Numbers are climbing but it doesn't seem as bad as Italy - desensitised already?

[BeatrixPottersAlterEgo]

A few weeks ago, when the deaths in Italy rose over 10k,I was horrified. The stories coming out of Italy were really shocking - bodies lying in homes for days because undertakers couldn't get to them, the army transporting coffins, hospital corridors full of people lying on floors.

Why aren't we seeing the same scenes here? Not that anybody wants to of course - but I have a close relative working on a covid ward, and she says that the hospital is otherwise quiet, and although there have been issues with PPE, so far they're managing the admissions well and aren't maxed out the way they expected - though the atmosphere on the ward is surreal and scary in other ways. Yet we're having just as many deaths as Italy, if not more. Although the government could have done much more earlier, has the fact we've been a few weeks behind given us just enough time to prepare so that similar scenes are being avoided, or are they still to come?

Or are we just desensitised because we had that time of seeing what happened in other countries before it kicked off here? I don't mean to start some sort of row, but i feel as though I saw more going on in both social and mainstream media a few weeks ago, but now it's getting to similar levels here, and it's like "here's the death toll for the dah6, moving swiftly on, please don't sunbathe in parks"

It's an estimated 50% of those on ventilation that die, not half of those admitted to hospital. Big difference.

Is it? Only i'm sure when the death toll was around 8,000 the other day I heard on Radio 4 that a total of around 16,000 people had been admitted to hospital? And then the presenter actually said "so that's around half of admissions..."

There are D notices out for Covid-19 reporting. That’s probably why most newspapers have turned away from reporting on fatalities and towards related topics they can have more editorial control over -like schools reopening or celebrity lockdown activities.

We won’t know the actual situation until we’ll after events. Just like most details of the war effort for WW2 didn’t come out until decades later.

We won’t know now because we don’t need to know and most people who do know are being instructed not to tell yet- including frontline nurses and doctors. For fear of scaremongering.

Foreign press might carry more details. Look at how Reuters has been banned from Iraq for questioning the death toll numbers there.

I've just checked and those were roughly the stats given by Dominic Raab on the briefing of 9th April.

Snaleandthewhail yes I believe we're being spun like tops.

Here ambulances are only taking the worst cases to hospital. Most are expected to go though the illness at home. So this creates a system that only the ones that are close to death are sent to hospital. In Italy maybe it wasn't like that? In Italy they may have taken anyone? Also, seeing in the news how Italian staff had to chose who to treat probably got the UK ready for what to expect and they created a system of who/how to treat before it got really bad. Also care homes are managing their covid alone so takes burden off hospitals?

I think there's been a problem with definitions, particularly on April 9th. Hospitalisations, people in hospital with, and even after reading the analysis I don't fully understand it! I think I need another coffee.

I have definitely seen proper papers about the critical care survival rates being 1 in 2.

@snailandthewhale what do you mean? That BJ didn't have it or it was overexaggerated to detract away from the escalating numbers?

That makes sense about the management in care homes. I don't know how I feel about that really. On one hand, putting an 88 year old with dementia on to a ventilator is going to be deeply distressing for them, with likely a poor outcome, but on the other hand the thought of just leaving all the elderly to quietly drop like flies in front of care staff who are trying to cope as well as they can.... It's appalling and all I can think of is the pictures post Hurricane Katrina of the poor people who weren't evacuated out of the nursing home in time

We are only testing hospitalised cases. You can only go to hospital if you are really ill. This makes the figures artificially low. It also means that more people die of covid. Underfunded NHS couldn't cope with people going to hospital at an earlier stage of illness. Elderly people are most likely to die. We have a public spend on care for the elderly. Care homes have not been given PPE. All these strategic decisions have been political. Why is there a lack of PPE? PPE is made simply of commonly available materials. Political decisions-Tory decisions all the way.

And we've now been warned to expect financial hardship. We could have had universal income. But Tory ideology is 'survival of the fittest'. Survival of the most selfish.

What’s a D notice?

joystir59 UBI would be unthinkable to tory ideology! what would IDS and JRM do? Their brains would fry! these 'Christians' have rather unChristlike views on the poor.

A D-notice advises the press of the subjects of stories it is advisable not to publish because of damage to national security; they are voluntary and have no legal standing, but almost all editors complied. (Wiki).

I was 17 during the Falklands war in the early 1980s. There wasn't wall to wall tv news back then or the Internet of course so a lot did pass me by as I was at work and it all happened so far away.
However , a lot of the footage of that short war was shown on tv news many weeks after it had finished. It was horrific seeing the open graves. My parents had lived through WW2 and were a bit more stoic but I've a feeling this will happen here too : by the end of the year we will see what really went on in our hospitals and care homes.
It's being air brushed at the moment : just my opinion and I know wars are completely different of course , but the same things happened back then as to now as regards reporting etc.

I thought I was desensitised until we went for a walk yesterday. We live near City of London cemetery, so used to seeing hearses and processions. Yesterday in less than an hour 7 hearses passed us. All of them just had a coffin. That was it. No flowers, no procession of cars behind them.

The route they were taking indicated that they weren't going to collect flowers anywhere. The reality that people were being buried/cremated alone regardless of whether they passed away from covid-19 or not really bought it home.

There's also been a helicopter flying over our house every night at exactly 4am. The local rumours are that it's bringing bodies to the temporary morgue they've erected on the grassland near the cemetery. I know they're only rumours, but none of the local councillors have shot them down which they have been doing if anything is seen as scaremongering.

Oh. Well that answers why it doesn’t look as bad as Italy - the media are being warned off. I was surprised as well by how vehemently people on MN were to Ross Kemp going into a hospital - but I would have thought a function of journalism would be to show what’s happening.

I’m not in the UK Billy, but every time I went for a walk here I would see an ambulance. Really brings it home as to what’s happening silently around us.

I certainly believe that things are being hidden to avoid mass panic.

Helicopter at 4am is a strange one. Doesn't seem feasible to me.
It would be far easier to transport bodies in a refrigerated lorry if they needed to move them around.
Private Ambulances are generally a transit type van kitted out to take bodies. It wouldn't be hard to kit more out even on a temporary basis. So easy to get a fleet of them.

One thing that does get me the way figures are being reported, the population numbers are omitted, ie Italy has lost 20,000 people out of how many, the UK has lost 10,000 out of 65m?

Is it? Only i'm sure when the death toll was around 8,000 the other day I heard on Radio 4 that a total of around 16,000 people had been admitted to hospital? And then the presenter actually said "so that's around half of admissions..."

16,000 current admissions to hospital, so not including all the others who'd already been discharged or died. The presenter was talking out of their arse if they reported that half of all patients admitted to hospital had died.

No, @cheekyweegobshite i'm pretty sure that was Raab's figure for total admissions to that date and a quick google search seems to concur. Feel free to prove me wrong with other data.

@RuffleCrow I think (from rereading that link, but it's not totally clear) that Raab may have said admissions- but actually he was referring to people in hospital with COVID-19 on that day. I've attached a pic of the slide that accompanied the presentation. It's difficult to read precise numbers because of the scale but it looks like about 16k.

Look at the Downing Street briefing slides which show the number of current admissions.

I'm in SE London and the peace we are enjoying from reduced traffic is broken all the time by helicopters and ,strangely ,circling twin engined aeroplanes .

Thanks for posting that. Even without being able to read the numbers exactly, if 16,000 admissions included 8,000 deaths then there would be far fewer than 8,000 in hospital at the current time because some would have been discharged. And that slide clearly shows that there are far more patients than that in hospital.

Don't you think that it would be the biggest story in the news at the moment if 50% of patients admitted to hospital were dying, it would be a woeful mortality rate, far worse than any country in the world.