what is the population of the Islands? 6 seems high if you compare it to Greater Glasgow

Are the 2 people who died overseas included in those figures so have 8 dies in UK + 2 overseas or have 10 now died + 2 overseas.

RE Shetland, take with the usual pinch of salt, but a poster on Reddit said it began with a couple who had been in Italy and decided to throw a party instead of self-isolating.

www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusUK/comments/fg0zsn/shetland_is_now_infected_with_covid19/

Let it spread in the majority of the population, cases will peak and then fall as when people are exposed to it their immune system will have antibodies against the virus. In the long run, overall cases will decrease because of herd immunity which means less likely for the vulnerable (when they re-enter society) to catch it.

This seems calculated to produce a fast peak, not a lower one. Implicit in that first sentence is a tidal wave of cases that will overwhelm the health service - exactly what's happened in other countries and what has led people there to urge other countries to take extreme measures earlier. I hope that's not what they're doing because for all the government talk about wanting to reduce the peak - this seems designed to do the opposite, to get it over with quickly, and implies that greater earlier deaths might have been accepted as a necessary evil by the politicians with the aim of getting the whole thing over with faster. But lots of the people in intensive care beds will not be people who know in advance they are vulnerable. This could affect anyone.

Businesses fire people to improve the health of the business. Governments already let people die for the economic health of the country and to make things like the health service sustainable (they have to - this is where rationing of the most expensive treatments comes in, even in normal times). It's quite possible the coronavirus policy makes sense looked at from one point of view, but it might well involve people in charge accepting a level of deaths and chaos in the short term that a lot of us would find completely unacceptable and too risky to us personally.

Questioning it, rather than blindly accepting it because "they have scientific advisers", is completely appropriate, and actually essential if people want to work out what's best for their own individual families (as that might be quite different to what's implied by national policy).

A few of the big London unis are moving to online teaching now.

Herd immunity is ridiculous. It works for measles because the “healthy herd” has been vaccinated.

This show of no actions is a euthanistic plan destroying families, trashing the economy and basically kicking off senicide.

Mark Jit, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who also works with Public Health England, told the Guardian that at this stage of the outbreak, the government’s plan appeared to be a sensible approach.

His colleague has criticised the UK response as insufficient (see earlier), but Jit said:

The whole world is at the situation now where we don’t expect to contain the virus. There might have been a window early on, but that has now passed … This virus is going to spread … A certain number of people are going to be infected in the UK, and the challenge is that they are not all infected at once. If it all happens at once then that is going to be a really big challenge for the NHS.

“You have to appraise the policies based on the timing. Early on when it looked like it was mainly concentrated in Wuhan countries were trying to prevent cases from entering and to detect the few cases that we had … Now there are countries which are closing schools and are having travel restrictions, but I think the motivation behind that is to really delay the epidemic … I don’t think countries are really expecting to prevent the epidemic.

“I’m not privy to the exact thinking of ministers, but the general thrust of it seems sound. There is no way to really prevent the virus spreading across the UK so the task is really to delay it."

KarenTookTheKids why would you think I was talking about school closures?

I'm talking about any action being taken at all!

please list what has changed/being done since beginning of Feb, other than hand washing.

Then list measure other countries have are takening.

Metaldog I skim read your link. it's very interesting but as of yet cannot see what the Gov see to make them follow the do nothing plan.

I have a question about worldometer and the UK statistics - how comes the UK has never reported any serious/critical cases? I'm worried that not reporting them means we are making the worldwide statistics unreliable. We clearly have serious cases as you dont have 10 people go straight from mild to dead, so why are they not reported? I feel its yet another issue the government is downplaying

@Lumene yes they are, my husband is recording his lectures now.

And @whereareyousleepthe two additional deaths reported were in London hospitals.

I think what is obvious, is that it is a juggling act, literally, trying to calculate the most optimum time to bring in full shutdown.

Too soon, the virus continues to cause problems and people will get fed up and start to go out and about again, causing a second peak.

Too late, then there could be further issues on the spread and the huge impact it will have on the NHS, which seems to be the worry they have at the moment.

Personally, I think they were expecting this peak and the 'modelers and virologists', will be looking very closely at the spread.

We have to trust them, Boris isn't the brightest, he ultimately can't take the decisions, he will be looking to those professors and health professionals, along with what the NHS to cope with.

Keep slagging the government off, is not going to make any difference and that is what they mean when they say 'we are guided by the science', do you honestly think they are not looking at it from all angles?

As @Sunshinegirl82 girl says, I would rather trust those 'experts', than a lot of people on Mumsnet, who may only have the odd GCSE, or A level in Science!

We've had an email from DS primary school asking if we have internet access so teaching can continue at home in the event of a school closure.

Statistically the same percentage of positive tests per number tested as yesterday. Test numbers were a lot lower yesterday. Perhaps there has been some catching up. We will only get a clearer picture when testing is increased. The stats are absolutely useless without demographics ie looking for hotspots. We probably have community spread but we are still in the incubation period for people returning from Italy. The scientists will have a much better picture of the contacts picture. It is far more complicated than just gathering positive test results.
London is the obvious hot spot for epidemic growth so maybe we will see a gradual roll out of lockdown starting with the capital.

Basically what @eeeyoresmiles said

When is an update expected? I need to go on the rather windy school run and tend to miss 100 posts by the time I get back.

doing something for the sake of being seen to do something is never a sensible approach to medicine. That's what politicians do.

It's happened Bercows

Re: 10 deaths representing high levels of cases.... I see the logic but I imagine 10 isn’t a big enough “sample size” to draw conclusions from. I’m not a statistician type though!

I mean an update on what, if anything, the government is going to do, not the numbers

@AHippoNamedBooBooButt on reddit a medic anonymously wrote a message (he’s been verified as genuine and other tip offs he’s previously provided came to pass) he/she stated that there were at least 20 critical in ICU’s, 9in one hospital in London but that it wasnt being reported in the media or included in the stats.

What should you clean home surfaces with eg kitchen and bathroom? I can't use bleach for health reasons.

According to my students Nottingham University is closed. All lectures now online. No idea if it's true or if my lot think I have the power to make that decision for our lot.

@AHippoNamedBooBooButt
Previously, I thought this was because people were being tested who were already in ICU and passed away before being included in the numbers of serious cases.
However, I know there is a patient in the north east who is in a coma so that’s at least one critical case, so it seems that they aren’t being reported.

Bercows bbc says they're in the meeting so I suppose it depends when it's finished