If CV turns out to be less deadly than flu...

[TheDailyCarbuncle]

do you think you will still feel the restrictions were worth it?

Just asking out of curiosity really.

I'm leaving the thread now, thanks for engaging. I will look in again but may not answer questions. I really appreciate all the responses.

@TheDailyCarbuncle beginning to see why i dont get mn anymore. Its totally different to real life. There is never black or white in any situation just shades of grey. we in a situation that is world wide, not uk only. Tbh id prefer tories to labour or liberal to deal with this and im not a fan of politics end of story. God help you if you in spain, italy or new York. We so lucky to live in a county which has a great health service where money doesnt matter.

remember we had the same apocalyptic predictions about millions of deaths in 2009 before the swine flu epidemic, which turned out to be nonsense

We were lucky with swine flu - a vaccine and effective anti-virals were found relatively quickly as flu is not new to us.

Swine flu killed around 500 in the UK over several months. Covid 19 has already killed three time that amount in a matter of days and is set to get much worse. This is incomparable to any type of flu.

Economic crashes lead to death. Indirectly and difficult to measure, but people do die.

Isolation will cause deaths,from abusive partners, children being killed, suicide, people not seeking medical care, addictions being badly managed.

Isolation will have long term effects on the children missing from school, educationally and emotionally. Some of them will suffer trauma that will have long term effects on their mental health. The disadvantage gap will widen and nothing anyone does right now can combat that.

We will never know which was the right decision. We can never go back and see how many people would have died in a different scenario. We just have to pray this is the least worst option.

a great health service where money doesnt matter

Are you joking? Our NHS is so chronically underfunded that it was on it's knees before this. Staff are dying because they weren't provided with the proper PPE despite them being warned of this mid January.

Italy's health service is superior to ours by far.

It may be worth it if it helps people understand just how on-the-edge and unsustainable our lives and attitudes are.
Pandemics are going to become more and more common, as is antibiotic resistance, as are food shortages, drought and flood. Normally these things most affect the poor in the global south - who are also most affected by the poverty wages and environmental destruction caused by our consumerism.
Perhaps we will learn to care about the millions who die 'early' in poorer parts of the world now that we have been forced to think about death in a way we usually avoid.
Perhaps we will start taking the obesity crisis a lot more seriously now that we know how obesity makes people more vulnerable.
Perhaps we will start to think about allowing people 'good deaths' rather than insisting that any death in anyone however old and ill is somehow a failure that someone ought to be blamed for.
Perhaps we will start voting for tax rises.
Perhaps we will start looking after our old and vulnerable better.
If some of these things happen, it may have been worth it.

@TheDailyCarbuncle Is that the BSE report by Neil Ferguson that a PP posted that was about a theoretical scenario about what would happen if sheep were infected with BSE? Which they aren't. So it can neither be proved correct nor incorrect.

Or do you mean the Southwood report that said there was a low risk of BSE being transmitted to humans from infected beef but it urgently needed investigation. The report that the government ignored so 200 people died from vCJD.And was indeed correct.

We can never go back and see how many people would have died in a different scenario

No, but we can get pretty accurate predictions from experts who's lives work has been based on scenarios such as the present one. The deaths we are seeing now are mainly from people getting the virus before measures were introduced. Surely you can see how much higher that would have got if people had been allowed to continue as normal? A large percentage would have caught it and the NHS would not have coped with the numbers needing ITU. I'm not convinced they will cope as it is.

Maybe it is like flu - in a world where nobody had ever had flu before. This is like when Europeans took viral diseases to the Americas, causing enormous epidemics among native peoples and huge death tolls, reducing populations by up to 90%. We are very lucky that CV is not as deadly as measles or smallpox.

@iamapixie

A very refreshing and thoughtful post - thank you.

*remember we had the same apocalyptic predictions about millions of deaths in 2009 before the swine flu epidemic, which turned out to be nonsense
*
No, the fear came about because swine flu appeared at the same time as bird flu, which had a 60% mortality rate. The concern was that it would mutate and transmit from human to human, which didn't happen. It only ever transmitted from birds, it killed people who worked with poultry mainly, although it also killed pet cats who ate infected birds.

At first it was thought that swine flu might be a transmuted form of avian flu, but it wasn't all that long before it was announced that it wasn't and that it was a lot less lethal.

Perhaps we will start looking after our old and vulnerable better.

Or they'll bear the brunt of a shitload of resentment judging by some of what is said on MN.

If avian flu had transmuted to transmit from human to human, the consequences would have been catastrophic.

Goingoverground - Neil Ferguson estimated that 50-100,000 may die from BSE in cattle. The sheep stuff was on top of it. So yes, he got it totally wrong. Obviously forecasting is full or errors but the ‘half a million will die’ is being treated as fact when it simply isn’t.

The disease is obviously serious but there needs to be a sense of proportion and that is getting drowned in hysteria.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/The-evidence-on-Covid-19-is-not-as-clear-as-we-think?fbclid=IwAR17QAMzorzAYQFhfZrYvz0-e9Wff0m4BHodLgHCPNnn_JXTeefkejz5ADg

I think it's a worthy debate OP. This is an interesting read

Whenever you say someone forecast something you should also caveat what assumptions were behind the forecast

Usually they are "if we do and say nothing" then this will happen

Since the whole point is to say and so something, you would be very unlucky to have a forecast like that come to pass.

Eyewhisker if you question the numbers what are you doing differently? Still going with what they say to do or otherwise

True Midgebabe

There is some interesting research based on the diamond princess cruise which shows a fatality rate of around 0.6 percent
www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-outbreak-diamond-princess-cruise-ship-death-rate
This is more likely to peesent an accurate picture than the WHO figure as it is a closed population and we know hoe many cases are asymptomatic.

Nonetheless it still makes it 6 times more deadly than the flu. Plus there is no immunity in the population and the long term impacts on lung function and chronic fatigue appear to be more severe.

Are Italy recording all people who tested positive for CV and underlying health conditions and then subsequently died, as having died of or died with CV? I'd say there is a difference.

OP less deadly as in fewer people die overall? Isn't that what the restrictions are about? Ie if fewer people die it will mean that the restrictions worked?

There have been far fewer deaths from Ebola than other diseases but it remains a deadly disease, and very contagious.

Rather than compare it with flu, consider COVID 19 as a stand alone disease, like Ebola, say. When severe, your lungs fill with fluid/blood. It might affect your heart, kidneys, liver. If you recover you may suffer permanent damage to your organs.

It is more catching than flu - it has a higher R0 value.

I really don't want anyone to catch this disease. Do you?

How serious your symptoms will depend on your immunity, linked to your age and health, but equally, it also depends on viral load is how I understand it - in a crowded bar where people are chatting for hours, it is more likely you'd get it. In a call centre crowded with people talking you are more likely to get it. On a plane. At soft play. Etc. Many, many people have weaknesses that don't usually affect day to day life - such as asthma.

Sweden - slower to introduce measures, but more measures on the way.

Immunity - Prof Kim Woo Ju in Korea has said that the position isn't clear as patients have recovered, tested negative and then tested positive again.

There is a huge amount of scientific research and data available,if you look for it, and some very intelligent and humane doctors and scientists who have summarised their experiences and research in simple layman's terms. But we are on month 3. Fingers crossed restrictions will work, and the virus will mutate to something less virulent. Fingers crossed. But I would say caution and restrictions are appropriate at this stage.

No because of infection rate, what would we do re flu if there was no vaccine and was very infectious.. it would kill a lot more people even if it was a small percentage of everyone who has had. Cv if def more infectious than flu I do believe or is still debatable if it is more deadly.

A quote from UK judge, Lord Sumption today:

Yes, this is serious, but the real question is, is this serious enough to warrant putting most of our population into house imprisonment, wrecking our economy for an indefinite period, destroying businesses that honest and hard-working people have taken years to build up, saddling future generations with debt?

If Covid-19 turns out to be less deadly than predicted, it will be BECAUSE of the restrictions.

How many dead people would make it worth it @amymayapple?