Why isn’t there more deaths atm?

[Mummypig2020]

Just that really. Obviously cases are going up and have been for a few weeks. Surely there would be at least an increase of people in hospitals by now at least? Or in a week or so are we going to suddenly have hundreds of deaths again?

Who knew CV isn't a serious illness

Well on the 19th March our government literally said it was NOT a "high consequence infectious disease".

^this was so that they could downgrade PPE at the time, because of the shambles of not being prepared

There’s scientists and all sorts of experts and governments

Most of the scientists/experts in our country are either on the payroll of Bill Gates or have ties to/shares in big pharma companies (Neil ferguson, Chris Whitty, Patrick Vallance, Matt Hancock)

Our numbers are anyone who has died "with" covid, some of which were untested, tested negative or had never been near covid, and some of which had it months ago but then had a car crash (until recently, now they've limited to 28 days). I can understand the government may have overestimated death rate in the beginning and played it safe, but now it's ridiculous, just open up the country.

The other reason for all this is that we have very short term governments; they're in power for 4 years only. Locking down will enable them to say "look, 500k could have died, we saved so many lives!". Alas, when hundreds of thousands die directly or indirectly from poverty, unemployment, the stress of their business shuttering, impacts of MH issues, and not getting seen in time for other illnesses, it will no longer be that governments problem but can be blamed on the next lot.

But why are they doing this? Not just here but all over the world? I agree there is something strange going on, just look at hospital admissions, hardly any Covid new admissions, only one for the whole of North East and Yorkshire but they have put stricter measures in. None of this makes sense.

@Alex50 yes I agree it's strange as hell, but it's not all over the world now, a lot of countries (although initially did lockdown to strengthen medical supplies/get a grip of the situation/peer pressure) now are saying no more, and things have gone back to normal. Places like Switzerland are completely back to normal. Belarus never did any kind of lockdown or distancing and are now having massive protests about elections, and somehow managed to avoid hospitals overrunning and mobile chillers parking on the street. Sweden have managed to save a lot more of their economy than us. We don't hear about those countries though, we're just kept in a perpetual state of fear about second waves and ending up like Melbourne.

@BeijingBikini wouldn’t trust Neil Ferguson as far as I could throw him. Look at the cock up he made of foot and mouth disease

People who are vulnerable know they are vulnerable and take precautions, so younger healthier people are catching it, and for them it is predominantly mild or with no symptoms.

Also I believe treatment is now better, there are drugs being given to folks to treat it.

Also potentially the virus has evolved, which is quite common in viruses, to be less potent.

Like I said the autumn and winter months will be the test, I will be checking NHS data to see what happens.

We didn't know what we were dealing with at first. It was right to lock down until we had a better idea and were responding to scenes from Italy. We also had the WHO going on international TV stating the mortality rate was over 3% when they knew fine well that was the CFR and not the IFR yet didn't make this clear and scared the shit out of everyone. There was alot of fear and public pressure for lockdown too

Back in Ye Olden Days the government was keen to let people know that that in the majority of cases, if you caught coronavirus you would suffer none or only mild symptoms. Obviously, that wasn't scary enough so the message was changed to let people know that around 99% of all our activities was likely to infect us with the deadliest disease ever known.

What we're seeing now is just the natural pattern of the virus. Yes, it is real. Yes, sadly, some people have suffered and some people will die. But most people will neither suffer, nor die as a result of the virus (although they might as a result of our reaction to it...).

The government had to scare the shite out of people to ensure compliance with lockdown. Obviously the virus is and was bad given the number of deaths we had but given the news last week that it’s estimated 7m of us have antibodies that’s a survival rate of what 99.5%.

Now despite that people are still in that state of being shit scared by the government and to afraid to try and return to normal. Look at the hysteria about schools going back

Yes, the "mild for most" message disappeared. Remember "20% of the entire workforce will be off at any one time" as well. What was all that about?

I think we did need to lockdown because the big problem was the numbers and how fast the rate of infection was doubling and there were no measures in place other than handwashing. If we had 1000 deaths a day at the peak they’ve likely come from over 100000 infections. But it now seems it was uncontrolled with large community spread right at the very beginning. We aren’t in that situation now and are testing and contact tracing more.

Why doesn't anyone know the difference between less and fewer any more?

I agree lockdown was the right thing to do when there were so many unknowns.

The big problem now is that lots of people are viewing case numbers exactly as they did in March, without taking into consideration the numbers of mild/asymptomatic cases being picked up OR our increasing ability to treat.

300 new cases now don’t mean the same thing as they did in the early days of lockdown. Applying the sledgehammer approach to the economy/society at this point would be immensely damaging. We need to focus on achieving better balance. See in particular, schools returning.

I agree many are still stuck in march. You still get people saying we are two weeks behind Spain, France etc like in march

I honestly never realised there were so many batshit conspiracy nutjobs around until I read this thread.

Or am I just Bill Gates in disguise?

Deaths in uk are lower than 5-year average for the 8th week running

@phlebasconsidered not conspiracy ... reality, huge difference.

I hadn’t realised there were so many people lacking the ability to think critically.

Yes there is a virus. It’s looking increasingly benign for the vast majority of people.

I don't think it is a conspiracy theory to reflect on our lack of knowledge in feb/March and compare it to what we know now

So this benign illness doesn't explain the huge excess deaths? Or it does?

There is a lot of guessing and denial on this thread.

Those of us with vulnerable children prefer to rely on proven facts.

Because it's summer. Generally all viruses do not like heat and historically there are more viral infections of all kinds in winter than in summer. It's for this reason back in March the case loads were much higher in the Northern Hemisphere than the Southern Hemisphere and why cases in Australia and NZ are starting to pick up now (their winter).

Brazil is hot as is India, the virus seems quite happy there

March and April is not winter and it was boiling hot here for much of it. No doubt there will be a seasonal effect based on our behaviour I.e. Indoor more. Isn't that what drives flu seasons as opposed to the weather/cold?

@chickenyheadand nearly half were from care homes.