Do you think it will be calmed down by the summer?

[Forfoxsake29]

Just that really.

Absolutely not in the slightest. Summer and early autumn will be high risk with June and July and early august within the peak which starts from a couple of weeks time.

Chardonnay I've just seen that on another thread, really interesting.

If people just stop pissing about and do everything in their power to socially distance we'll have a small chance at weathering this with less impact on health services and lives lost. The economy is going to take the mother of all bashes which is very worrying and impact on the MH of many will be severe.

If everyone carries on with this Blitz Spirit bollocks though we're significantly more screwed.

I work for a large multinational and was chatting with a colleague this morning, things had improved so much in China they are going back to the office next week. He has been WFH for 8 weeks.

Let’s hope we see similar for the sake of everyone’s mental health.

@Sallycinnamum unfortunately, it is not a scare story.

The latest paper by one of the groups informing the government:

www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3Mo3ZyOJ1Rt9SBQ-xVTMMTf_rF-pj4FHjaDa1nblIRVuPnPVqVzlZSsM8

The short version is - mitigation is too costly in terms of lives, suppression strategy is the only viable path. It is likely to have to be maintained, more or less, until a vaccine appears (18 months minimum), with only intermittent relaxation based on healthcare capacity and infection rates (they estimate 2/3rds of the next 18 months spent in some form of lockdown).

What people are missing in the "China is fine" narrative is that it is very likely to rebound if the lockdown relaxes.

The only real saving grace here is if a vaccine arrives much earlier than predicted, or some other form of very effective pharmaceutical intervention (some anti-malaria and anti-HIV drugs look very promising).

No

Who are these people that are still thinking it’s scaremongering? Life as we know it is done.

Logically it's not over and business as "usual" until the infection is stable and controlled through the world. There's lots of comparable nasties out there, but we live with them because most of the time, enough people have immunity for them not to cause widespread disruption en-masse.

China can't get completely back to normal on an international level while it is still problematic in other countries.

The problem won't go away with a month of lockdown, too many people are still left too vulnerable to any incoming source, mutation or recurrence of the virus. We seem to be aiming at a longer but more managable period of restrictions, while keeping what we can of economic activity functioning.

By the summer we should have more information about the virus, but I can't see life fully back to normal, certainly for sectors like the travel industry. I'm not sure on mass events like sports/ concerts either.

Speaking to an Italian colleague today. They think the rate of increase of cases is starting to slow. So maybe their peak will be come soon ish

Am I missing something, unless China has eradicated it completely won't relaxing the quarantine mean that it just starts again spreading through the population ?

I think there will be waves of this. Things with be very tense and strict until at least July, maybe August, then a short period of respite where things are more relaxed (but still far from normal). Then there will be a period over winter/traditional flu season when things are more strict again. The tense/relax pattern will continue until there is a vaccine in mass scale production and a huge immunization programme has been carried out.

@BretonKitten I couldn't agree more. That is the scenario I think is likely to happen judging on what I've read.