Feeling a bit duped about the seriousness of Covid....

[mostwonderfultime]

Found out my district of 55,000 people there have been 156 confirmed covid cases since March. Now I hear there is an enquiry into the over reporting of Covid deaths in England. Average death rate has now lower than average indicating many people who died from Covid would probably died in the next month or so. No surge in Covid cases or deaths since relaxing lockdown measures (I know about Leicester, but we all know reasons why they have more cases and again they haven't had a spike in deaths).
In the meantime, the economy is screwed, Kids have been off school for months, best friends business has gone bust.

I would urge people to be cautious about the vaccine, the signs are promising but from what I have read none of the trials have been tested against the live virus yet.

With regards to the seriousness of Covid, all I know is that I got very ill, probably the illest I have ever been in my life. It took about six weeks in total to recover and I still think there are some lasting effects, my taste buds are different and my hair and nails are in a terrible state. I appreciate many people were mild or asymptomatic but for me there were moments where I thought I'm in trouble here and I have never thought that before, it was properly scary.

I'm with you, OP.
However on MN you are called a lunatic for questioning anything..

@BakedBlossoms

Wait until 2022 and see if you still feel duped. This is just the beginning.

Hardly, a successful vaccine has already pretty much been found.

Possibly. But it isn't available and won't be for this winter which means there will still be a lot of people to catch it this winter, be seriously ill and many will die.

If the concerns about long term, serious illnesses as a result turn out to be correct then we could be going into the future with thousands of young people developing diabetes and heart failure. What implications does that hold? And that's assuming that we've only got this one winter to get through before a vaccine.

"with a world population of 7.8 billion the % is minuscule"

Western countries like the UK are not used to pandemics, to large numbers of extra deaths in a short time
Same as the UK does not expect mass deaths from famine or war

You may think we are supposed to consider deaths wrt 7 billion people,
but in practice, the UK - rightly - considers deaths in its own country and its own "normal"

I keep seeing people comparing it to y2k

There really wasn’t a major fix going on in the background

The people hired to work up to and over the millennium night to prevent and respond to fix any glitches and bugs did not have to

@Userzzz

I'm with you, OP. However on MN you are called a lunatic for questioning anything..

I think questioning everything is fantastic. We should be questioning and researching every aspect of this without bias or pre conceived ideas.

What I do think is lunacy is dismissing the whole thing as some sort of hoax, and encouraging others to follow suit, whilst ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary.

imo there is a sensible medium between "it's just flu" and "we're all doomed"

We should follow all the public health / government rules, but this summer get back to as much normal as each of us personally feels is comfortable & sensible.

It is likely that SD etc would be tightened in late Autumn & winter,
particularly to enable kids to stay in ft school if at all possible

What they are saying is that the England figures show all deaths with Covid on the certificate including those with Covid or of Covid. The other 3 only tally those who died within 28 days of a positive Covid test

So could you in fact say the others are under reporting? Or should they only stat those across all 4 that die of Covid

Who knows, however we look at it the deaths are horrible for the families so how about thinking of them?

And yes I think the right decision was made on lockdown. Because just how many more would have died if it was not in place and the nhs overwhelmed?

I think going of a zombie thread that was reopened yesterday from November and my own family experienced late last year - in March was actually the second wave.

There is evidence it was Italy in October.

I think that why Boris is quite certain all will be back to normal by Christmas because he is fully aware when it got here and that its on its way out, he just doesn’t want to admit they ballsed up

I don’t think we’ll be able to judge anything for quite some time, regardless of second waves/vaccines/etc.

Excess deaths across the year arent known yet. Neither are long term affects or the full extent of the economic implications.

A question for the history books.

I live in an area where getting a test was virtually impossible for most people given people needed to do a five hour round trip, driving themselves, to get a test done. People were being unofficially diagnosed as a result by GP over the phone and don't feature in official stats. That'll be the case in a lot of rural places.

Meanwhile I've a family member in their early forties who now needs dialysis having lost both kidneys and part of a lung to covid, which they were repeatedly told they were free of yet either werent or were reinfected. They've been in hospital several times with it. Before they had asthma, which wasn't bad enough to require a steroid inhaler so considered to be "very minor" otherwise considered fit and healthy. They're not expected to live long due to the severe effects to their body from covid effecting the dialysis.

My point being there's a lot said about it being either minor or killing. There's people, like my family member, in-between now severely disabled by it.

We'll all find out if we were "duped" or not in coming weeks given most things are open and people are ignoring social distancing and calling it all a conspiracy by the government in social control (overheard this morning getting my meds)?

What I do think is lunacy is dismissing the whole thing as some sort of hoax, and encouraging others to follow suit, whilst ignoring mountains of evidence to the contrary

I certainly don’t think it was a hoax but the media coverage of it was dreadful. You had TV presenters on TV whipping up the fear of death in people. Which should been investigated as we know that 80% of people that catch it will be completely fine. The last time I checked not even 1% of 60 MILLION people were effected by it

If you think the % dying is minuscule then you have presumably estimated the % who got infected.

UK Excess mortality c65000. The last study I saw said the UK had between 5-10% infection though it's difficult to be sure given the UK's deliberate choices around testing and and cessation of elements of community testing.

This would give mortality around 1-2%. The long run will be interesting given the numbers showing longer-term impairment inn addition to those deaths. The population on support in ITU for many weeks appears unprecedented, odd that for such a mild disease, OP. Let's hope they all recover quickly though it's not looking like that.

Oddly, PPs so clear that COVID was not bad seem to not have much of an understanding of the counterfactual - how people would have reacted without an official lockdown and the economic effects of those personal lockdown reactions plus what I assert would have been greater deaths. For everyone gung ho for a return to normal, I suspect there would have been many more becoming economically withdrawn voluntarily over the longer term. I saw lots of children withdrawn from school before lockdown voluntarily.

One economic analysis of the 1918 pandemic showed the US cities that locked down 'more' recovered much better than those that didn't. 'Flu is different to COVID and 1918 is different to 2020 but it is a data point. More of a data point than the people just saying 'over-reaction' 'fake news' and so on.

There's now no testing centre at all in my county - people are being sent to Hereford, an eight hour round trip.

"he is fully aware"

Boris is not fully aware of anything !
and also, he'll say anything to get the economy back on the road

I listen to public health experts - around the world - who specialise in this:
They say we may avoid a "2nd wave" this winter if we follow sensible measures and if the track & trace system works properly

@CodexDevinchi I am also of the opinion covid was here long ago and believe that this is now the 2nd wave. The 1st wave was well before xmas which was consumed with the usual higher seasonal chest infections

Which should been investigated as we know that 80% of people that catch it will be completely fine. The last time I checked not even 1% of 60 MILLION people were effected by it

What do you mean by "fine"? The only time I've heard the 80% bandied about was that 80% would have a mild illness (meaning they didn't need hospitalisation). As a poster above describes, having a "mild" illness does not mean they are now fine.

So, are there official statistics showing that 80% of people have made a full and complete recovery with no lasting effects?

If anything, the lesson the UK and pretty much the rest of the world should learn from China's success at containment is that we should have hit it harder - much harder at the beginning. China has been mask free for two months now, everything open, everything back to normal (Beijing aside).

Not pandemic in February, Facemasks in June/July. See EU/US etc.

But strict lockdown - enforced via fines, close the borders, tracking/tracing, facemasks mandatory. Then confidently but carefully get back to normal lives (ruthlessly squashing spikes where they appear) while waiting for eventual vaccine.

European/US governments were busy trying to balance the economy, but in fact should have sacrificed more at the start, for a much faster recovery at the end.

"not even 1% of 60 MILLION people were effected by it"

ONS and PHE estimate that about 7% of the population have had it, going by antibodies

ONS have about 55,000 deaths from COVID, as they have more complete data than PHE do

That gives a death rate of 1.2 % , which fits broadly within the range other developed and densely populated countries have found

The overall risk of death atm is tiny, because there is a v v low rate of community infection

This is quite different to the situation in March - May, when COVID deaths were a significant % of the total

• in fact ONS reported COVID as a cause of death was setting new records

imo there is a sensible medium between "it's just flu" and "we're all doomed"

Yes, but unfortunately it's increasingly difficult to find a sensible middle-ground on here, or social media more generally, on this or any other issue.

I don't feel duped as the information was always out there as to how many cases in our areas. I think that we should have locked down earlier then we might not have needed to stay locked down for as long and they should have managed care homes better. I dont think we should have carried on as normal as there have still been a lot of deaths and not all those with underlying conditions or elderly and some have long lasting health issues now.

People need to assess their own risks now according to the data out there. The infection rate here in Cornwall is low but we have a lot of tourists from out of the area down here at the moment so we are still being careful. We have done a few meals out at pubs, had a weekend break at a UK hotel and I am restarting my leisure club membership next week but will go at quiet times.

Well obviously bigchocfrenzy otherwise lockdown would not have been lifted.

People have memories like goldfish. Remember the scenes in Wuhan and Italy? It was absolute chaos, hospitals overflowing with people needing non-existent breathing equipment.

Thats what a more lenient approach to this would have looked like. As it is "only" 65,000 people died in Britain.

Goldfish.

@CodexDevinchi - what thread is that, and where is it? Would be interested to read it.