Why are we in lockdown when no one is dying?

[SplunkPostGres]

I don’t understand why we’ve got local lockdown again. Cases are high but deaths are still low. Seems like a lot of cases are asymptomatic? So why are the lockdowns and restrictions needed?

I live outer suburbs of Melbourne. We have 10 cases in the whole state of Victoria today, 5 yesterday. Metro Melbourne have been in stage 4 lockdown since start of August. It's a joke.

@Itsabeautifuldayheyhey

Lockdown? What lockdown? I'm in an area where there is an extra restriction. It just means we can't mix households temporarily while others can follow the rule of 6.

Extra restrictions needed to stop the asymptomatic passing it on to someone else (who might also be asymptomatic) who then infects someone else who dies from it.

Interestingly and hopefully the WHO now says it’s looking very rare that asymptomatic people transmit the virus. This looks like good news, for once!

Interestingly and hopefully the WHO now says it’s looking very rare that asymptomatic people transmit the virus. This looks like good news, for once!

If true, thats fantastic news and obviously will make a huge difference to..well a lot! Hopeful..

@rebecca102

I live outer suburbs of Melbourne. We have 10 cases in the whole state of Victoria today, 5 yesterday. Metro Melbourne have been in stage 4 lockdown since start of August. It's a joke.

But wouldn't you agree those numbers are significantly lower than the beginning of the lockdown? And, also, over the last couple of weeks, the lockdown has been very gradually eased? I'm not sure what the complaint here is.

My friend is a nurse and says covid wards in her hospital have been reinstated, they have 30 cases in at the moment and 3 deaths during as many days including a 30 yr old normal weight no health problems. Hospitalisations and daths will start to rise in the statistics soon.

We need to look after ourselves, stay as slim as we can, get out in the fresh air, keep our vit D levels up. That's another way of combatting CV-19

Hospitalisation are rising, so deaths are very likely to rise again. Or we could eff about and end up like America, but I’d rather not. I’m in South Wales, so our local town is ‘locked down’. Yeah, it’s annoying because all the delivery slots are gone and we don’t own a car so usually rely on those. However, it’s not that bad. The worst for us was losing a relative (Not covid) and being unable to travel to say goodbye and unable to attend the funeral. But yeah, I’d rather have restrictions because deaths always take longer to rise than cases and I’d rather not risk killing people off or making them ill. I’ve had chronic fatigue relating to other health conditions before, I’ve also got a son with a kidney condition and a husband with multiple issues left over from cancer as a teenager - so our chances of longer term effects would be higher if we were exposed to a high viral load.

Some of my NHS friends are knackered, they or their colleagues have PTSD from last time, some of them were thrown into brand new roles, this will be the same for medically staff internationally. They were already pushed to the limit and underfunded, some were understaffed. I want to do what I can to help them by following restrictions. I also don’t want my baby to be born with it, if I can avoid it. There seem to be current lower risk of death in infants, but higher admissions to NICU. Having a baby in hospital, be it NICU or paed ward, is horrid and stressful. I’ve gone through it once and it’s partly why it’s taken me 5 years to have another.

Restrictions are really hard on those already struggling, but they’re needed. We don’t even have a properly functioning Test and Trace at the moment that keeps up with current numbers and has an app available to the huge majority of devices. IMO, we don’t have enough of them, too many people are jollying out to pubs, crowding streets and so on, while our maternity units won’t allow a birthing partner for the whole of labour or all the scans. That makes no sense, even with lower immune systems in pregnant women/new mothers/infants. E

There might have been 13 deaths recorded yesterday but that was a Monday and as we all learnt back in March and April there is a weekend effect. On Monday last week there were 11 deaths recorded. But in the middle of last week (Tuesday to Friday) there were 37, 37, 40 and 35 deaths. That's comparable to mid March.

About 8% of us (5.4 million) have antibodies to Covid-19, and we've had 42,000 deaths attributed to it (so a death rate of 0.8). If the virus was allowed to run rampant there would be up to 525,000 deaths. Maybe more because the NHS would collapse.

The idea that no-one is dying is just plain wiring, then the rate per thousand has more than quadrupled in the last fortnight (and do bear in mind that there's typically at least a 1-2 lag between diagnosis and death, so the impact of the higher case rates has not been seen.

Now, keeping it in proportion the rates are still extremely low.

But we don't want them to get higher do we?

If we look at France and Spain, you can see how the death rate has followed the increasing case rate, and stars to increase considerable once you're up to about 1 case per thousand. UK was at 99.7 per 100,000 yesterday, with deaths having risen from 0.1 to 0.5.

I suppose one angle on this question is whether we have the foresight and the will to stop a rise before it happened.

If the virus is allowed to just grow and make its way through society then more people will start dying from it.

It's not going away. The choice is try and suppress it or let people die.

@oaktree That’s one model and it doesn’t continue indefinitely. That trend will slow once a certain proportion of the population are infected. (And more of us have been infected than we know about - because of limited testing earlier on and asymptomatic cases).

Mumsnet: no one is following the rules!
Mumsnet on another thread: the rules are keeping people from dying!
Mumsnet: my 20,25,30,28 year old friend who runs marathons and has no health conditions died from covid. You won't see it on any media or statistics though.
Real world: most people are kind of.
Real world: restrictions are not doing a great deal let's face it.
Real world: I don't even know anyone who has had covid let alone died.

Sadly we have people dying here in Greater Manchester.
We are getting better at managing a terrible infection. Fewer mercifully are infected at the moment. That's it. It's still killing people .

🤦🏼‍♀️Because rising infection = deaths down the line if we DONT try and control

@SplunkPostGres

But people aren’t dying. That’s the point. Just 13. And whilst I’m sure it’s very sad for their families, we’ve got millions of people shut away with winter approaching. Students being told that they might not be able to go home for Christmas. Charities are warning about the victims of domestic abuse. People losing their incomes. It isn’t worth it.

But people aren’t dying, JUST 13!

That’s people dying then isn’t it!!

Sadly I'm not sure how to quote but @AlecTrevelyan006 talks a lot of sense. We can't suppress the virus entirely and at some point we have to accept that a certain level of deaths is acceptable- provided NHS not overrun - just as we accept that deaths through other causes are acceptable, or do we expect people to live forever?

I'm hoping that the UK and Scottish governments are not as deliberately incompetent as they seem and this is actually the policy they are following, but not saying as it would be too unpalatable to too many. Why else would Scottish government have opened up gyms and swimming pools at the precise moment cases were rising? I think the local lockdowns are a bit of a sop as they don't expect most people to follow them. What they've done to students is horrific though - treat the least vulnerable group of society as criminals for following government and university instruction by going to their halls.

It's like a tap and it feels too late and too difficult to turn it off entirely. And yes most illnesses have the propensity to cause after effects for a period. We don't know exactly how bad long covid is, but I hate the way it gets trotted out after anyone rightly points out that currently deaths are at a low level.

It’s not palatable of course but there has to be an acceptable number of deaths because otherwise we will be doing this forever as the illness is endemic now and never going away. No one wants it to be then or their loved ones but then no one wants them or their loved ones to die of anything else either, it still happens though, when people dying before their time, as we accept this sadly is part of life. I agree we can’t let the NHS get swamped this winter though of course.

[quote Sweetnhappy1]@AlecTrevelyan006

That 1600 would be a hell of a lot higher if our hospital wards and ICUs are full of Covid, there will be no room for anything else. No operations able to take place because all the theatre recovery rooms are converted back into makeshift ICUs. No-where for people to go after a road traffic accident/major trauma because the ICU beds are full of Covid. No chemo/radiotherapy due to lack of staff who are ill/isolating. Sound familiar? Why the hell would people want to go back to March? We need to contain this now.[/quote]
This. Why is this is so difficult to understand.

The NHS is running on fumes at the moment. People are knackered. Yes I know there have been some pockets of inactivity but in many, many Trusts the number of Covid patients meant there was no capacity for much else, regardless of the need for isolation.

If we don’t contain the virus we’re heading there again (and it may already be too late).

I just don’t understand where the “let it go” people think all the Covid patients will go. Are you proposing just not to admit them? Stick them in the Nightingales with no staff to care for them? Leave them at home to suffer and die? Because you can be sure that without specialist care many additional people will die.

[quote bumbleymummy]@oaktree That’s one model and it doesn’t continue indefinitely. That trend will slow once a certain proportion of the population are infected. (And more of us have been infected than we know about - because of limited testing earlier on and asymptomatic cases).[/quote]
Current estimate is about 8%. Nowhere approaching herd immunity.

@WiseUpJanetWeiss I don't think anyone has advocated getting rid of all preventive actions to keep case numbers within a level that can be coped with by the NHS. Of course it's not a pure science, but I'm hoping in the background someone smart is running statistics on likelihood of admissions based on demographics from the numbers we already have.

We're all knackered at this point in time. Teachers trying to second guess the government in terms of which way teaching will go, parents exhausted from trying to work and home school without usual support mechanisms in place, elderly and vulnerable people scared to go out but desperate to see their loved ones, people with worrying lumps who can't get a hospital appointment.

It would be nice to stop any cases coming through to NHS but the only way that can be achieved appears to be full lockdown for a sustained period of time, so we have to look at alternatives.

We can't suppress the virus entirely and at some point we have to accept that a certain level of deaths is acceptable- provided NHS not overrun - just as we accept that deaths through other causes are acceptable, or do we expect people to live forever?

We don't 'have to' do anything.

NZ, China, Taiwan, Japan, Greece to name a few varied countries are not 'accepting a certain level of deaths is inevitable'. They are pursuing the virus and suppressing it very very effectively.

Some may prefer to choose to accept high deaths, but we don't have to.

@RepeatSwan

We can't suppress the virus entirely and at some point we have to accept that a certain level of deaths is acceptable- provided NHS not overrun - just as we accept that deaths through other causes are acceptable, or do we expect people to live forever?

We don't 'have to' do anything.

NZ, China, Taiwan, Japan, Greece to name a few varied countries are not 'accepting a certain level of deaths is inevitable'. They are pursuing the virus and suppressing it very very effectively.

Some may prefer to choose to accept high deaths, but we don't have to.

Sadly the ship has sailed for us in adopting the measures those countries took

@rookiemere

Yes it’s shit. I want to see my son and grandson. I want to hug my mum in her care home. I obviously want people to get timely non-Covid care.

But if the number of Covid patients overwhelms the hospitals like last time there will be no capacity to care for anyone except the acutely unwell. That’s what the stats geeks are telling us. That’s what these measures are trying to prevent.

I don’t necessarily think they are the right measures, or at the right time, and I think the government are both incompetent and driven by self-interest. I agree we have to look at whatever alternatives we can. But posters saying “but no-one is dying” are spectacularly missing the point.

www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manchester-news/two-more-people-died-coronavirus-19011148

Or are people who aren't you that die of a preventable illness not important

@WiseUpJanetWeiss what do you want to happen long term then? The virus isn’t going away. We may not get a vaccine and if we do it won’t be rolled out for a while and may not be that effective. Do you want the country to keep up restrictions long term? What about the effects on education, livelihoods, mental health? You may not be effected by then but lots are. Is it reasonable for grandparents to be expected not to hug grandchildren for a year, peoples businesses to go under because they aren’t allowed to open, children isolating every few weeks and not allowed in school? Where do you draw the line?