What is the true story?

[Namechangervaver]

Hancock has said he has lost two people close to him.

Somebody I know has died.

Boris has been hospitalised.

The country has been shut down despite us knowing that to do this will cripple us for years to come, so it's a very serious situation.

A small fraction of our population is supposedly affected but I'm guessing we all know people hospitalised or dead.

This is obviously so much worse than we have been told

One thing we know from this virus is that anyone who says anything about it in a confident, know-it-all, lecturing way is being arrogant. I couldn’t understand at the start of the year how there could be so many people confidently stating that a novel virus was much less to worry about than the flu - just because they knew a lot about the flu and pretty much bugger all about covid 19. It seemed even more odd when the Asian countries with the most expertise in the last 10 years of dealing with novel respiratory viruses did not seem to be responding to it in the same relaxed manner at all. However I think it is also arrogant for people with pretty much no scientific background to be arrogantly claiming now that it was absolutely obvious what was coming and anyone who trusted the advice of the experts in our own country who were advising the Government, and who thus continued with their pre-booked holidays, theatre trips, meals out, etc, were deluded fools. Retrospect is retrospect... it doesn’t suddenly make some people wiser than others and that the truth was always obvious, it just means in retrospect, we can see more clearly who was right and who was wrong.

Your ideas of herd immunity are interesting

My rough estimate is that it would take about 12 years to achieve herd immunity if infections are kept at a rate the NHS can cope with ..assuming we do get to 18000 ventilators, leaving 4000 for normal nhs use and magic up about three times as many critical care nurses than we have today

More interesting is to consider how we manage that " keep infections low enough"

It would probably be easier to aim to keep infections close to zero than to manage the infection rate to a low but not that low level...that is a fundamentally unstable approach

So it makes more sense to ride this out, probably need 6 to 12 weeks depending on how good people are , and then concentrate on quarentine at borders, test, contract trace and local lockdown if things show any sign of getting out of control

there have been issues with a police force interpreting the rules differently and having to be corrected.

A solicitor client managed to find loopholes in the rules that allow them to stay open.

That will always happen with every law. Some laws take decades to mature via court cases etc. Police have been misinterpreting laws since the service was first formed. Solicitors have been finding loopholes since the first law was created. Remember people bricked up their windows to avoid window tax brought back in 1696!

@Walkaround well put

I feel very differently toward the friends who spouted the nothing to worry about, more people die of flu rubbish

@NemophilistRebel I think it depends how they said it. I told DD (10) that it was like the flu because I know that if I had approached it in any other way I would have panicked her and I couldn't cope with an anxious child on top of everything else. Doesn't mean that I believed it though!

This article may interest some of you regarding how to count the cases.

www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-to-understand-and-report-figures-for-covid-19-deaths-

And who was the deluded fool who, on March 3rd, did a press conference declaring he had visited a hospital, shaken hands with everybody including coronavirus patients, and we should all carrying on shaking hands with everyone? The same deluded fool who also said the UK has fantastic testing facilities, which somehow Hancock didn't notice.

I don't know anyone hospitalised or died from the virus, but I do think we are very vulnerable to high deaths in the UK.

We have an extraordinarily amount of people (young people!) who have metabolic disease in this country and that seems to be devastating if you catch this virus. The 'young, healthy' people who are dying very likely have some form of metabolic disease such as T2 diabetes (even pre-T2) and hypertension.

The stats are that 3.8m people have T2 diabetes.
12.5 million people have hypertension.

We have a very unhealthy population and this is massive cause for concern for me with this virus.

www.nature.com/articles/s41574-020-0353-9

Some discussion of the issue around metabolic disease and CV-19

According to the C19 COVID app only about 3% of the 5000-plus reporters in my county have reported Coronavirus symptoms. So I think the infection must have a way to go yet, if this is representative.

I’m surprised the WHO haven’t updated their mortality rate since 3rd March

Nemo,

I think they lack good data.

I mean it could be anywhere from 0.5% to 2% ish. Ultimately they will know the death count (roughly) and will, from antibody tests, be able to see how many were infected.

The below estimate from Mike Famulare puts the CFR at 0.94% with a fairly large variance, which is very similar to the Imperial College estimate and, thus, probably the best we have right now.

institutefordiseasemodeling.github.io/nCoV-public/analyses/first_adjusted_mortality_estimates_and_risk_assessment/2019-nCoV-preliminary_age_and_time_adjusted_mortality_rates_and_pandemic_risk_assessment.html

I think it has raised awareness about pneumonia and how serious that can be, something which was brought home to me over ten years ago when my youngest was hospitalised with severe pneumonia as an infant.

there were so many children in there with it and also bronchiolitis...see here for more info from British lung foundation statistics.blf.org.uk/pneumonia

i know no one who has had it or has died, but i'm based in the north

Honestly Mumsnet is THE worse place to go for scare mongering and making you feel even more depressed. The vast majority of everyones theory's are based on anecdotal evidence and their personal interpretation of the data. And 9 times our of 10 is the worse case scenario.

My friend is an ITU consultant. She is working incredibly hard and she’s a totally honest person. This is what she said to me;

• the situation in her hospital (not in London but in a deprived area) is bad but manageable. The main problem is lack of decent PPE and also untrained ITU staff (so for example gynaecologists) being brought onto ITU. Necessary but annoying was her term for that.
• she was very clear that the reason “younger” people are getting this and dying is because they are unhealthy despite not having an official diagnosis. Obesity is a massive risk factor for this.
• someone died in her unit who has been reported upon by the media. This person was in their thirties and described as “fit and healthy”. She told me this person weighed over 18 stone and had only recently stopped vaping like it was going out of fashion. Still a tragedy but worth knowing to stop panic.
• if you are in the most vulnerable groups (elderly, obese, underlying health issues) and you end up on a ventilator in ITU you have a 50% chance roughly of death. This is broadly similar with the usual rate of death for respiratory issues for adults in ITU. The issue here is volume of people coming through.
• there will be a lot of dying this week and next. We need to expect figures in the 1000 nationally for a few days next week.

I am not a medical person so I’m just going on what she said. She also said my risk of getting it and being very poorly was very small (I’m mid thirties, slim, non smoker) and that healthy young (ish!) women who aren’t obese are amongst the people most likely to be asymptomatic, other than kids. My DH has had it we are fairly certain. He had two days of “ couldn’t get out of bed” type poorliness and was then ok apart from tiredness. All managed at home no problems. Hope this helps.

@ChippityDoDa, thank you, that's useful and also what I suspected. Every single "fit, healthy, young" person shown in the media was clearly obese - this is just irresponsible reporting.

As Choppily says, most of the people are overweight and also male...

see also How bad it might get plays on your mind How a junior doctor is coping with the strain of the coronavirus crisis By Lucie Cocker, 31, a junior doctor working in an intensive care unit in the East Midlands (Times today)

We are not at the level of intensity yet of London, but we are getting there. How bad it might get plays on your mind. I know it has definitely affected my sleep. Last weekend I found myself being very emotional — almost out of nowhere being tearful, and I am not a crying person at all usually.

The patients we see with coronavirus symptoms are really, really quite sick. They need a lot of clinician input. It requires a lot of our brain power because it is not something we have seen before. There are about five junior doctors on a shift, but also people on back-up rotas at home in case someone calls in sick or has to self-isolate. It means those people at home and not on back-up can completely switch off and have a mental as well as physical break.

Quite a few patients deteriorate rapidly. A lot of them are the younger ones. We are seeing people in their fifties and sixties, particularly men, particularly if they are slightly overweight. They are still talking to us when they come in to A&E, maybe looking short of breath, but when we do bloods and chest x-rays we can see the level of illness.

It’s hard for families — particularly of someone on the younger side who has gone in to A&E with shortness of breath and they expected to hear from in an hour or two. You tell them their loved one isn’t coming home — at least not yet — and they can’t visit. There are so many relatives you have to book in updates and can’t give them as much attention.

We are used to seeing people who are very unwell in ICU and people dying, and getting patients referred who we have to tell “we don’t think ICU will help you”. What we don’t experience often is having to explain that to relatives who cannot visit. Even if it is just a touch on the arm or a friendly gesture, you can’t do that over the phone.

A day or two after lockdown I remember driving down the high street and saying “I will just count how many people are out”, and I got to about 30 before I was halfway down. That was really difficult — the public didn’t seem to be doing their part. That does seem to have changed now.

Hearing about health workers dying is very upsetting, particularly when we hear there are still people without the right amount of equipment. I am very lucky with protective equipment but I know a lot of people around the country are not. We know that people from all walks of society will get this — and die — but it is a lot more frustrating when you think it could have been avoided.

Sometimes you can ring a family to say that you are taking their relative off a ventilator and moving them to a ward. I think people are expecting the call to say they have died. When you can say they are getting better, that is definitely a positive moment.

Yes unfortunately we have so many people living in poverty and in poor quality housing, which is strongly linked to increased ill health like type II diabetes.

Japan's about to declare a state of emergency. I thought they had low rates of obesity?

Mass graves are being dug and noone is worried, from well documented precedent, it it could be plans for something OTHER than the deaths from the virus? This is a freaking nightmare.

I have NO idea what you are trying to say here...

Every single "fit, healthy, young" person shown in the media was clearly obese - this is just irresponsible reporting.

Ah, well. Clearly they deserved to die, then.

ChippityDoDa is reporting pretty much the same story I've heard from different sources from 3 hospitals.

She didn't say anyone 'deserved to die'

Ah, well. Clearly they deserved to die, then.
How did you get that from what the poster wrote? They were just pointing out that if you are obese you are not fit and healthy no matter how the media are framing these deaths.

If you are carrying a few pounds or kilos more than is suited to your frame, now would be a good time to consider easing up on the baking and the chocolate.... no one sets out to become overweight at any level, but it creeps up. No one deserves to die with obesity cited as a co-morbidity, but everyone needs to wise up to what a 'good' balance looks like. If one has an endomorphic body, then a bit more care needs to be exercised, for health reasons.

I recall a Ch4 documentary a few months ago which centred on a particularly vocal woman (about 35) claiming it was fine to be grossly obese and that she was 'healthy'. I'm sorry if she contracts COVID, but if I were a clinician, I wouldn't be prioritising her need for a respirator over someone I felt had a better chance of coming through.

Tread carefully XingMing suggesting Obesity is a worryingly unhealthy state on MN is tantamount to heresy. It's 'fat shaming' and 'dictating how people choose to live.
I was obese and knew that I would die before my time if I didn't do something about it. I already had high BP, Sleep Apnoea (incredibly under diagnosed and common in obese people.) and Type 2 diabetes.
I admitted to having a Bariatric bypass through the NHS on here , a few years ago .. and was roundly lambasted for using up precious resources.. despite this having reversed the diabetes, and all other weight related medical issues that cost the NHS to treat.

Obesity kills and is a factor in death from other causes. That's why a BMI over 40 put people in the shielding category. It's not a life-style choice , it's a death-style choice.