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.

these threads are dangerous

I disagree. I do not agree with OP but I think we should all be questioning what is going on. Most of the government measures seem entirely sensible given the current state of knowledge. But we would be stupid to pretend that the knowledge base is not partial and changing very quickly- so government policy will need to adapt. Epidemiologists do not agree among themselves ( Imperial model v Oxford model) so there is no right answer to dealing with this threat.

The reaction of some police forces - Derbyshire in particular - has been disproportionate and in some cases unlawful. The role of the police is to enforce the law - not the off the cuff dictats of different members of the executive. That is what happens in totalitarian states.

We all need to act sensibly. But a huge part of acting sensibly is asking questions about what is going on, why it is going on and to what extent the measures that have been taken and will be taken in the future are justified in terms of the economic hit to current and future generations.

Societies that willingly surrender freedoms rarely recover them.

It is obviously more deadly than flu, and I speak as a mum who almost lost her child to swine flu on 2010. Six weeks in ICU in an induced coma. This is even more deadly than that.

Once it spreads in place like India, Nigeria etc with little healthcare it will really cause deaths.

If it was less serious than flu then why would the hospitals in Italy be overwhelmed if they aren't normally?

Leckford the scenes in India are already something else. Mass movement

It actually takes very little for hospitals to become overwhelmed... they run almost to capacity anyway. ICUs are often full. If this year had turned out to be a particularly bad year for the flu, hospitals would have been overwhelmed. It may turn out that this is less deadly that the flu, we don’t know yet. It’s irrelevant though. We’re taking the measures we are to prevent the NHS becoming overwhelmed at this moment in time. The more overwhelmed it is, the more people will die who otherwise had a chance of recovery.

I also don't think we can assume that the governments are doing the right thing. Not even the experts know what the right thing is yet. But the initial talk of herd immunity in the UK didn't go down too well, did it?

Reminds me a bit of that big tsunami a few years back - afterwards they brought in a load of clever plans and systems to deal with tsunamis. All of which could have been thought up before, but people didn't see the urgency. I'm sure we could have had a clever plan in place for how to deal with a pandemic if we'd tried before this. We humans are pretty bad at planning ahead.

@Eyewhisker The paper you posted was about BSE in sheep.

I'm guessing your source for "Neil Ferguson predicted 100k people will die from BSE" came from a newspaper not the actual scientific paper? I can't find a free version of the paper to link to but if you google Ferguson BSE and vCJD, you can find it and read it, and the other papers they wrote on the subject over many years as data allowed them to refine and update the model.

The first (1998) states that it is impossible to predict deaths from BSE because there is so little data. You will also see that the 95% confidence interval in most of the papers is massive eg in the 2000 paper it is 63 - 136,000. That means they can be 95% sure that the number of deaths from BSE/vCJD is somewhere between 63 and 136,000. Not quite the same as "they predict 136,000 will die from BSE".

And it wasn't "Neil Ferguson", he was just one of the team working with Professor Roy Anderson.

OP, why don't you volunteer to be given a dose of it so that they can trial medicine on you? If it's only flu you haven't much to worry about, have you? Neither will the members of your family you have daily contact with. Please come back and post how you are in a couple of weeks. Put your money where your mouth is.

Yanbu op. There has been a lot of debate about the cure being worse than the disease. Flu is and always will be an issue because different strains will attack each year hence the need for annual vaccination which even then is guess work and may not be effective. We have had some terrible years for flu with really high mortality. Italy has a unique set of circumstances which has made it particularly vulnerable to covid 19 sadly.

Muminabun if everyone got it at once and the NHS got hit even harder what would we see and would you be ok with it?

Sorry, @Eyewhisker if I am being harsh towards you. I am just frustrated with journalists irresponsibly quoting things that they don't understand and misrepresenting facts.

If it turns out to be less deadly, it will be because of the restrictions. We will not see the alternative result - we won't know how many would have died if we had taken a different path.

Anyone also thinking that the hospitals are overwhelmed because up to a quarter of its staff are SI, not because of Covid?

I do wonder how this will be written about in 2 years, 5 years , 10 years. At some point, we'll have distance enough to coolly analyse the historical data and gain a clearer understanding and judge whether will are losing our heads over this.

I think some of us are.

Less deadly or not it spreads faster than flu as it’s particularly contagious.

Even if similar lethality there is currently no vaccine so there is still an urgent need to flatten the curve. Lots of us are probably going to get it eventually we just have to make sure not all at once or many thousands more will die.

Anyway it probably is more lethal than flu because Covid seems to cause shortness of breath more than flu. 15 to 20% of Covid patients need hospitalising. Whereas for people with flu (unvaxed) the percentage is much less.

nonsensical question. What do you mean by 'less deadly'? less people die? - that'll be because of restrictions.
Statistically you have a higher chance of dying of you have Covid-19 than if you have flu

Italy has a unique set of circumstances which has made it particularly vulnerable to covid 19 sadly.

If Italy's circumstances are so unique, then how do you explain Spain?

The official UK statistics show that over the last 15 years excess winter mortality from flu' has been about 8,000 per year (with a couple of peaks). If this virus had continued unchecked we could potentially see 6000 deaths per day within 12- 24 days (based on it doubling every 3-5 days).

Flu - lots of people do die from it each year - but far fewer than would be the case if it were not for the vaccinations given to vulnerable people.

Covid - lots more people will die because no-one has immunity (it's a new virus), it seems to spread more quickly and easily, and there is no vaccination.

We can choose not to isolate and let it run its course, but hundreds of thousands of people will become ill very rapidly and health services will crumble; and many will die unnecessarily.

I know which I would choose.

This is utter bollocks. If we didn't suppress it the death rate would be FAR higher. You can't compare a death rate with flu and a suppressed rate for COVID. It's apples and pears. If we didn't suppress it we were looking at death rates that were exponentially higher than flu.

OP, how do you suggest we send children back to school when we can’t staff schools safely due to the number of school staff in vulnerable categories? You would have to take even greater care of teachers/support staff because children are super spreaders and it’s impossible to have any form of social distancing in full classrooms. Or are you suggesting teachers should go in and risk their lives by constant and repeated mass exposure rather like you also expect healthcare workers to do whilst this thing spreads but at least doesn’t cause you too much inconvenience..?

Children are not thought to be super spreaders of this,for a start.

The thing is that it has a higher attack rate than flu so it will still be more deadly this time around, (if not contained) even if it has a lower mortality rate.

@ShieldPrintersNeeded the fatality rate wont change - we arent trying to suppress that. The fatality rate surely would remain the same whatever we do. One imagines across the different countries once it all comes out in the wash it will be within a small range (if the data you are getting is accurate).

What we are trying to suppress is the number of people infected. If you have 100 infected people and 1% die that is 1 death. If the number of infections goes up and goes up exponentially (and at the moment it looks like for every infected person 3 more get infected). By day 10 if left unchecked you could have 6 million people infected and 600,000 deaths (have rounded up). The fatality rate has remained the same but the number of deaths has risen up.

The issue with this is and always has been a lack of initial immunity (we are starting to get that) and a highly infectious nature. The fact it has a relatively high rate of causing symptoms that need hospitalisation plus death is also a problem

At least 5 of the teachers at our school are over 50. I obviously don’t know how many have underlying health conditions, but I imagine some do. It would be impossible to open the school without putting staff at risk.