Why does no one talk about the 1989-90 epidemic?

[LinemanForTheCounty]

Found out about this recently - 29000 dead. Looking at the dates I had it and after effects including pleurisy (I was 20, no reason for me to have pleurisy other than this). It affected people under 25 worst.

I dunno. I'm trying to figure this all out but that's a lot of people dead, mostly young people. Did we get it wrong then or have we got it wrong now? Our response, I mean.

@hamstersarse - please would you have a look at what's happening in say Brazil and Ecuador, then pop back and explain why you believe the death rate is exactly the same as flu.

I think one estimate for the UK alone was 250,000 dead and a health service unable to cope.

Even the 250,000 estimate was based on mitigations that we didn’t contemplate back in 1989-90 (which was basically protect the elderly but let everything else carry on as normal, which they realised probably wouldn’t be possible to do particularly well given that we wouldn’t have been able to hermetically seal off millions of elderly and vulnerable with the virus left to rampage through the rest of the population, especially given the lack of PPE back in March.

The comparable figures was 510,000 for a “carry on as though it was just a bit flu” scenario. That figure is hotly disputed, but given the deaths we’ve had, and given the deaths in hotspots around the world (6,000 out of 1.1m in Bergamo region of Lombardy even though they had a lockdown, albeit far too late) means it’s a credible figure in my opinion.

@hamstersarse

There were flaws in Ferguson’s model which can be seen with hindsight, principally that people would naturally socially distance substantially when faced with the threat of Covid, so a “do nothing” versus “lockdown” dichotomy is too simplistic.... However, back in March no one knew how people would respond.

Ironically it is those that are most critical of IF’s modelling, and that advocated we should simply carry on as normal as its only a bit of flu, that match his assumption for human behaviour best, and if the country were full of such people, his modelling assumptions would have matched reality better!

Bergamo shows us what happens when society just carries on as normal, and even they did respond aggressively, just too late to stop a significant proportion being infected (I believe antibody levels are 40%+). Scale is that 6,000 deaths out of a 1.1m population to the U.K. and you get 360,000 deaths, not far off from Ferguson’s predictions when you consider that even in Bergamo intervention occurred before it burnt itself out.

You've answered your own question. That was an epidemic (flu). This is a pandemic of a new Coronavirus and nobody knows what the R0 for it is, how deadly it is etc.

You are comparing apples to oranges.

No source for your 29k figure (for flu deaths that year?).

(Don’t think flu death figures were / are published by ONS/ public health agencies)

I had pleurisy once, age 21, it hurt like hell!

What do you mean “antibody levels of 40%’, Derby? That 40% of UK population have antibodies for Covid? If so, v much doubt that! Anyway, barely anyone has been testing because testing has been so crap here.

@EdithWeston

I read somewhere that some people who have had H1N1 and MERScov may have residual immunity to Covid-19

If you come across what you read, would you link it. I can see why other human coronaviruses might ave some sort of cross protection for this coronavirus (and remember reading about one particular strain of cold in this context)

But I've not come across the idea that influenza (a whole different family of viruses) had any relevance and wouid like to read up,(yes, I know I can google, but if you still have the link it'll give me a nice starting point)

I’m interested in this too! Would love to read any info.

Anecdotally I have had a confirmed case of H1N1. I work on the SLT of a primary school and 3 out of the 5 of us have had Covid. I’m one of the ones who haven’t - could just be luck though, or I have had it asymptomatically. We are in London and the virus was in the school community before lockdown, sadly we have children who have lost relatives.

H1N1 has been in the seasonal flu jab

I know not everyone gets their jab, but if these was anything in that theory, surely there would be fewer cases in the flu jab recipients - which include a lot of NHS staff and the elderly?

Also interested in what is going on with this one

@Dozer

What do you mean “antibody levels of 40%’, Derby? That 40% of UK population have antibodies for Covid? If so, v much doubt that! Anyway, barely anyone has been testing because testing has been so crap here.

Apologies for not being clear... I meant Bergamo region in Italy, the epicentre of Covid outbreak in Europe.

I don't remember any flu epidemic in 1989 & I was 18 then. You do get some years where flu is worse than others though. The only thing I specifically remember is swine flu which was a pandemic.

I don't remember that at all, and I was 26 with 3 very small DC. My 2 yo was ill that Xmas and the GP was talking about having him admitted, but that was a combination of bronchitis and tonsillitis. Might have been flu as well. Had I been aware of an epidemic I would have been really panicking.

[quote MRex]@hamstersarse - please would you have a look at what's happening in say Brazil and Ecuador, then pop back and explain why you believe the death rate is exactly the same as flu.[/quote]
I didn't say the death rates were the same as the flu, what I am saying is that we are used to dealing with this amount of excess deaths and it barely hits the headlines.

'Just the flu' is not something I would say as when you look at how many people die from it every year, particularly on 'bad flu years', it is brutal.

However, it is comparible to flu in the sense of the numbers we are talking about and the lifecycle of the virus. And also how we carry on with life relatively normally in the midst of flu season.

There is no evidence that locking down actually helps. Sweden, Belarus and Japan have had no lockdown and followed the exact same curve as we and other locked down countries have followed. It is the natural curve of a respiratory virus..which we have known about from the beginning.

There are lots of people / experts/ statisticians talking about this away from the MSM. The balance from the BBC has been awful on this - they have just pursued the 'deadly virus, must lockdown' line relentlessly with no critical analysis of any kind.

Here is an example of alternative views, this is really just a summary article, there are hundreds of experts examining the party line we have all been subjected to for months through the MSM.

inproportion2.talkigy.com/

Unfortunately you don't have the remotest clue what you're talking about @hamstersarse.

1. Sweden is facing an 8-20% economic contraction because people voluntarily social distanced as directed, huge swathes of the population have been working from home and will be for the foreseeable future. Apart from Stockholm, Sweden's low population density makes it not comparable to the UK anyway.
2. Belarus has had its borders locked down and had very few foreign visitors bringing the virus in to start with.
3. Japan - you think Japan did nothing to try to limit the spread of the virus? Don't you read international news at all? They've been in a state of emergency.

OK @MRex

You see what you see, I see what I see.

That's the way life goes!

But I would be interested in your evidence that lockdown works?

Is it that 500,000 people didn't die?

@LinemanForTheCounty

It was an epidemic. The last one we had ie the last outbreak that was classed as such, as far as I can make out. But nobody even remembers it.

I remember it. I also recall Swine flu. And the great flu outbreak of 2017 / 18 that was estimated to have caused 50,000 extra deaths in the UK that year. It's one of the reasons why some of us older people may be cautious about Covid-19 but can't get hysterical about it. We've been "here" before. I got Swine Flu, never quite got over it for about four months and ended up with bronchial pneumonia (bad, but fortunately not as bad as it might have been). I find it absurd how few people recall a serious flu epidemic that only happened two years ago! Remember months of NHS disruption, cancelled operations and procedures, and overwhelmed hospitals. We learned so much from that as a country, that we've handled the current pandemic so much better as a result....

Oh flaming heck, we didn't, did we?

Some info on Neil Ferguson's modelling:

[Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths. . . .

In 2002, Ferguson predicted that up to 50,000 people would likely die from exposure to BSE (mad cow disease) in beef. In the U.K., there were only 177 deaths from BSE.

In 2005, Ferguson predicted that up to 150 million people could be killed from bird flu. In the end, only 282 people died worldwide from the disease between 2003 and 2009.

In 2009, a government estimate, based on Ferguson’s advice, said a “reasonable worst-case scenario” was that the swine flu would lead to 65,000 British deaths. In the end, swine flu killed 457 people in the U.K.

Last March, Ferguson admitted that his Imperial College model of the COVID-19 disease was based on undocumented, 13-year-old computer code that was intended to be used for a feared influenza pandemic, rather than a coronavirus. Ferguson declined to release his original code so other scientists could check his results. He only released a heavily revised set of code last week, after a six-week delay.

So the real scandal is: Why did anyone ever listen to this guy?

I have had a bit of a look EdithWeston Useruseruserusee but I can't find anything that looks familiar.

There was this in Science Daily

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/02/200204094722.htm

and a really old BBC news item (2011) about H1N1 immunity:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12152500

Derbygerbil Sorry if it wasn't clear that I meant this was referring to Sunetra Gupta's views overall, not just that which is quoted in the article:

www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.24.20042291v1

Yes I did mean SARS-CoV-2, not coronavirus, but I never remember the proper name. As I understand it, there is a period when a virus is circulating before people have actually become symptomatic with the disease Covid-19.

I'm only putting this info here as an ordinary member of the public - I am not even an armchair epidemiologist!

Because, sadly, we have very short memories. Especially the mainstream media. For most stats, charts rarely show figures earlier than the year 2000 (if that). It's like nothing of note happened any earlier, or that bad stuff is now happening for the first time ever!

Also re lockdown and Sweden / Japan, it seems that people are just stuck on lockdown being the only thing that impacts the rate of deaths /transmission. It is never that simple. You have said it yourself in your post, it is rarely that simple:

My argument is this: One cannot say “We implemented shutdowns (X) and cases/deaths from COVID-19 (Y) decreased. Therefore X is the sole cause of Y.”

This ignores the numerous factors exclusive the the shutdowns — improved hygiene (before and during shutdowns), masks, voluntary distancing (prior to shutdown), immunity, weather, etc. — that could be causing Y in addition to X. Sure, X could have and affect — but say it is the sole cause is a logical fallacy in absence of decisive data, which we do not have yet.

@hamstersarse - Cases reduced as they needed to. There is no single type of lockdown and with different viruses some measures are more important than others. At the time of lockdown, nobody knew what measures are most important with this particular virus; quickly reducing spread before hospitals were overwhelmed was urgent, as it was the PPE stocks were still much too low for months, health services couldn't have coped with more cases AND everyone else in the country bidding for visors / masks. Back in March we even had India barring paracetamol exports, it's easy to "forget" the many practical elements that didn't become an issue but had to be considered as part of the planning and response at the time. Now more is known and practical preparation such as new PPE supply chains are all in place, many things can open safely.

People needed to learn how to distance and understand about isolating with symptoms, neither of which happened consistently pre-lockdown. There was a need for all businesses to change how they were working; WFH where possible, adjust public spaces etc, many who could WFH still weren't doing so and lockdown forced those changes. Actually closing offices and nightclubs were probably the biggest impact on spread, if you research super spreader events you can learn about that. When more things are known, other risk factors will become clearer and that makes it obvious what does or doesn't need to happen for public safety going forward.

However, it is comparible to flu in the sense of the numbers we are talking about and the lifecycle of the virus. And also how we carry on with life relatively normally in the midst of flu season.

There are number of quite fundamental differences. For one, we innoculate vast numbers of people against the flu, or it would be much worse. Flu (current strains) are not as lethal as Covid19, and it is much better understood too.

Lockdown is probably the only reason that the numbers ARE comparable to a Flu outbreak currently. We are a small, heavily populated country of free people who don't like following rules. Because of the unknowns, it was only prudent for the UK to lockdown as it did. To see what happens if you don't do this, watch the figures for cities in the US and Brazil.

With hindsight (!), we should have limited large groups, and locked-down towns and cities much sooner and limited movement between them. You don't need to be a rocket scientist (or epidemiologist) to understand that the more people come into contact with each other, the faster the virus will spread.

"this particular virus has ~25 times the death rate of that flu"

Outdated info. Flu has an IFR of 0.1 (normal flu) to 0.2 (bad flu) pct typically. Spanish flu possibly higher.

This new Coronavirus has an IFR of 0.26pct estimate (source US CDC, based on fairly conservative assumptions)

So not much worse than flu. Possibly not worse at all.

The IC modelling was based on an IFR of around 1pct so it's not that "lockdown has saved lives" but an instance of "crap in, crap out" when it comes to modelling

@hamstersarse

There are all sorts of things that impact on a virus’ trajectory, and I accept that lockdown isn’t the only, or even the best way, to manage Covid - it seems possible to contain Covid without it, as hopefully the next few months will in the U.K. will show (fingers crossed). The problem with the U.K. is that is left it too late for action, so lockdown to squash the virus down was probably necessary, and in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the only responsible thing to do given our situation back in March. What responsible Government would have taken the chance with 100,000s of lives?

What you seem to be saying is that the virus follows its own natural trajectory through a population regardless of intervention, whether that’s top- up through Government led policy, or bottom-up as in people voluntarily socially distancing (such as reports from Belarus where the Government has notoriously not taken a firm line).

It is this “it has a natural trajectory that happen whatever we do so let’s just carry on regardless” philosophy that’s utter bollocks and can only be argued by the most selective use of data and the complete absence of any basic epidemiological knowledge or even common sense.

How anyone can seriously think that Covid will transmit the same amongst a population that is locked down versus one that is mingling like
it was 2019 is beyond me. It requires a critical reasoning bypass worthy of a flat-earther!

Can’t believe that 65,000 excess deaths in three months, thousands suffering ongoing chronic illness & a significant proportion of asymptomatic people now being found to have ground glass opacity in lungs & damage to internal organs & Here we are, still having these endless discussions that “it’s just the flu, bro, total over reaction”
Yes, there is lots of talk about this alternative viewpoint outside the MSM, much of it from the usual suspects - you can spot them a mile off as they also tend to be climate change deniers and get very shouty about black lives matter and think wearing face masks is an affront to their liberties.