Is anyone else angry and embarrassed right now ?

[Sapphiresunrise]

For the developed and resourced country that we are, we are potentially going to be overtaking Italy and Spain by the looks of things.
Australia and other nations have death rates in double figures. They were smart to close borders and even close regions. Canada the same. Denmark, etc. The list goes on. South Korea have the situation under control.
We were warned about this. I feel like majority of those deaths could have been avoided.

We had the opportunity to look at what was happening in Asia and use their experience. We had the gift of time/

We should not have stopped community testing (if we ever did it). Testing, tracing and containing was our only hope. We went with herd immunity then back tracked massively a few weeks later. Now look at us...

Thank the Tories for destroying this country.

Please stop scaremongering

Exactly my point. Until people like this lose a friend or family member, they don't want to know, or act.

Thank the Tories for destroying this country.

at least we didn't let labour making even more of a mess of things, it would have been so much worst with them! Look at the state of things they left.

France's figures were awful yesterday after they had to add 800 that had died in care homes but were not counted.

Dodie, where are you getting your numbers? Those do not match the WHO reported ones for the last 24hrs:
U.K. 743
Spain 846

I think from here: www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

I think the difference is because of what makes up 24 hours. Whether you measure from midnight UTC to midnight UTC or from midnight local time to midnight local time. Both give a 24 hour view but the 24 hours overlap each other a bit.

Australia and other nations have death rates in double figures

OP the total number of deaths is not a death rate. Please look up basic statistics and how death rates are calculated.

This isn’t a competition.

you don't get it, do you. Of course it's not a competition. The UK is not special, we are not special. What happened in countries before ours was obviously going to happen here! Do people think living on this island was giving us some kind of immunity?

If I was an expert, I would tell you how to cure it. All I can see is how things unravelled abroad, what made you think they wouldn't be similar here? It's barely more than common sense.

Yep fucking furious. The UK made a very deliberate decision to ignore WHO advice, yeah after all what would they know about managing dangerous epidemics eh?? The Government put the economy over the safety and health of the population- well they are stories so I guess that was no surprise! 🙄
And Cheltenham races going ahead was an absolute disgrace, and plenty of us locals were screaming out loud about the dangers at the time. I wrote on here about our fears and about how horrified my dh a local hospital Dr was. I got slated by some for not caring about how much money some people might lose if the races were cancelled!! Honestly you couldn’t make it up 😡

I don't disagree about the testing mistakes but what else should we have done earlier? How should we have avoided 1 death?

We waited far too long. Many of us on here were posting constantly how people should prepare, get ready, it’s coming, it’s going to be horrific, it’s going to get so much worse, all that back mid February.

People chose not to listen, the government chose not to act, we still have flights coming in to the country, people are still not adhering to the lockdown rules. We believed China’s lies about their numbers, we got caught up in the Trump show, we were tricked with Herd immunity bullshit, we cared more about the fact our kids wouldn’t be in school instead of the fact that we would lose our most vulnerable. We value coins more than lives.

It’s going to bite the biggest chunk out of our arses that we will need implants to cover it up

Well North Korea has reported zero cases. I don’t think I’d want to live there (and to be honest I don’t believe they have no cases!).

We can all have an opinion on what should have or could have been done, but for the majority it is just an opinion and not based on expert knowledge. The Government of the day was democratically elected (didn’t get my vote) and therefore are in the position to make the decisions. However, whilst there are so many tests, trials, exercises and drills to deal with these things, until it happens you cannot even begin to process the enormity of it - who ever were to be in power wouldn’t be doing the right thing in some people’s eyes. It is interesting that the Covid-19 bills have been passed with full support of the house - this suggests that there is cross party working (for once hooray!).

I have no idea if what has happened is right or wrong, only time will tell. Until then I hope we can all work together, follow the rules and kick this virus in the arse.

@PlanDeRaccordement

I think from here
www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

I dont know how accurate it is. Figures are representative from midnight GMT. UK figures seem to be releasted around 2pm. Other countries seem to update as and when. Italy is a lot later in the day.

I don't need to be an expert either to tell you that the REAL figures might be known in a year or 10 years. At best you only know the number of people who died in hospital after testing positive. Many more are not included in there.

So @wehttam what should we have done in February?

I don't see how we could have implemented a Korean style system. Many of our population has so far been unable to keep to a two week mostly voluntary stay at home policy, I can imagine the uproar if people were expected to give up their mobile phones so that contacts could be traced, or told that they were on compulsory lockdown because they sat at the next desk to Jo from accounts.

I do think we have been very lax in not expecting arrivals , visitors and citizens, to go into quarantine. Right at the start of the crisis I saw an interview with a guy fromItaly who was returning to the UK after visiting his girlfriend, he was amazed that no one was even checking temperatures or giving advice. The interviewer asked what his job was. He was an uber driver.

Many of us were castigated for 'scaremongering' in Jan and Feb when we pointed out what was happening, with threads deleted in January and February.

We saw the train heading our way, so why the hell didn't a Government and its wealth of advisors see that too?

Nobody is scaremongering. We are just saying that we feel angry.

Cross post with @GirlYouHaveNoFaithInMedicine

Exactly what you said though. UK figures seem to get released around 2pm but is that representative of yesterday or from midnight and therefore today's figures.

I feel like majority of those deaths could have been avoided.

No one really knows this answer. The numbers of dead are people who died with C-19, not people who died of it. We will never know how many of these people would have, sadly, died anyway of their other complications. I suspect we'll only get a clear picture of uplift in total deaths over yearly averages once we're through this mess.

I also suspect people will be arguing over which counties had the 'best' tactics for years.

Canada is going to have a very high death rate. We currently have OVER 600 care home facilities with confirmed corona.
Almost all individuals who reside in such facilities are NOT candidates for mechanical ventilation, based on the level of intervention they selected they may not want IV’s or antibiotics and will go straight onto palliative care.
Nothing wrong with the conversation and end of life planning but it may make Canada look like it’s unable to treat cases properly.

But I don’t think people would have listened - I remember the overwhelming consensus on MN being that it was no worse than flu. We could have locked down and closed borders at the beginning of March but no one would have listened.

Things have perhaps been reactive rather than proactive to some degree. But there may not have been much difference with a different approach, and its all easy to say in hindsight.

We're a massive transport hub with millions coming in through heathrow and London generally. Difficult to shut down and by the time you do, the horse will well and truly have bolted.

Also those other countries still have fairly high per capita death rates - I don't think its fair to compare to smaller countries or more distributed populations like Canada and Denmark.

Next steps are critical too - is any country starting to relax lockdowns yet - I'm really curious what the next phase looks like and how you do a 'controlled' relaxation of movement

I think the problem was indeed that too many thought the U.K. was special. Amazingly some still do, still can’t see that we’re on the exact same path, perhaps worse, as Italy.

In social science there is something called the Anglo doctrine of exceptionalism. The handling of this pandemic in the UK and the USA has been a great example of it in action.