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

Financial Times, Vallance at a press conference with Borsi where they are presenting the govvernments strategy -

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www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5

“Communities will become immune to it and that’s going to be an important part of controlling this longer term,” he said. “About 60 per cent is the sort of figure you need to get herd immunity.”"

www.ft.com/content/38a81588-6508-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea68b5

Sky News:
The government's chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance has told Sky News that about 60% of people will need to become infected with coronavirus in order for the UK to enjoy "herd immunity".

Boris is in hospital???

OP, you keep posting as if 'they' know eerything about the virus or its implications.
They/the govt are dealing with sa new pandemic, they aer human, why do you think they know any more than what's presented? Do you think all the govts around the world are not in the same boat?
You may have had a point if this was UK only situation, but everyone is in the same boat and no one knows how resillient the virus is until vaccine isn't tried and tested..

I'd say the only 'conspiracy theory' can be regarding how and why this virus has started up (i.e was it released from a lab in China either due to negligence or deliberately by some evil person).

Okay so we are rewriting history now? Is that the new Boris strategy to say herd immunity was never his idea? If that really is the strategy it is a spectacularly stupid one as he was at press conferences while herd immunity was presented as the government strategy. So if he is now saying he has never agreed with it, then that makes him look a spectacularly weak and stupid PM.

*vaccine IS tried and tested

@TheoriginalLEM Yes Boris Johnson has been admitted to St Thomas hospital and will be there as long as he needs to be according to Downing Street.

A work colleague has died (in his 70s), as has my boss’ FIL and aunts neighbour. My mum’s neighbour is in hospital fortunately on the mend, I have at least two colleagues who has recovered and a colleague’s daughter was also hospitalised and now recovered.

Is this a question of six degrees of separation - because to me this feels very real and widespread.

Fuck, I'm not his biggest fan but that's awful. In hope he gets better

allout he was acting strictly on the advice/modelling of the medical experts, how the heck could he himself devise strategy on something he had no knowledge about! He's then changed it because they've advised differently based on what they could see happening in Italy.

P.S. some herd immunity is not only needed but is unavoidable in the highly populated countries. So they did reach 'some immunity' point then turned to a diff strategy which made sense.

I only know one person who has been tested. He was positive and ill in bed for a week but doing fine know. A few ex work colleagues in London had symptoms but weren't too ill. Don't know anyone seriously ill with it or anyone who had died.

Presumably the drugs used so far to treat it don't work very well? Otherwise they'd be considered as an alternative to waiting for a vaccine. If the drugs are successful I assume Boris wasn't given any? Everything I've heard is they need to be taken early. Is that something else I've got wrong?

Herd immunity isn't a social media invention. In one of the earliest press conferences, Sir Patrick Vallance, one of the two
scientific experts, used the words to explain why the UK wasn't following the example of the rest of the world in an immediate lock-down.

He was close to Cummings and played a prominent role in the Vote Leave campaign. There was an immediate outcry from other scientists and we haven't seen much of him since. Especially after Niall Ferguson, of Imperial College, who was advising Boris on the herd immunity strategy, revised his figures on the probable death rate from max3 times the annual flu death rate to nearer half a million.

The thing is, even what seems a relatively low death rate of 1-3% (which seems to be the best guess at the moment, more confidence in it being at the lower end of that) is a vast number of actual deaths when it’s looking at population size.

So in all likelihood we will all know someone who has been seriously ill, hospitalised or died from it. It would be more surprising if we didn’t.

There is also the novelty factor in reporting terms, young people with no underlying health conditions die of things all the time - sepsis, meningitis, flu, blood clots etc. We just don’t hear about them as they are rarely deemed newsworthy.

Sorry. I'm repeating previous posts. Thread moving more quickly than my typing.

Presumably the drugs used so far to treat it don't work very well?
What drugs do you mean? There is no treatment.

@CatAndHisKit The imperial college study had already been published when press conference happened and Valance talked about herd immunity and WHO was saying that herd immunity policy was immoral and advising Britain to take a very different approach.
Experts never all say one thing. A good PM looks wider. If all Boris did was listen to Cummings and Valance and ignore everyone else, then yes he would adopt this strategy. And admittedly this does fit with his long history of being spectacularly lazy. But it would also be a clear sign of incompetence.

Well of course it's serious - it kills and make others very sick. It is overwhelming the nhs much like flu over the winter season but this is on a much larger scale. You can tell by the government response ie. lockdown that they thought it was serious. However it is just that, there is no big conspiracy or cover up. I don't know anyone who has died or been hospitalised. I know people who have had symptoms but no-one who has been a confirmed case. Everyone on SM seem to know a friend of a friend who works in a hospital and claims there is some big cover up - I think you have to take storied like that with a pinch of salt!

thing is, even what seems a relatively low death rate of 1-3% (which seems to be the best guess at the moment, more confidence in it being at the lower end of that) is a vast number of actual deaths when it’s looking at population size.

Except the death rate isn’t 1 to 3% of the population, or even 1 - 3% of the people who probably have or had covid 19.

It’s 1-3% of the people who have been tested, most of whom are already very ill at that point.

Boris & co completely failed us with his/their notions of herd immunity, and a lacking of policy in the containment phase. They let CV ravage the country first, then took action - this was a mistake and peope will die because of it. The model to go by is the Singapore & S Korean model of containment, testing & contact tracing - the procedures put in place when they were affected by the 2003 SARS outbreak. We, as a country were completely unprepared fo this, and yes, it's bad.

I know personally of 3 people who have been taken by ambulance from their homes on ventilators. I know of one person who died from this (my DD's friend's uncle). My Dh suffered from suspected CV for the past 2 weeks - we don't know whether he had it or not, because they're not testing. Pretty sure my sister has it - she has the symptoms, but thankfully mildly. Let's hope I don't hear of many more.

@MakeLemonade I have a wide social circle. I only know one previously healthy young person who died of cancer and one in a car crash over a span of 40 years. Young healthy people rarely die.

But I completely agree with your last paragraph about fit and healthy young people dying all the time of things no one anticipated and it not being generally reported.

I think its very simple. Sod all is known as yet on how this virus can and does behave and how and why people are affected by it.

Unitll the scientific community know more as proven fact then there will be fumbling around in the dark so its not that surprising anyway.

I do think that the gov will suppress some matters or play them down for the country's own good, to try and stop that bloody silly panic hoarding that went on a few weeks ago. Now people are acting more sensibility the supermarkets have got their act together we're getting the vast majority of goods that we need to live on.

We'll just have to sit tight and wait it out and see where the UK goes in the grim stats tables. Hope old BoJo is OK even for his girlfrineds sake ,poor woman, and one other thing her Maj as impressive as ever!

No mention of the old man trust he is OK?.

The thing is, even what seems a relatively low death rate of 1-3%
The official death rate is much more than that in the U.K because we only confirm cases that are hospitalised. The proportion of those dying is a lot.

And we have no idea what the death rate is in the UK. The 1-3% death rate is an estimate of everyone infected and is taken from WHO.