" I must level with you, I must level with the British public, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time."

[YoursTunbridgeWells]

Quote Boris Johnson.

Lots of people will die.

@CaptainNelson
China is still taking tough measures to avoid a second wave of infections. There are strict quarantine measures in place for those people returning to China: 14 day home quarantine assuming you pass the health check at the airport and have no symptoms is the very minimum arrivals can expect. Home quarantine also involves twice daily temp checks carried out by officials coming to your home.
Office workers went back to work on 24th Feb, but schools are still closed.
Btw The above relates to my province, Jiangsu.

thinking about trying to leave the city/ getting hold of medicines

@DoubleAction
I don’t think people believe it’s over in China, but restrictions started to be relaxed w/c 24th Feb and no second spike yet.

@highghost I saw this yesterday:

www.rcog.org.uk/globalassets/documents/guidelines/coronavirus-covid-19-virus-infection-in-pregnancy-2020-03-09.pdf

When China comes out of lockdown, in the highly likely event disease re-explodes, they are absolutely fucked. 1. Because it will explode in major cities - disease will be imported. And 2. The people simply will not and financially cannot stand another major lockin. Compliant or no, mental health effects will overwhelm compliance and lead to civil unrest.

We actually need to ready ourselves for this, because the disease re-imported to China from the West will then be explosively re-exported to the West, exacerbating our existing outbreak. Potentially also with more severe mutations.

Also - Cam77, China's financials have been fiction for many years, going back to the Cultural Revolution and "Make Steel!" nonsense. The more things change etc.

*Look - I loathe BJ but in this I think he’s sort of right.

People are going to die - I’m immunosuppressed & I’m likely to get very ill if not die. Well if it’s my time it’s my time. No one can live forever no matter what we want.

I’m scared, of course I am, but I starting to deal with things at home & do clearing out. Keeps me occupied & will hopefully be less for my loved ones to deal with if I go. I’m mid 50s but with my conditions unlikely to live much more than 70/75 anyway.*

Good for you. I'm in the same situation - immunosuppressed, won't make old bones - but do you have children? I do, they're at school. I can't leave them. They need me. But the government want me to take my chances commuting into work and letting my children go to school until the point where enough people have got ill that they make an official announcement that I should stay at home. Hoping that I haven't caught it by then. Until then - what do I do? Stop hugging and kissing my children and my husband? Insist on working from home though I have nothing official to back me up and my work think I'm taking the piss? I feel betrayed.

Medical Science and Epidemiology doesnt take account of individual people, human beings and their loved ones. It's about humankind, disease, herd immunity and collective survival. It isn't palatable, it's hard hitting, but its these difficult decisions that have to be made to get through this. Plus people forget they can individually choose a route to meet specific needs of their family if they don't agree the government is doing enough.

They're not making it very easy though are they, when it comes to things like working from home or feeling pressured to run events that haven't been explicitly cancelled from higher up? It's very much "we'll give you more instructions later". Nothing about people making their own decisions - even the elderly/unwell are only invited to get extra advice from their GP or specialist, not invited to make their own decision about when they might want to take social distancing measures based on their own judgement about risk v. loneliness.

I think too many people don't realise what you say about individuals not mattering, and are taking the lack of explicit instructions to avoid socialising as a sign that it's actually all quite safe and fine for another couple of months. All it really means is that deaths up to a certain number (which will trigger the next steps) are considered acceptable at this stage so that the next steps can be delayed. But if one of those deaths is you or a loved one, you might wish you and many other people had taken greater social-distancing steps earlier off your own bat.

@ Dongdingdong

Key is ‘at the moment’. Conservative estimates suggest that the number of infections doubles every three days. I’ll leave you to work out where we are in a couple of months (Hint: over 30 million infections in the UK)

People are lax because they don’t comprehend how exponential growth works once the numbers take off.

This is Boris

Ramalama

Yes I have dcs - one at uni, one at school. I’ve developed what I think are cold symptoms (doesn’t follow the cv symptoms & importantly mom fever) but will now self isolate in case.

Yeah if the Labour Party were dealing with this, they would probably tell us that it's OK because Covid 19 identifies as common cold and therefore we have nothing to fear Ah gallows humour, I like it. But never have we needed a decent opposition more - and yet they're more wedded to magical thinking and biology denial than the government.

It's left to Jeremy Hunt - Jeremy Hunt! - to be the voice of reason.

I’ve just closed my eyes to try to go to sleep and I’ve got these words going round my head. I’m sure it’s true but why would our leader say this to us, why? Is it some kind of psychological preparation, as they’ve been using behavioural science, trying to prepare us for the situation in Italy? What happened to the reassurances British prime ministers have always given in times of crisis and war? This is like walking into a nightmare, how can the world have been turned upside down, to quote I think the New York Mayer or some other world leader, seemingly overnight?

What really would you expect any leader to say?, would J Corbyn really put it any differntly?.

As to public events and the like then don't go, keep your distance from others outside and wash your hands when you come in etc

Maybe by next week they'll tighten up a bit moie but some may be off work but hey! someones got to man the bog roll factories!

What I'm getting rather concerned about I asked my chemist how's he doing for stocks of my blood pressure meds he just said its getting more difficult by the day now that India has banned exports:(

I wonder how many people still think it doesn't apply to them?

They want some people to get it to start off herd immunity. It's up to you what you do with the information. Personally, I wouldn't be putting the "outdoor events are fine" theory to the test anytime soon.

@SnoozyLou

I wonder how many people still think it doesn't apply to them?

Probably not many.

I think this is a very irresponsible comment. A) it's conjecture and b) even if true it's just going to cause panic and upset which are not helpful.

Is that to me @thatmustbenigelwiththebrie?
Everything on here is conjecture really. And I dont see how me saying that probably not many people don't think it applies to then will instil panic and upset

@DustyMaiden that's exactly what I thought when I heard him say that.

If that's the case Boris, how about you fucking do something?

The reason behind keeping schools open, due to NHS workers, is total bollocks. Does anyone know any medical staff that work school hours only? Cos I don't.

We are NOT in delay phase. We have not listened to the WHO who have slammed us for the lack of inaction. We have not listened to the pleas of people from Italy (I have ExILs over there who have confirmed to ExDP how horrific it is).

We. Are. Fucked.

That's not true @LittleCabbage.

Radio4 had extensive coverage of this yesterday and they were saying they have no idea how long immunity even lasts after you've had it - and they suspect perhaps only a few months. So pfffff goes your little theory.

Also, Boris didn't think of this....

Every other country (mostly) is trying to contain it, go on lockdown so it disappears. If we "let it run riot" and become Corona Capital, won't everyone just bar flights from the UK for the forseeable? How will that help our businesses, especially travel companies?

I've not RTFT so apols if I'm covering old ground, but I do think the govt could have said, from now if you can work from home, do, if you can meet virtually, we recommend it, if you have the option to avoid large events, then do it, don't travel unless you really have to. As a PP said, the lack of any mention of these things means that lots of will feel we can't say to work 'I'm going to WFH unless I MUST come into the office' and therefore are exposing ourselves to risk unnecessarily... 🤷🏻‍♀️

Surely if we start the social distancing measures earlier rather than later, we stand a better chance of fewer people catching the virus No. It is airborn. It will mutate. As peole start moving around again it will then come back and we will be where we are now.

The WHO praised China for their quarantine efforts in the initial stages - well, once they had stopped hiding its existence, before the virus escaped and reached pandemic status. They were praised for the attempt to slow it down, that should have given the rest of the world time to do something, But that didn't happen. Selfish people, asymptomatic people, many people travelled and too it with them. We have no idea what will happen in China over the next few weeks.

Italy locked down, look what happened... we have no idea what will happen there either.

Too many commentators want to shout that nothing is being done. We all need to listen to epidemiologists, the know how such viruses spread. So we have a readiness plan... we don't have as many cases as Italy, so we have a different plan.

Basically, if this virus is as Spanish flu etc, it will come back regularly, it will mutate, it will eventually be added to the WHO flu jab (though that should be in a couple of years rather than a decade or so due to advances in science).

So we get ill now or we get ill next winter... whichever decision is taken there will be many lives lost to it and an economic impact that has to be managed too. All eyes will be on China and Italy to see how they fare...

All we can do is take the best precautions we can afford to. Isoltae yoruself it that amkes you feel safer or you fear you are infected. Take basic precautions, those same polite precautions we all say we do anyway - wash your hand a lot, sneeze/cough into a tissue and don't touch your face!

And yes, I am immuno compromised and have an intermittent physical disability. I am also self employed. I have to be pragmatic about this. I appreciate the candour from BJ. There will be no magic wand, no sudden saviour, no cavalry coming over the hill. This is not a Hollywood movie, this is scary, real life. Act accordingly! Take personal responsibility, don't panic and do what you have to do!

It seems to me the UK response is based on the fact that it's inevitable, (maybe desirable for future immunity?) most people get it but we need to spread out the peak to give us the best chance of treating everyone who needs hospitalization.

It seems like a brave move when "everyone's" clamouring for something else but no one can say who's right at this stage.

So if immunity doesn't last long, then CV will be an endless reinfection cycle, killing more and more along the way until a vaccine is found and Boris' herd immunity thing is utter BS.

There's conflicting "science" on here, everyone's expert. All the real information I've read says CLOVID viruses are more stable than your typical flu so mutation is less likely.