Do you think the situation in the UK is going to end up being worse than Italy's?

[fucknotmeplease]

Watching what is happening in Italy is so terrifying, it's a living nightmare and such a tragedy for all of them.

If the situation in the UK is still a couple of weeks behind, do you think our infection rate and death toll is going to be much higher than theirs?

This is a copy and paste from the comments on Marina Hyde's article in the Guardian, but I thought it just totally summed things up perfectly.

Captain Rogers in the Guardian:

Johnson maybe enjoying his crisis “Churchill” moment, but once we are through this, I hope no one forgets how shockingly inept this government’s response has been at least up til now.
Let’s consider the 3 main strategies a government could take-

1. Test extensively, trace moments and contacts of infected and test those people.
2. Restrict movement and interactions between people (voluntarily or mandatory).
3. Let it happen and hope for “herd immunity” to kick in.

If unsure of what to do, think about what happens what happens if it fails, then it’s clear. Start with 1, if that fails you can move to 2, if that fails move to 3. Johnson’s mob started at 3, found they didn’t have capacity for 1 and have only now half heartedly moved on to 2. It’s not like there was no warning, or experiences from other countries to guide us. South Korea had already shown that testing and tracking works, and China shown that shutting down movement was working before cases started ramping up here. Yet we were still being told to “keep calm and carry on” (TM) as normal as recently as last week, even as Italy’s health service was being rapidly overwhelmed. Unlike some other places, the UK had time to see events unfold elsewhere and start preparing. Time to scale up testing capacity, to procure and distribute PPE to the front line, and to get a coherent plan together. What did they do? Apart from trying to play hardball with Europe?

It really isn't scaremongering. I am in central Italy and up until 2 weeks ago most people were complacent and joking about it, it seemed like an issue for the north, then schools shut, and within a few days we pretty much weren't allowed to leave our home. My family in France have gone through the same process.

People are rightly worried because the UK seems to be taking less measures not more, wasted time and confused people with its short-lived herd immunity approach, and the NHS is stretched and under resourced at the best of times.

Yes i do, usa will be alot worse though.

My neighbour/friend is a gp, but she works in regional planning of resources etc.. so right now she is drawing up new protocols on who gets treatment when an icu bed is needed , where they can go, palliative care plans, and back ups for no ventilators working off prediction graphs. None of it is pretty its down right terrifying. She told me she never expected to be in the postion of choosing who lives and who dies. And we are not there yet, shes already broken. And i cant even give her a hug. Our nhs wont cope no matter how much they give they will all be broken.

I don’t know, but there is a lot of scaremongering on here. The situation is serious, and there are a lot of factors in the models. I can’t comment on behaviour as there is no data, just anecdotes. Here are some relevant points:

Firstly the Italian response was more dramatic but later than in the uk (we have learned from their experience, I’m not casting blame). Italy didn’t start ANY large scale restrictions at all until there were over 300 deaths. (Death rate is more accurate than reported cases). We are ahead of Italy in our response so far. (See worldometer for numbers.)

Secondly, the majority (around 90%) of Italian deaths are in three provinces (see Statista.com ). In these three provinces the situation is horrific. However over Italy as a whole it isn’t quite so bad. Some regions have only had two or three deaths. UK cases are more spread out, although London is a hot spot, so we have less chance of individual regions being totally overwhelmed.

Thirdly, for those showing the FT plot of death rate, the uk looks worse because of how the first 20 cases were spaced out. If instead you look at the time to grow from 50-100 deaths then it is the same as other countries. (Or, for those who understand log-linear plots, read the average gradient not the x-normalisation).

Sadly I think we’re about to see the worst case scenario play out. And I think that government have actively chosen this route, by reducing/ abandoning testing, dropping the identification of contacts, and refusing to take legal measures to stop social mixing sooner.

The economic stimulus and seizing control of the private sector will mean fuck all in the end- the number of lives that will be lost because of the twatting about they’ve done, mean far more- but they’ll be able to point to the economic measures and say “but we DID do something!”

Oh and inevitable NHS collapse will usher in privatisation faster.

It’s almost like.... well you could be forgiven for thinking this sounds a bit like something someone like Dominic Cummings would cook up as a madcap strategy...

Please note the logarithmic scale. Each vertical divide is 10 x bigger than the previous. Also note that our gradients in the UK are steeper than Italy's.

I am not optimistic. I think we've shit down too late. The government haven't listened to advice from WHO and other countries. The model used for forecasting was wrong.

Plus we are short about 70,000 NHS staff and have half Italy's intensive care beds, some of the lowest in Europe.

I really hope this government, especially Johnson are held accountable one day.

We may well be turning the tide in 12 weeks, but it could possibly be because at this rate, we would have infected everyone in the world.

And why do we not have enough PPE for our staff? I looked back today to see what the date was when I stocked up on ffp3 masks, gloves and goggles for my own personal use.

25th January.

Our government has had the same information. Why didn't it act sooner?

Nellodee 😳

Sadly I get the feeling the tally of deaths by country will be watched world over so if we are wildly out of whack people will see it

It really doesn't matter how many ventilators we have.

That was at the 12 week thing. It’s a fair point. But awful.

It really isn't scaremongering, most people who say that I find really haven't woken up to what's happening here. Like an older local gentleman who was on my Facebook recently saying the same thing people were just 'scaremongering' even asking everyone if the library was open so he could go and get himself some books today.
Walking around as though nothing is happening

Firstly the Italian response was more dramatic but later than in the uk

The Italian Lombardy police enforced lockdowns which started on February 21st.
That's 4 weeks ago.
When there was one death.

They made many early mistakes. But they locked down hard and fast when they realised.

Those who are unsure which data projections to trust need only give it a few days of comparing our current numbers to Italy's of two weeks ago. There's a daily analysis tracking thread here on Mumsnet to follow.

Projections made on hard data with robust analysis are never scaremongering. They may be wrong, or be based upon flawed assumptions.

But undermining people's confidence in facts which already exist is not responsible. We may diverge from Italy's path. Time will tell.

But for now, all we need to give us a rough expectation of what we must try to prepare ourselves for, is to look at the data we already have.

Denialism won't help us. It may even harm our ability to prevent as many deaths as we can. We need to stop throwing around accusations of 'scaremongering' so easily.

People who believe this is all scaremongering are drinking in pubs in London tonight. Some of those people, statistically will suffer as a direct result of that belief.

All the people on here who think Chris Whitty sounds so reassuring.

I hate the man with an absolute vengeance. He should have know better. He did know better. And he went along with this anyway.

Blood on his hands.

People who believe this is all scaremongering are drinking in pubs in London tonight. Some of those people, statistically will suffer as a direct result of that belief.

Yep bizarre that it goes on but it’s true

No, as Italy has a much older population so they will be hit particularly hard.

I've also read that the death rate has been particularly bad in Italy and Spain as many more old people live with their families, and so they catch it from their children and grandchildren, whereas the different family generations in the UK are more likely to live separately.

I don’t know where people are but I am based in a village in the north and feel it has been taken very seriously around my local area. All the restaurants and bars were very quick to swap to online only ordering, the local council set up a village help Facebook group and people have been helping go to buy things for elderly. The shops are not too busy and when I go to work (nhs) the roads are empty as well as the streets. It’s been eerie for over a week. Buses are now on Sunday service only as most people are working from home. Everyone I knew withdrew their children from school last week.
The city is empty and the universities shut last week and moved all their exams and lectures to online only so the students all went home to isolate. There are still a few areas around here with no reported cases and even the closest major city only has 5 reported cases.

Then I see all these ridiculous people on Facebook going out drinking and undoing all the hard work we have put in to shut this region down. There are people travelling to here from south to escape the lockdowns and bringing it with them. I feel like this area has really pulled together to make this as short an isolation as possible and follow all the guidance but selfish people are ruining it.

We are tracking them 14 days behind.
We have shown no sign of diverging yet.

I'm hoping that the fact that Boris seems to be bringing in his decisions for the whole country at the same time, rather than by region, will save some of the regions that are most delayed from a worse fate. It's the only straw I have left to clutch, to be honest.

I did a little calculation exactly two weeks ago today based on the UK death number the day we in Italy went into full lockdown. I predicted if they followed the Italian example, the UK lockdown date would be in two days time. I.e. Sunday night. However, at that point the two hotbeds in Venice and Codogno were already in quarantine and Lombardia soon followed. I think realistically given the beds situation in the UK, it can't not be equivalent if not higher, even with a full lockdown tomorrow. The only hope is someone finds a drug in the next few weeks.

Italy has an older population but it also has more ICU beds.

@nellodee the only steeper gradient I see in your plot (by eye, you give no figures for gradients) is for the uk deaths below 50. The error bars on this, if they were shown, would show that it is misleading to extrapolate a gradient from the lower numbers on a log-linear plot. You can approximate them simply by the square root of the total if you want to add them in.

@Barracker you are right that the Italians did an initial lockdown 4 weeks ago, but it was for only around 50k people (Wikipedia). I stated clearly that I was talking about large scale responses. The rest of Lombardy region started the first large scale restrictions on 8th March, 12 days ago.

I think people really underestimate behaviour when comparing countries. Singapore for example was one of the first countries to ban all travellers from mainland China in Jan. A resident who didn't comply with isolation had his PR revoked. The UK would not have done this. Plus Asian countries have learned a lot from Sars.

No way would there have been an appetite to close the schools & lock down 3/4 wks. People have to want to lockdown, as realistically it's not possible to enforce it on a population of millions in a democracy. Everyday we have more restrictions, more scaring. As another poster says it's intentional drip, drip feeding.

I honestly don’t think we can tell. There are differences in our populations and in our social interactions, too much to say if we will be exactly the same.

I think London will be bad and that is unavoidable with the density of the population and wide use of public transport. I hope/pray that the rest or at least some areas of the U.K. will have more manageable numbers.

My part of the country has a lower than average life expectancy and with that lots of people with risk factors at a very young age and lots of smokers. My fear is that will cause a significant shift to younger deaths.

As for ventilators in Cremona (channel 4 news clip) the ICU have not managed to successfully take one patient off a ventilator, they have all been dying. They are in the centre of the epidemic so have been at this for a while. I don’t know how many the ventilators are actually saving - some for sure but I think preventing infection is the only way to prevent death.