Coronavirus may have infected half of UK population — Oxford study

[Lycidas]

‘New epidemiological model shows vast majority of people suffer little or no illness.’

www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

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“The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. “I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.

However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.”

A glimmer of hope. They’re gonna start with the antibody testing very soon.

Lastly I think that dying when everyone has done everything they could is a different situation to Drs saying help us so we are not overwhelmed to the point of Italy.

This is entirely detached from the enormous scale of preventable deaths, direct and indirect, that we accept every year.

I don't mean to be callous, but let's not close our eyes to the fact it's a pretty niche group of people who are wiling to change their lives to help the 50,000 people dying of starvation every day.

The initial analysis of deaths in the UK has a lot of healthy people dying, surpisingly few have the serious underlying conditions which had been expected to dominate.

Sorry, I should have said the initial analysis of servere cases- not all died. Data is here:

www.icnarc.org/About/Latest-News/2020/03/22/Report-On-196-Patients-Critically-Ill-With-Covid-19

Allout, odd false binary choice being presented. Lockdown or not. Testing with contact tracing like South Korea, Singapore and others in line with WHO guidance would appear to have saved lives without the economic cost. Shames it's taken so many more months to get the tests than other nations. Then again, shame HCPs lives and families lives are being put at risk by still not having the PPE that we were told in previous weeks was already distributed and we're now being told is now in stores.

Bluntness - our comments sort of crossed - re agreeing about compliance.

@OrganTransplant123 Agreed. I am in shielded group I am 50, work and have 2 teenage kids. I lead a busy life and most people are shocked to find out I am in this group.

Marginal when you consider the Italy situation what do you think? That you’d be ok with the same or even worse here?
As they have tried to slow it.

Contact tracing only works if you take this seriously from the beginning and throw resources at it. This government never did and the economic cost will now be far greater.

I’m fucking disgusted with some of the ageism on here. People would actually rather let the elderly suffocate to death with this virus than have their kids miss out on something that they can do at a letter date? Are you fucking kidding me? No fucking wonder we needed a lock down.

So why are such large groups of elderly people being wiped out in nursing homes? Flu doesn’t wipe out whole groups in one building, the way this does It has, does, and would if we didn't have a vaccine. The key is the vaccine.

It’s irresponsible because it encourages people to minimise the effects of the epidemic and leads to them thinking they can ignore advice

no it doesn't, there are people who had symptoms in Jan and early Feb and are wondering if they had it early.

And it isn't ok to keep the elderly alive when they have zero quality of life. I said on here a couple of weeks ago that if this had got my father when he was in his last six months of life I would not have thought it was a bad thing. He had no quality of life, he wasn't going to get better. What's the point of being alive?

Leaving elderly people to die, like happened in Spain is another thing entirely. That is shocking but I am sadly sure we will see something similar here and in other countries too.

The truth, I suspect lies somewhere in between. From places that have tested extensively it seems that symptomatic CFR is in the 0.7-1.5% range. But how many asymptomatic cases are there? That is the great unknown. That Italian village experiment indicates it might be 9:1 asymptomatic to symptomatic.

Over 600,000 people die every year so how many of the 250k who are predicted to die of the virus would have died anyway?

Even if every single person who dies with CV would have died anyway- it would still have an enormous impact on the overall death rate. Unless your preference is to simply not treat those who get CV and are in "risk" groups at all? Because in an effort to save those who can be saved, inevitably medical care will be denied to people without CV who might also be saved.

So you might end up with figures like:

Total mortaliy this year: 750 000
Total who died with CV: 250 000
Total who would have died if CV did not exist but didn't catch CV: 350 oo
Total who died of non CV related causes, but would have been saved if the NHS wasn't having to deal with CV: 150 000

I mean, obviously there are issues around poverty and poor mental health that may have an impact on death rates in future years, but frankly that is almost a problem for another day. Let's solve this crisis and then hope we have a government who is prepared to solve the next one too.

Marginal when you consider the Italy situation what do you think? That you’d be ok with the same or even worse here?
As they have tried to slow it.

---

I think we should accept a 2 week lockdown and consider that our best effort.

Thank you. I’m just so glad to hear anything positive at the moment.

I’m not sure blithely walking into the death of 2% of the population is the solid economic solution some of you seem to think.

We see all the posters leaping on here saying "I have found my people"

All the posters who have suffered financially - like most of us - and just want any excuse to make it stop

Think hard whether "your people" have spotted something that almost every government and almost every public health scientist has missed

It certainly is a discussion point: how deep most countries can afford to go into recession vs how many deaths would be "acceptable"

but then discuss the ethics and decision tree for that
Don't deny the seriousness of this global pandemic

@vera99 Look at all the threads here today. There are many many people looking for a way out to not follow what they are being told to do. This thread gives them a reason.
That is why it is irresponsible.

You just don't share articles like this that have not had the most basic peer review - we can see from comments that there are serious disagreements with it. You also don't post a summary post that misrepresents what the study actually says, knowing most people will not understand the study.

The quarter of a million people predicted to die is based on assumptions heavily challenged in the comments on the paper. The authors make a broad assumption that only a very small proportion of the population are at risk from covoid 19. There is no real evidence to support that assumption.

serious symptom rate of just 0.1% I've only just skim read quickly so far but I think the 0.1% is the percentage of the population who are at risk of severe symptoms requiring hospitalisation (eg the elderly or people with underlying health conditions that put them at risk) not the percentage of people with COVID-19 that have serious symptoms.

I understood that. I see your point and I am conflating the two a bit. When you are talking about a majority of the population becoming infected, I'm not sure the distinction is huge.

The most optimistic model in that study is still way out of whack with what most experts are saying.

Think hard whether "your people" have spotted something that almost every government and almost every public health scientist has missed

That's not what I think at all, you've missed the point. Rather, I think that our leaders are nervous to venture a balance between liberty and loss of life.

totallyfuckedup I am 1000% doing all I can. My dcs came out of school a week before they closed because ai could see what was going to happen and understand minimising contact and it's effectiveness and could do my civic duty a week early because I wfh.

I had no idea they would sacrifice my dcs education for so long, or deny dd sitting her GCSEs though. And I think it's expected that we question everything and anything that has that much impact on the very basic things we assume are always there such as the right to an education, the right to get in my car and drive to a public beach, pick my mum up for Mothers Day lunch.

We should question. Not because we know better than the experts but because we deserve to have the knowledge to eirher accept or reject what is being forced on us.

It's one of those things- we will never know what would have happened had no or little action been taken - and it is easy to be wise with hindsight.

Whatever model is right, we shouldn't be complacent - we have seen how woefully inadequate our current health service is due to the lack of investment for decades; how vulnerable we are because of reduced numbers of police, fire services and armed forces; how the obsession with profit above all has damages all of us; and how selfish we have become as a nation.

I can't believe the lack of data about the excess mortality rate. This was Evan Davies' point on r4 this evening.

I feel awful for saying it as in an ideal world it wouldn't be a choice, but I also can't believe saving the elderly in ICUs is being prioritised over younger people's potentially life-saving cancer treatment.

It's like common sense and proportionality has completely gone out of the window.

1. The winter flu problems are over, delay worked to some extent.

1. The sick people who would have died anyway probably died of that winter flu.

1. We have evidence from China and from South Korea that large number of people require breathing support. Some of that is now being given outside hospitals but inside London hospitals other wards are being used not for the "normal" ill but for the virus.

1. In London they are already running out of ventilators. To quote a junior doctor - anyone who has even looked at a ventilator will be trained to use them.

1. The NHS used to be better resource, therefore previous problems could be managed more readily - and were less widespread anyway.

1. If people do what they are told we will get through this much more quickly and with less economic damage because the restrictions can be relaxed. The more idiots there are the more economic damage there will be. "Economic damage" actually means the banks get baled out again, the rich get richer.

The authors make a broad assumption that only a very small proportion of the population are at risk from covoid 19. There is no real evidence to support that assumption.

In their defense, they are merely showing that the current numbers might fit with a much lower death rate, if certain assumptions are made. It's good to have the counter argument, but no-one should start ignoring the very real dangers based on an unlikely model.

I live in a retirement area a friend owns an undertakers business. Every winter despite the flu vaccine usually January February March he is flat out working. People on waiting lists for retirement homes suddenly find rooms are free at this time of year. It is a fact that our winters see a lot of people off.