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"

Italy has launched an enquiry into why the virus is rampaging through its care homes.
Care home cases are being tested though, so are now being fed into the daily figures.

There was also very much a triage system as to who got a ventilator a few weeks ago, especially in the northern hotspots.

most people seem to focusing on the absolute numbers but given the disparities in populations between countries surely this is very misleading?
When you look at deaths relative to the population size then Spain and Italy are almost twice as bad as the UK

Italy has almost same population as UK, doesn't it?

Italy and Spain are two weeks more or less ahead of the UK in terms of the spread of the virus etc. Hence much higher numbers.
Spain's population is about 15 million less than the UK and Italy, which are more or less the same. The UK has a couple of million more.
It's not at all useful to look at total figures- that puts the US (for example) in a great position and somewhere tiny like San Marino in a bad one.
The scientists look at % of population, death rate X infections etc. Check out the graphs thread which uses data and projections from various scientific organizations.

I'd be interested to know how many people are off the ventilators and out of the doors now. I have this fear that people are just staying on the vents without a change, almost like a long term coma.

The research seems to suggest that the outcomes for ventilated patients are not great. Much better for other forms of respiratory support. This is research up to 3rd April.

www.icnarc.org/About/Latest-News/2020/04/04/Report-On-2249-Patients-Critically-Ill-With-Covid-19

However, it's a new virus. Hopefully, with better understanding of the condition and patient responses the results will improve. I read ( either linked on the data threads here, or sent by a medical friend) that research to compare treatments has been given the go-ahead.

@GrumpiestOldWoman

"No government wants its citizens to realise that their country has come out worst because it looks bad for the government so clearly they aren't going to dwell on the numbers. But why the press aren't making people aware - I cannot fathom. "

The reason is that the press have been told by the government not to print bad news stories. And NHS staff have been banned from talking to the press, with the Official Secrets Act used to gag them.

This is why the news isn't full of horrific stories and pictures like Italy - because the government is deliberately preventing the public from finding out the truth, for political reasons.

The government, understandably, don't want to highlight the fact that the UK has far and away the worst death stats in Europe, and quite possibly the world (the US has more deaths but 6 times the population, so on a per capita basis, the UK is probably worse - unsurprising, as the US had more ITU beds to start with and its population is far more spread out).

Our hospitals are likely not as overrun with old people and doctors are less likely to have to choose whether or not to intubate them - because government policy not to provide care homes with PPE and to send sick patients back from hospitals to care homes means that care homes have had very high levels of infections. Government policy however has been not to test people in care homes and to discourage doctors from recording their deaths as coronavirus (after all, old people in care homes will likely all be suffering from other conditions the deaths can be attributed to). So the net result is vast numbers of deaths in care homes, but no addition to the overall coronavirus death stats, so it looks like the UK's coronavirus death figures are just a shade under Italy's/Spain's, rather than way worse.

As families aren't allowed in care homes, no-one to know or see.

Meanwhile, a government run by eugenicists like Cummings and Johnson are smiling.

Government policy however has been not to test people in care homes and to discourage doctors from recording their deaths as coronavirus

This is simply not true. in fact many doctors are citing COVID on death certificates in the absence of symptoms and test results in the individual.

UK population 68M
Italy 66M
Italy has an older average population and a higher death rate in the past 5 years.

Deaths in Italy appeard around 27th Feb whereas in the UK reporting started around 12th March (read from the worldometer graphs) which is 2 weeks.

UK is currently reporting around 750 deaths per day which Italy did at its peak now around 500 per day. If UK follows Italy 500 per day for 2 weeks would be 7,000 deaths which is approximately the difference between the total deaths in the UK now compared to Italy.

QED... UK is not in a better place than Italy in respect of number of deaths, though the UK may be better at dealing with it calmly.

I was told by a friend (who's mum is an A&E nurse in our local hospital) that people were dying in the corridors and they had turned the local ice rink into a morgue becaise the hospital ones were over flowing. This was the week before lockdown, and at that point only around 10 people had died in the whole of Scotland 🙄. A lot of hearsay and scaremongering.

Usually caveats about accuracy in reporting, generalisations, extrapolations, etc etc

Our Trust has 500 empty beds with wards closed because there are no patients. Our critical care also has plenty of beds available. My worry is the people that are staying away and the swathe of non covid patients we will have at some point who are medical/surgical emergencies because they’ve had an illness and haven’t sought help

www.euromomo.eu again delays in reporting and this is long term view. The Coronavirus season on a Europe wide basis looks similar in profile to the 2016/17 flu season. We now have to hope that it really does drop off.

The ever growing numbers of frail elderly who need care are a problem for all modern societies, not just the UK, yes the situation in care homes is horrifying but this is happening everywhere not just the UK.
The only way to deal with large numbers of elderly is in some kind of elder care facility, we do not have the resources for highly paid staff to look after the ever growing numbers of frail elderly, this is why they now take the role of kindling in a worldwide forest fire.
I can't see how it could have been any different?

We don't actually know how many people are sick or have died.

Our death figures show only those who were diagnosed with COVID19 and died in hospital.

So it excludes, for example, those in old people's care homes, or those who die at home. Figures of 4,000 and 7,000 have been mentioned. Last time I looked, Government representatives refused to confirm, deny, or discuss these figures, and pretend to be angry when questioned.

People who die, or are sick, in their own homes are also omitted.

Since we are not testing sufficient people, who don't know the true number of cases. We only know that official numbers are too low.

The ONS figures for deaths per day are around 50% higher than usual.

If you have had the sad experience of having a loved one die recently, you will know that it is very hard to get through to an undertaker, crematorium or registry office, and that cremations are now being carried out, without mourners, seemingly at peak capacity.

I think the media aren’t being allowed to show the full horror of what’s going on in hospitals. I remember those scenes from Italian intensive care units, with rows of patients on ventilators lying on their fronts. I’d never seen that before. That alone was shocking. Those same scenes are playing out up and down the country but we aren’t seeing it.

My child was due to have an outpatients appointment at the local community hospital next week. Instead it’s been converted to an acute hospital and is full of beds. It’s almost impossible to comprehend the scale of sick people needing care right now.

@cloud1183 Yes our trust has over 40% of beds empty (over 700 beds) and ICU still well under capacity. Nobody being sent to the regional Nightingale

I actually don’t think the scenes from Italy are being played out in the NHS. The NHS has a lot of capacity at the moment and I don’t think these Nightingale hospitals will ever completely fill.

In all fairness though, the scenes that Sky news (main shock doc purveyors- they are the televisual version of the Sun and the Mail with their attention grabbing dramatics) showed in Italy were all in one very localised area. Most of the country was largely untouched at that stage and much of the south still is.

Also, one of the doctors interviewed all over the foreign press saying his hospital didn't have beds and equipment (hard to believe it was only a month ago, it seems so much longer) was a proctologist in a private hospital which didn't have any emergency care beds.

Italy's average age (not of Covid cases but in general) is 45. In the UK it's 40.

I spoke to someone whose training staff for the Nightingale hospitals. They only had 18 patients in the London hospital

At the moment I’m more worried about the people staying away and the inevitable surge from that. There will also be a huge backlog for surgeries so the NHS will suffer for this for another 12-18 months. I think the NHS is coping well with lots of capacity to deal with a surge

Ckoud1183 and pocketem - must assume you are both lucky enough to be in parts of the country where cases and death rates are low - but that doesn't mean there aren't crises elsewhere. Two hospitals near me were closed with critical alerts as they nearly ran out of beds in one case and oxygen in the other.

Cathyandclaire - what I wrote was true. There has been lots of reporting over the fact that the ONS deathstats for overall deaths show much higher numbers than the same weeks in previous years. It is apparent that these unexplained deaths have not been attributed to cv even though that is clearly the cause of most (maybe a small proportion are from other causes going untreated eg strokes or heart attacks as people are too scared to go to hospital st the moment or can't get through on the phone).

There have also been examples of guidance telling doctors not to attribute deaths to cv without having had a positive test result - but tests have not been available for those dying at home or in care homes.