It's predicted we might well be the worst affected country in Europe

[KenDodd]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52261859

Yes, its the density of the British population compared with other countries that has caused this. No other eurpean country was dense enough to put someone as manifestly unsuitable as Johnson in charge of its wellbeing.

@Sunshine1239

Not necessarily:
mobile.twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1249366217204338688

Also, from a doctor in Liverpool:
"#COVID19 patients admitted to our ICU are generally healthier than our normal patient population, but despite this, have a high mortality. People dying in middle age, many years ahead of them."
mobile.twitter.com/peterahampshire/status/1249415318969163780

Maybe initially, that will be true. But then other European countries may overtake us, especially poorer countries with health services that can't cope when their critical patient numbers rise.

I think the "herd immunity" comments were based on the reality that unless a full lockdown is put in place for months on end, until a vaccine is found, the best we can hope for is that most people are able to recover and then there will be herd immunity, to a large degree. The government knew that a full lockdown early on would not be supported by the UK public until death numbers rose. Even now, with well over 10,000 deaths, there are still some who flout the guidelines. A few weeks back some well educated, intelligent people that I know were still saying things like "It's no worse than the flu... that kills thousands every year" and "It only affects the very old/frail people... most will be OK". I think the govt took human nature into account and timed the measures accordingly.

I think that if no lockdown had happened, we would be seeing a far higher death toll now. Looking at the stats, this virus has the potential to kill one or two million people in the UK alone, but hopefully the measures taken will reduce the final death toll to thousands, rather than millions. Even so, I think we may lose 100,000 or more, by the time we have a vaccine and/or herd immunity. No country is handling the pandemic perfectly, and no health service had everything it needed when the pandemic began to spread, but I think there are many countries in Europe and around the globe that will have a far higher death toll than the UK, once this over.

@toryandproud

Re-read my post - I said WHO are suggesting strict lockdown, contact tracing, testing etc. And we still are not doing this.

I did not say that they were making recommendations for ventilator production in January
I did say however that ventilation support and PPE requirements were obvious in January and so appropriate preparations should have been made. You may think that a tweet asking for companies to switch to ventilator production in March was an appropriate response. As a healthcare professional having already watched the need for ventilators in China, Spain and Italy for weeks-months, I was under no illusion that the UK would be different. I find it bizarre that these totally predictable needs were overlooked by gov 'intelligence'.

It was only a matter of time before there was a pandemic like this - at least that is what epidemiologists have been warning about for the last 5 years. After SARS was contained, scientists working on a vaccine of corona type viruses has their funding pulled because it wouldn’t be profitable. That vaccine would have been able to be used against Covid 19 (or at least tweaked slightly). I think it is a lesson to us all to stop being short sighted. Our government did know that they weren’t prepared for a pandemic (they had a test run in 2016 then did nothing about the recommendations). They took a gamble against that advice and that of the epidemiologists in the name of saving money. Responsibility for that rests with the government because they made their decision and it has consequences - not enough PPE etc. Our government has also run ICU at 90 percent for years with one of the lowest ratios of ventilators to people compared with other European countries, it is a known fact rather than opinion that the NHS has been underfunded for years. Whilst the government didn’t cause the pandemic they have to accept responsibility for how prepared/ not prepared they have been and for how they have responded because that is down to them.

Blaming us isn't working and people are starting to get arsey.

No, they're not, they're worshipping at the altar of St Boris now.

Very different figures on different media news

Aljazir has over 1700 deaths for Britain
BBC has under 800

Why the large discrepancy?

Whilst the government didn’t cause the pandemic they have to accept responsibility for how prepared/ not prepared they have been and for how they have responded because that is down to them.

They won't though, and their voters will let them.

Maybe they're including the deaths at home? I think our official figures only count those who've died in hospital. On a related note, how is Saudi Arabia doing? And the Gulf States? They took fairly swift action I think.

Because they have attached the overall totals for wales/scotland/NI not their daily figures.

Fintan O'Toole wrote this interesting article in The Guardian yesterday. He makes a very good point. Yet people seem to have short memories. He thinks the UK government "squandered" the chance to act decisively when it got a couple of weeks head-start. I'm inclined to agree. Too little, too late. The virus infected exponentially before they closed schools, pubs, restaurants, large gatherings. History will not view Boris and his cronies kindly.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/11/coronavirus-exposed-myth-british-exceptionalism

I doubt we'll ever know how many have been affected either catching the virus or dying from it, as we aren't collecting data to tell us this.
it's nothing better than guess work.

@MintyMabel comparisons between countries have their value - and are used in many other areas of life (policy, tech, infrastructure development). Chris Witty has also said there are lessons to be learnt from Germany. Whilst their exact approach may not be right for the UK we could definitely apply some of what they are doing to improve our prospects.

@Lexijayde44

Well said! What more can we bloody do now? We are all staying in ALL the time- everything outside is shut.
We are doing our best

It definitely has something to do with population size and density. We have more people than many countries. London has a lot more than twice as many people as Madrid, Paris or Berlin. Birmingham has more people than some European capitals.

That's part of the reason why New York has also been hit so badly.

god we love a blame game... Its our lives at stake... We need to work together to find solutions rather than blame and accept responsibility

@ToffeeYoghurt this FT page has some good visuals what the global of CV looks like: www.ft.com/coronavirus-latest

My friend is out in Saudi and said they went into lockdown pretty quickly because the country can afford it (and any impact it has on the economy).





comparisons between countries have their value - and are used in many other areas of life (policy, tech, infrastructure development)

An entirely different circumstance and those things are less variable.

Comparing something as binary as cases and deaths tells you nothing about whether one strategy in this exceptional situation is better than another. We also won’t know anything about those numbers until this whole thing is over and done with.

but we are always told theres plenty of room in this country when the immigrant/refugee threads kick off........

ODFOD.

Who do you think the government will blame?

The experts. Why do you think that, from the outset, they’ve been setting out at every opportunity that they’re “following the science”? The Daily Mail is bolstering the strategy, deifying Johnson (headline today: “He is Risen!” - yes, really), while gunning for the experts.

Thanks for the link. I find it interesting seeing how different countries responded to this.

I wonder if it's because we are so densely populated on really a very small island?

Netherlands has a greater population density than us, but far fewer cases or deaths so it's not just population density.

@MintyMabel what parameters can they work with? The data may crude but I'm not sure what else they can use. I know correlation doesn't always equal causation but there has to be some framework to work with in?

It’s very easy to be wise with the benefit of hindsight, isn’t it?

The last comparable event was the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s. It didn’t spread beyond south east Asia. Any government that had spent a ton on ventilators and shutting down the economy ‘just in case’ in 2003 would have received a good kicking from voters, who would have complained that the billions it cost should have been spent on something else.

Exactly the same thing would have happened here this year if we’d gone into lockdown too early. Imagine the howls of dismay:

‘You could have spent all this on flood defences!’

‘You could have spent £31 billion on backdating my pension until 60!’

‘Why didn’t you give all the civil service a 2% pay rise?’

‘But the Cheltenham Festival brings £Xm into the economy!’

(For the avoidance of doubt, I think that letting Cheltenham and the Athletico Madrid match in Liverpool go ahead was insane.)

I can see that there is some aversion here to laying any blame at all at the door of the public, but the sight of packed tube trains after we were asked to go to work only if necessary was horrifying. Didn’t some Italian public health experts say that the tube was a disaster waiting to happen? You’re not telling me that all of those people on the tube from around 16 March were key workers. No wonder London is in a worse position than any other city, disproportionate to its population: all those people picking it up on the tube and spreading it to their families and neighbours. Terrifying.

Look back at some of the threads here from mid-March: idiots claiming that they, or their relations, HAD to carry on going to work despite impending lockdown if people didn’t comply with the request to only go to work if absolutely necessary, “to put food on the table”. I’m sure that some people, unfortunately, are in that position but not as many as claimed. They just didn’t want to lose any earnings at all, and prioritised their financial well-being above being responsible. One fucktard on here was making excuses for her niece, a mobile hairdresser, continuing to visit clients in their homes - and we all know that a high proportion of mobile hairdressers’ clients are older ladies - after lockdown because she “couldn’t afford not to”. But risking transmission of the disease to those older ladies, risking their lives: that was evidently OK. Just as long as the selfish niece didn’t lose any income. There were a ton of people on here agreeing with that viewpoint.

Similarly, there were idiots on here saying that they would continue visiting the gym - which from other countries’ experience was known to be a hotspot for transition - “until the government tells me that I can’t”.

Which goes to show that, although not every judgment made by the government’s scientific advisors has been dead on in hindsight, I am far more inclined to trust their judgment and capacity to make reasoned decisions than that of the public.