Why isn’t this information getting more air time?

[Floralapron]

I heard on the radio earlier that when infections in Leicester rose, the hospital admissions and deaths didn’t.
Surely this information should be made more of? I’m confused!

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/03/coronavirus-80-new-cases-trafford-among-white-community

“ The declaration of a major incident in Greater Manchester should jolt a “complacent white middle class” into realising that Covid-19 is not just spreading in ethnic minority households, one of the region’s health chiefs has said.

Eleanor Roaf, the director of public health in Trafford, said 80% of its infections in the last week were in the white community, and she urged the region’s 2.8 million residents to concentrate “much harder on what we can do to stop the wider spread”.@

Can we stop with the Blanket racist assumptions

@Floralapron thousandsof people have lasting affects. They are having xrays. Ct scans etc. The NHS are setting up Post Covid centres all around the UK. Some are already open I'm waiting for my area. Obviously we don't know how long term yet but people are struggling 5/6 months on, with a mixture of issues. A large majority of these people are young fit healthy, having initially mild symptoms. This should be more in the news. It should be a warning.

With regards to Leicester they are not 'assumptions'. If you from here then you have a say, if not then you have no clue.

@MrsIceCream that’s incredible. 66 people on a ventilator in England with CV and shops, pubs, primary schools etc have been open for a few months now. It’s when I hear figured like this I become confused about the reaction we are having to the virus.

The way I look at this is that it's like the weather.

There are forecasts, which say 'It is likely to rain', available in advance - not perfectly accurate but are an indication of what may happen.

Then there is the looking up at the sky, with approaching big black clouds so 'It looks like rain' - but we might be lucky.

We see cars coming the other way with their wipers on - definitely raining up ahead, but not raining with us.

Then it does start to rain, at first lightly, then heavily.

After a while, if we are out in the rain without an umbrella, we get soaked through.

However, if we have been inside doing something else, we don't see any of this, and look at the puddles on the ground 'Oh, it's been raining'.

For Covid, modelling is like the weather forecast. Other countries are the cars coming the other way. Cases are like the rain falling on us, hospitalisations like getting soaked throughand deaths like the puddles. Just because we haven't seen the hospitalisations yet doesn't mean that we're not going to see them - it's just that it takes a while to get to that stage.

I see what you're saying OP. It does appear that although cases are rising in some areas, that's not being reflected in hospital admissions and deaths. And I agree, my take on it is that we have shifted from many cases being in the very ill and vulnerable, to cases among younger people.

These people probably won't need hospital admission. The key is to trace them so they can't pass it to people who might.

There's also a lot of tricksy language used around this - Scottish government report on people in hospital with Covid and it's 200 and something, has been for weeks. But people hear that and interpret it as people in hospital because of Covid. Not the same thing AT ALL. Many of those 200 people would have been in hospital anyway, because they are seriously ill for other reasons. But all you hear is the headline "225 people in hospital" or whatever with no context.

It does appear that although cases are rising in some areas, that's not yet being reflected in hospital admissions and deaths.

It should be obvious that hospitalisation and death will occur later than detection of a case of Covid.

You have a new cough. You go to the testing centre, and are tested. You are positive. In the 'classic' course of the disease, reported by many early in the outbreak, you fel ill for about 5 days, then start feeling better, then suddenly worse again.

A couple of days into the 'worse' phase, you may reach that 'hospitalisation' stage.

If you do go to hospital, it may be days or weeks until you die.

So it should be absolutely obvious that even if detected infections are rising now, we will not see this reflected in hospitalisations and deaths [even of those found to be infected today] for a few weeks.

If we wait to respond to the cases because 'hospitalisations are still low', we will loose a couple of weeks again that will turn out to be critical in containment and reduction of the eventual death toll.

I’m really unsure how I feel about the latest restrictions (I’m in Trafford). Yes rates per capita are high but in the press they are talking about Hale causing spikes - there were 8 cases diagnosed in Hale last week which is the equivalent of only 2 households! And testing is so easily accessible now that whole families are getting tested even if one child has a snotty nose, so cases that were previously undiagnosed due to being asymptomatic are in the figures (in March we were doing only 3500 tests per day and only healthcare workers, now it’s almost 200,000).,
But then I really want schools to go back so if this means shutting down social gatherings and possibly pubs then I think that would be the right thing to do.
Such hard decisions that are being made.