Something doesn't add up to me

[Greysparkles]

If the virus is as contagious as claimed by some, as in you'll catch it from sitting on the same patch of grass someone else has, or just walking through where someone sneezed earlier.

Why haven't more of us got it??

WoeIsMee we knew some things about this virus from the other countries going through it and that meant we knew we could NOT let it infect everyone at the same time.

Fosler - What communities are you referring to, genuinely don't know who you're talking about.

@StatisticallyChallenged

Do you mean the Los Alamos research - found CoVid to be twice as contagious as originally thought. R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7. But new R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6.

I think I may have had it. I came back from Spain on 29 February and 2 days later felt awful for 3 days and then just poorly for another week.

I thought I just had a bad cold but I had a fever and thought I was freezing when I was sweating buckets. And an annoying cough that lasted once I felt better. Plus I felt exhausted.

The more I read about mild symptoms the more I think maybe it was it.

Looks like some Germans are not happy with the lockdown:

Berlin - German people rebel against the lockdown

Fosler let me help you with your questions since they have only been answered a few 1000 time times.

Going out risks infection. If it only endangered you then I'd be happy to let you earn a Darwin award but you may then pass it onto others

We have to go out for some things but the plan is to restrict to to essential trips only. Going out for picnics is not essential so stay indoors.

How is that hard?

I feel like I’ve walked into a film halfway through, and even though I’m sat down with everyone else and laughing when they do, I’m privately going ‘wtf? This makes no sense?’

Yup.

Peter Hitchens described how he is going approaching it all as similar to conforming to customs in a foreign land out of respect for those who believe in them - similar to how I would cover up in a Muslim country.
I don't follow Islam but I respect that others do, same as I think that the approach we've taken here is batshit, unfair and deeply problematic but I conform out of respect for those around me who seem to believe it's for the greater good/are frightened out of their minds.

Going out risks infection. If it only endangered you then I'd be happy to let you earn a Darwin award but you may then pass it onto others...How is that hard?

Why not just keep the vulnerable protected? The rest of us need to keep the economy. No taxes = no healthcare for anyone.

But we didn’t know this about Ebola or swine flu or bird flu or Spanish flu and we didn’t close the world down for them?

This! It's unprecedented, and it's fucking weird.

Why this approach, now, when never before?

Either it is not as contagious as they say, and that’s why only a relatively small number of people have it (in which case we should panic a lot less about sitting on benches etc) OR It is highly contagious, most of us have had it already, in which case it is a lot less dangerous in terms of mortality than has been suggested

I think in Feb/March govt and their science advisors and modellers were working believed the viral spread in the UK was probably relatively at the beginning. If so and with the indicators the RO infection rate was reasonably high then the modellers showed numbers of deaths if no lockdown occurred would be high. Imperial College modellers forecast approx 500,000 deaths if no measures were taken and around 220,000 if partial lockdown measures were put in place. So the risk of working from the assumption the virus had spread further than believed was too high when the indicators were it hadn’t yet.

It could be in the future they may be able to calculate (don’t know whether this is possible) the virus had spread further in the population by March than they originally thought.

WHO have said test, test, test because it’s only by large scale testing they will I presume get a better picture of the nature of the spread in the UK.

BBCONEANDTWO if that video is genuine (I don't speak german) then it just proves they have the same problems with their village idiots that we do.

SmurfWorn "Why not just keep the vulnerable protected?" because if we do that perhaps half a million will die. You didn't think it was just the vulnerable who could die did you?

Also those sick would overwhelm the NHS if all sick at once.

Ebola or swine flu or bird flu or Spanish flu

I haven’t read the history of the Spanish flu in any detail in the UK in 2019 but I believe they did shut down things.

I think with swine flu they managed to contain it and stop a wide outbreak and their testing showed the RO number wasn’t as high? And didn’t the UK only have a tiny amount of people with Ebola in the country all who were traced and quarantined so the virus had no chance to take a hold.

Typo above, Spanish flu in 1918 not 2019!

Do you mean the Los Alamos research - found CoVid to be twice as contagious as originally thought. R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7. But new R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6

Yes tatiana, that's the one - I was feeding so typing one handed so didn't search out the exact study. But it's quite a significant difference. If (big if) it's correct then we've possibly had many more cases than are being estimated. It also has interesting implications for our current r0. This has been estimated to be down to I think 0.62, based on the previous estimates and that contact had been reduced by 73%. If that 73% is correct and we've got a true r0 at the lower end of the Los Alamos estimate then our current transmission will still be above 1, unless a fair proportion of those available to infect (keyworkers in the main) have had it already.

"I haven’t read the history of the Spanish flu in any detail in the UK in 2019 but I believe they did shut down things."

Yes, they had lockdowns and those cities with lockdowns did better than those without. history.com/news/spanish-flu-pandemic-response-cities

As I understand it, Ebola is more deadly but less contagious than Coronavirus.

Reading the replies, we have an awful lot of very selfish ignorant people in our society.

Those saying it doesn’t bother you, do you think that sounds impressive? Does it make you feel hard? Does it make you feel clever?

It makes you look stupid in my eyes, that is for sure.

Maybe it will inexplicably disappear like mers and sars?

You didn't think it was just the vulnerable who could die did you?

No, of course not. But I think that the risk of death is preferable to living like this, for most people.

In Ecuador they are dumping corpses in the street, because the mortuaries can’t cope. I’d rather they don’t stop the lockdown until they have decided either whether they can keep a lid on the number of infections through better testing and tracing, or have prepared more body storage facilities and mass graves... and I wonder what people would be saying about the population’s mental health then.
There is no easy way out of the current situation - especially not with the current paucity of knowledge. I do not fancy the consequences of our health and social care systems collapsing, though, so until we can be confident that won’t happen...

@Polly02
*What puzzles me is - science and medicine is held in such high esteem. There will now be scientists all over the world researching this disease. Why is so very little still known about it?

Either Science is far less incredible than we are usually led to believe. Or something fishy is going on here.*

They won’t have have the funding to down tools on the stuff they were given grants to do and to start to research this. The money is starting to come through now, but even still science takes time. You have to write a proposal, take it to the various approval bodies, including ethics committees, and then start researching. And then there’s the actual time involved to do things like cell culture etc. The science is moving pretty quickly on this one, but it will take some time to fully understand. Nothing fishy, just how science actually works.

"I think that the risk of death is preferable to living like this, for most people."

Depends how long lockdown goes on for doesn't it? At the moment, it hasn't been going on long enough to just abandon it.

I feel there could be a push to get us to accept some kind of surveillance measures in return for being unlocked

I don't follow Islam but I respect that others do, same as I think that the approach we've taken here is batshit, unfair and deeply problematic but I conform out of respect for those around me who seem to believe it's for the greater good/are frightened out of their minds.

Me too - this is a great way to put it. I think the actual death rate will turn out to be a lot lower than 1%. Germany is doing the most extensive testing and theirs is around 0.4, as well as Iceland who found that half of the cases were asymptomatic and 7 died out of 1600 - also about 0.4%.

1600 people die a day in this country and deaths so far are only very slightly higher than this time last year. We just don't have the data yet to know if we are "saving lives" or actually "very slightly prolonging" them on average, which will all be undone anyway once the deep recession sets in and half of the businesses are boarded up.

They did quarantine areas in the countries that had Ebola in the 2014 outbreak (and indeed any outbreak of Ebola) it just so happen to work so it didnt need to go further because you need to actually come into physical bodily contact with fluids. It never became a pandemic

Spanish flu there were areas that quarantined and they did better than areas that werent - but global travel didnt exist. And the pandemic of flu since then havent been as big.

This is the big pandemic that was due and it is in a different time to the others. But as I said it very much is a Schrödinger's virus, because we dont know much about it at the moment it is multiple things at once because we cannot accurately know which one it is.