Is the fear out of proportion?

[Hotlungs]

I’m asking this genuinely as I struggle with anxiety and have a tendency to catastrophise.
I read yesterday that 99.5% of people will survive if they have the virus. Whilst I understand that people are worried they are in the 0.5% is the fear rationale? The press describing it as a ‘killer virus’ and people saying they don’t want to go to the supermarket incase they die. Obviously I’m not talking about those in the vulnerable group.
Are we doing poor risk management? Again to clarify I don’t mean the current lockdown situation to protect the NHS (which is needed) but I mean the fear of it.
We are more likely to die in our cars but we risk manager that (with precautions) to still use them. What are people’s thoughts?

eagle I think it’s different in a rural town. In a rough part of London, we’re all angry for a range of reasons and increasingly my route to the park has signs up like “we know you stole from us, we’ve got a ring doorbell etc”.

I alternate between being scared and then being calm and thinking its a ridiculous over reaction from me. Just when I am feeling OK a news item comes on that makes me panic again. I work for an Ambulance Trust and have lost one colleague and another paramedic is in hospital fighting for his life, my DIL has been redeployed as a nurse and started working in a hospital today that has many cases. I worry she wont have sufficient PPE and she will bring it home to my DS who is severely asthmatic. My DD works with nursery children and I worry that when she returns she will be at risk as although she isnt on the vulnerable list, she was admitted to hospital in January, struggling to breathe, on a drip and her kidneys were damaged as a result (still dont know what that illness was as they took a blood culture but werent able to be difinitive about the infection) they also battled to get her temperature under control.

I am not worried about me catching it, althoug, being 55, overweight and a smoker, my DS both keep telling me to be careful and sending me news items about people in my category falling very unwell and dying.

My eldest DS is still working and has been throughout all of this, not a healthcare worker but an engineer that works in banks, he is the healthiest of my 3 DC but he was a smoker from the age of 16 to 28, he has changed to vaping for the last 2 years and follows a healthy life style.

Sorry rambling away on this, but yes I am scared and then when I manage to do other things, I forget the news items etc and feel normal, until the next thing pings up on my notifications.

Where do you get the 99.5% survival rate from? Everything I've seen shows we dont even have our own statistics in order

Just wanted to say that the deaths from Coronavirus are much higher than road accidents or suicide. In 2018 under 2000 RTA fatalities and 6.5k suicide. There have already been 16.5k deaths from Coronavirus in what, just over a month??

So by my reckoning you are about 10x as likely to die of CV at the mo than in an RTA. Just saying..

Sorry 10x more likely to die of suicide and more than 60x more likely to die than in an RTA.

But that depends on your own personal risk profile. Not everyone is at equal risk which is why it is important to risk assess.

It’s like saying that someone without a car, an average car user and a taxi driver are all at the same risk of having a car accident. Clearly that wouldn’t be the case

Someone who is at a very low risk from Coronavirus might actually be at greater risk of dying in a car accident on a personal level.

At a population level the risk of Coronavirus is higher than the risk of car accidents.

Personal risk and population level risk are not always aligned.

Yeah but it's not like everyone's individual risk of Coronavirus is mutually exclusive. We are isolating to 'protect the NHS and save lives', not to save ourselves.

Someone up thread had said you are more likely to die from a car accident or domestic abuse, which just isn't true.

@Ponoka7

The problem is that we now know you don't become immune. Those working on the vaccine, Sarah Gilbert being one has now said this.That then gives the potential to have your lungs weakened during each infection. As well as the effect on other organs. If we then liken it to TB, that then shortens your life and causrs a whole other range of problems.

Can you link this please. Because I can find no evidence of this. She says they think you can be infected more than once. But noone has claimed you'll get lifetime immunity. All reports I have seen say they are working on the assumption that like with SARS you will have a gradually waining immunity over probably years but it's too soon to know.

It's comments like yours that are causing this mass panic. Wheres the evidence it weakens your organs and causes long term illness. For many people it never even effects their lungs.

Yes but we are talking about whether the level of worry about corona is proportionate.

A lot of people who are at a very low risk from Coronavirus have been so swept away by the “killer virus” messaging that they believe they are at much greater risk than they actually are.

On a personal level it is entirely possible that an individual is more at risk of dying in a car accident or from an incident of DV than from Coronavirus. It will depend on their risk profile.

I consider myself to be low risk and so I am not concerned about catching the virus. I am obeying the lockdown rules not for my benefit but in order to protect those who are more vulnerable and therefore at greater risk.

Based on my personal experience, I think there might be good reason for people to be more concerned, not less.

I started to notice symptoms around lunch time a few weeks ago - new, fairly persistent cough and a high temperature. By around 9:00 pm I was feeling rather unwell and went to my bed. I woke up around 4:00 am with a raging fever so I emailed my boss to say not to expect me to be working for a day or two.

I then went online and double-checked the NHS guidance which was pretty much if you're symptomatic self-isolate and don't bother contacting the NHS unless you literally think you're about to die. So I did exactly that for a few days. I got suckered a little bit by the stats and guidance as well to be honest. I'm a fit, healthy and active person in my early 50s with no known underlying conditions so in the category that shouldn't have too bad a time of it, or so they tell us. Looking at the stats I didn't fully appreciate at that point what a misleading bag of incomplete shite they are. I took the view that it was statistically highly unlikely I had CV-19 and a cough and fever could be any number of other conditions.

So I soldiered on self-isolating. By about day 4 I started to notice pain in some of my organs - kidneys, lungs and heart mainly - but it was fairly mild pain by my standards so I stuck with the NHS guidance. By day six, my wife and step-daughter decided they didn't care what I thought they were going to get me seen by someone, somehow. We had a bit of a disagreement over this because I'm very much of the don't make a fuss mentality and from the big boys and girls don't cry generation. Thankfully they over-ruled me. They then spent 3+ hours in a queue to NHS 111 and after speaking to them waited another 30 minutes for a call-back before they were finally given the go-ahead to take me to the local health centre for assessment. Fast forward an hour or so and I'm in an ambulance being blue-lighted to the general hospital 50 miles away.

I spent the first day in hospital in a single room until they got my test for CV-19 back as positive at which point they moved me to the covid ward. I was given antibiotics and oxygen therapy. By day 5 they had got me to a state where I no longer needed oxygen and I requested and was permitted to go home.

All good you might say and yes at the end of the day it worked out well. The thing that really grips me though is that according to my doctor my oxygen levels were so low when I was initially assessed that I would not have survived another 12-24 hours without medical intervention. I'd followed the official guidance (which is too vague and vulnerable to subjectivity IMHO) and yet I very nearly shuffled off my mortal coil when all I needed was, in the grand scheme of things, some fairly basic medical support. To add insult to injury I would probably not even even have been recorded as a CV-19 fatality.

My advice is if you or someone you love is symptomatic for more a than a very few days without showing clear signs of recovery, fight tooth and nail to get them seen. Do not take no for an answer. Also have a hospital bag ready just in case. It might sound silly but it never really crossed our minds that I might not be coming back from the assessment centre and nobody warned us that was a possibility so I arrived at hospital with nothing but the clothes on my back. The hardest part of that was I didn't even have my phone and as visitors aren't allowed I had no way of communicating with my family. Seemingly small details like that take on a whole new significance when you're faced with the reality of the situation. Losing me would have been hard enough but I think not being able to even see me at the end is something my wife would never have got over if it had come to that.

It's worth pointing out as well that I didn't see any signs of the system being under strain. Obviously that will vary by region and over time but our assessment centre had 3 drive-in bays set up and we were the only people being seen for the half-hour or so we were there. The Covid ward at the hospital had several empty beds and the staff seemed very much in control and not shown any signs of stress or struggling to cope. That may well change with time but why the determination to reduce people engaging with the NHS as much as possible when they haven't yet reached capacity?

Something I would urge everyone to do as a matter of urgency is think through where it might leave your family if you were to die and get your affairs as much in order as you reasonably can. I was fortunate in that we updated our wills and got powers of attorney drawn up a few months ago but there are still quite a few things, practical and financial, I've identified that could have been better organised and I'm now working through those.

1 read yesterday that 99.5% of people will survive'. - that's an optimistic forecast - 33,000 or so deaths (assuming whole population catch it).

For a population of 66m, if all catch it and 0.5% die that is 330,000 deaths and not 33,000.

Yes, it's way out of proportion and I worry what the effects of the catastrophising is doing for the mental health of some people. For some perspective, 165,000 people die from cancer every year in the UK.

Yes like people saying they won't send their kids to school because they won't be safe.. I'm not really worried for my own personal safety, I'd rather not get it though.

My in-laws are getting on a bit (60's) but quite healthy, they have completely locked down and now scared to leave the house at all.

I'm not sure I think some people are a bit OTT but I think the severity has to be understood. I know the risk will vary from person but ON AVERAGE CV is much more deadly than, well anything else at the moment.

Also the death rate is only this low because we have locked down, if we had carried on as usual it would have had exponential growth. I do think it needs to be feared but people do need to be sensible.

So the death rate for cancer is around 450 a day and the death rate for CV has been up to around 1000 a day, and that's with very significant restrictions.

Not exactly insignificant is it!??

Please, please, please don't think things are being blown out of proportion and become complacent. This is very real.

I have just heard tonight that a close friend has lost his sister-a healthy 40yr old. She's leaving behind a 4 and a 14 year old.

Each of these cases we are hearing about, and perhaps becoming numb to, are people. People with families, friends and hopes. 16500 deaths already.

Stay safe everyone.

Is the fear out of proportion? Hmmm.
As of today there are 215 pages of threads in the Coronavirus topic and no doubt there will be more. Look back at the history a bit - page 111, 88, 176, the very early ones if you wish. It's interesting, as the earlier ones (from 2 months ago, only) can already be tinged with hindsight.
The scenes from Spain, in particular, show what could happen when health system/facilities did get to the point of near overwhelm. The points in the Italian situation when loved ones who had passed away were left for some days in a residence alongside a member of their family because of the difficulties and demands on those who were needed to help. With underlying conditions, yes, but certainly much younger than the demographic assumed to be 'at risk' on the basis of what seemed to be coming out of the Chinese findings. The UK has less space and a much larger population than Spain and than a good number of countries in the EU. If the risk seems to have been overstated now, please be in no doubt, this is somehow due to a combination of luck, quick learning/adaptation, and getting some of the strategy right.

@toogoodtobetrue

I’m sorry to hear you were so poorly and glad that you now seem to be on the mend.

I do think that the anticipation of hospital scenes similar to those in Spain and Italy meant that the messaging has been stay at home at all costs and unless you are at death’s door and that really isn’t good enough.

The NHS does have capacity and so people should be being seen at a much earlier stage of the illness and being given support. As you say you needed relatively little help to recover. There really shouldn’t be desperately unwell people struggling at home when there is quite a lot of spare capacity in hospitals.

I think the lockdown has worked much better than they thought it would (I understand the level of compliance is much higher than anticipated) and so whilst the numbers requiring hospital treatment are still high they are not as high as they possibly expected. The benefit of that should be that we can more people into hospital earlier but for some reason that doesn’t seem to be happening.

So the death rate for cancer is around 450 a day and the death rate for CV has been up to around 1000 a day

You can't really make a day to day comparison like this because the nature of pandemics is that they have big peaks and then wane. Whereas cancer will continue to kill people every day, every year for the foreseeable future (unless we ever find a cure).

ON AVERAGE CV is much more deadly than, well anything else at the moment.

Of course it isn’t. Most of us aren’t being infected, are we?

A global pandemic will never be an insignificant event and no one is immune. It’s just a question of keeping everything in proportion and thinking critically about your own level of personal risk and acting accordingly (whilst continuing to follow the guidance issued which is in place for the benefit of society as a whole).

How is it not more deadly if more people are dying from it?

I don't understand how something that is killing twice as maybe people as cancer (at the moment) can be made light of.

I’m actually quite scared. I’m in London and know of quite a few people who have died. I myself am a bit overweight and BAME.
It just seems so unpredictable who is going to get hit quite badly and who isn’t though it seems that BAME seem to have a higher rate of death?
I’m not sure what’s going to happen after lockdown is over but it’s all very worrying.

If the UK had nearly half a million people die in a matter of a few weeks (without any measures that would have been the case), there would have been civilisational collapse. Dead bodies around, no social infrastructure working, etc. It is pretty silly to argue that not doing anything would have saved our economy. The economy would not have been remaining intact with people hopping to the restaurants and schools happily open in the conditions unheard of in modern time.

Exactly as istherelifeafter40 says.

It's also not about catastrophising. Instead of people panicking they should think the worst probably won't happen - because we're doing something about it, as best we can. It's about pointing out just how bad things could get without taking measures including lockdown, but there's no need to panic because we are taking action to mitigate things. The hospitals that are currently quiet wouldn't be quiet without lockdown. Having said that, in some areas people are dying at home or like a PP not being taken in until very late stages (despite it being best to treat early), and care home residents are being left to die with no proper medical care in large numbers. If hospitals are quiet in those areas they shouldn't be. They should be treating all those desperately in need patients.

When it comes to lockdown. We shouldn't take a more haste, less speed approach. Longer initial lockdown spares us greater longer-term damage.

The saddest thing is the children are deleting the same levels of anxiety- article here today in papers

"Another mother from north London who has a girl aged nine and asked not to be identified said: “Early on a child in my daughter’s class told my daughter that there was a virus that was going to kill everybody. It hadn’t been something we’d talked about at home so unfortunately this is the first she heard of it. That night she came downstairs very late, saying she couldn’t sleep. When we asked why, she became upset and told us what her friend had said.”

Her family reassured her by explaining that most people would have only mild symptoms and told her not to worry.

“For the next few days she had difficulty going to sleep but eventually things went back to normal. Then her life started unravelling with clubs, trips and eventually schools all cancelling or closing, so the anxiety at bedtime kicked in again for a few days.”

When their daughter developed a cough she again began fretting, especially at bedtime, worrying that she had coronavirus.

Rachel Andrew, a child psychologist in Rawtenstall, Lancashire, has counselled a number of children with what she calls “health anxiety” about the coronavirus. Many are frightened of contracting Covid-19 and fearful that they or people they love will die, particularly grandparents.

“In terms of trends I would see most referrals of children in middle childhood, between about eight and 11, with anxiety,” Dr Andrew said. “They are most likely to experience heightened anxiety within that age span and a fear of death can really take hold.”