Westminstenders: How many Dead Cats Do You Get In A Thunderstorm?

[RedToothBrush]

It never rains. It only pours.

What I wouldn't give for a bit of old fashioned drizzle right now.

4 years on and we are facing a torment of calamities. Brexit, serious political instability in the USA ahead of an election that Trump will refuse to lose even if he does, trade deals with the rest of the world put on 6 week deadlines, anger within the commonwealth, a sick weak dependent PM on the back foot and ill briefed, rampant growing corruption in the Tory party, woke nut jobs out of touch with reality, councils on the brink of bankruptcy and the whole covid-19 crisis.

bigchoc
I do not know what the UK death toll would have been if there had been a focused approach rather than a general lockdown
I do know that Prof Ferguson of Imperial has form as a catastrophist who then takes credit when is disaster option did not happen.
Hopefully he will be sidelined next time.

Closing schools and gyms has done far more long term damage
than keeping them open with sensible precautions would have done.

Blocking the established test / trace teams and expert labs
from doing their job
has been a catastrophic failure that led to many thousands of deaths (because they warned about the NHS care home link in February but were sidelined),

So no, I am not convinced that Lockdown has saved lives.
THey could have been saved far more efficiently with much more reasoned measures (copied from countries with experience of contagious diseases)

Clavinova It's not that high a number when compared to the numbers employed there

The Germany health service is HUGE and employs about 4.5 million people
(takes about 12% of our GDP, much more expensive than the NHS, which employ 1.5 million)

Recent serology studies of NHS staff have found 45% had antibodies,
so I suspect far more German healthcare staff have antibodies than those 13k

Listening, lockdown stopped vector transmission. It has saved lives.
More should have been done to shorten lockdown, yes, and stop a second wave. The time was not used wisely. We needed tougher action sooner and our lockdown would have been far shorter and less painful. Systems would now be in place to control further outbreaks, such as Leicester, which frankly are not. This risks the same being repeated.

Listening We now know (mostly) the measures that work
We didn't know in March

Look at the curves - from the earliest stage, the UK was following Italy's curve, not Sweden

• because of the Scandi / Nordic advantages already listed

Look how the UK's curve went down with lockdown - and Sweden's did not

I know you hate lockdown because of the hammering to your family finances and prospects,
but get your OH to look scientifically at the attached comparison to understand why the government had to lockdown, to avoid carnage

Look at what is happening in the USA
Compare NYC with states that came out of lockdown too soon

re Ferguson:
the one whose opinion had real weight was Whitty - who used a back of the envelope sum for 80% infected and about 0.7% death rate

When the CMO says "reasonable worst case" is 500,000 dead no government would dare ignore them

Everyone opposed to lockdown has fixated on Ferguson to blame (?)
but without Whitty - & Vallance - there would almost certainly not have been a lockdown

Also we cannot talk about long term damage yet. We are seeing daily new studies on PTSD, ME and lung damage amongst other symptoms that COVID sufferers will have to live with which massively deteriorates their quality of life. It is sadly one of those "wait and see" and more resilient families will do better psychologically with things like lack of socialisation than others. I actually think that more people exercising outdoors is far healthier (lots of studies about "tree bathing" and how outdoor exercise is better for mind and body) than going to a gym and as a family will have instilled good healthy routines that ay well be long lasting, so some good may also outweigh the negatives here.

The Germany health service is HUGE and employs about 4.5 million people.

4.5 million staff obviously not enough;

March - "Germany's alleged attempt to fly in Filipino nurses to provide assistance to COVID-19 patients has irked many in the Philippines.The country is facing a shortage of health workers as it tries to combat the disease."

www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-demand-for-filipino-nurses-increases-in-europe/a-52927591

April - "Germany calls on migrant medics to help tackle coronavirus. Country has 14,000 Syrian refugee doctors waiting for qualifications to be approved."

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/14/germany-calls-on-migrant-medics-to-help-tackle-coronavirus

🐿🐿

The UK was left nearly defenceless after so many years of cuts to
e.g.
. the NHS
. the public health track & trace teams at local authority level

Also, all pandemic planning by previous CMOs, science teams and governments were for flu,
which had a completely different strategy that doesn't work for COVID
(The original plan had a small section for Coronaviruses, but this was deleted over the years)

Flu:
. far less deadly, 0.044% IFR vs 0.36 - 1% IFR
. treatments available for the very ill - doctors knew how to treat it
. wait 6 months for a new flu vaccine
. not infectious much before symptoms
. high "dispersion factor" - doesn't propogate via clusters & superspreading events like COVID
. herd immunity is feasible

Clav, are you actually trying to poke holes in Germany's health system from UK They realised they needed more staff and instead of telling staff to suck it up, re-use PPE and get on with it they advertised for help. Which country is more responsible?

We are where we are with Lockdown
but if the lessons are not learned and taken on board before the next flu season
which will coincide with Brexit
the UK will be in a real mess
the UK needs to build on what it already had.

My problem with Ferguson is his pre Covid record BTW
and the curves will all be adjusted later due to the massively different testing regimes

The impact of lockdown on my family is by the by
its impact on inequality and education an poverty and the young
is something EVERYBODY
should be incandescent about

"4.5 million staff obviously not enough"

You can never have enough during a pandemic !
The UK is trying similarly - I wonder which country will proce the most attractive ?

I suspect too that the health services, like many German businesses now,
are trying to implement early retirement for older HCPs especially,
since the risk rockets from age 60

The German govt advice during lockdown was for those of us who are 60+ to stay home as much as possible
This is best done when retired.....

Listening The testing regimes won't affect death totals

The excess death curves (excess total deaths over the historical average for the period) are striking
One Western country or another may suffer a heatwave or a bad flu epidemic, but this effect is global.

It really is unlikely that most epidemiologists and most governments in the world decided to smash the global economy for shits and giggles

Interesting Somali perspective here;

africanarguments.org/2020/05/13/why-is-the-somali-diaspora-so-badly-hit-by-covid-19/

Ah yes, the FT charts
I'd like to see a rolling 12 month average
because November and December were very mild ...
start and end points on data sets are rarely equivocal

That cartoon is WRONG - and ridiculous

Brexit is nothing like as serious an effect as COVID,
by an order of magnitude even in UK GDP
and is not infectious, would not kill so many in such a short time etc

and it really only hits the UK & to a lesser extent the EU
Brexit would be very different within a much healthier global economy

Listening They weren't mild around the world
All those countries showing a COVID peak

and many in lockdown

• otherwise many more young & middle-aged would not have had an ICU space

However, the old saying
"you can never convince someone when their income depends on not understanding"
could be paraphrased to
".... that losing their income was necessary for the general good"

BigChoc
In April you said you'd not go back to your gym till there was a vaccine.
We all change our minds depending on the evidence.
My mind changes in increments most days.

Bigchoc I think the relative sizes of the waves are just down to Covid hitting us first, Brexit second and climate change at some point in the future. It you are drawing waves, they usually get bigger the further out they are from the shore. Just artistic licence. Draw three waves, first one big, second one small, third one massive. Looks stupid. So the artist hasn’t done that.

I don’t think anyone is saying Brexit will have a similar impact to Covid (or that either of them will have as big an impact as climate change).

listening If we look at the 7-day rolling averages of deaths,
we see that Sweden's deaths are not declining like countries which locked down
Not so terrible for them, because their peak was not too high

However, the UK had 22 successive days of over 1,000 deaths, reaching a peak of 1,445
Imagine the deaths - and the state of the economy - if the UK was still suffering anywhere near 1,000 daily deaths

As posted upthread, Sweden's economy has not benefitted as much as everyone expected from not locking down because,
as in the UK before lockdown,
with a high level of deaths, enough people change their habits about going out to shops, cinemas, restaurants etc that profits crash and economic activity plummets.

BigChocFrenzy
The excess death curves (excess total deaths over the historical average for the period).

Just to point out that Germany's estimates are based on stats from only two German states (out of sixteen) - Berlin and Hesse - both
have fewer deaths per 100,000 population than many of the other states.

www.rki.de/DE/Content/InfAZ/N/Neuartiges_Coronavirus/Situationsberichte/2020-06-26-en.pdf?__blob=publicationFile

Other countries may have estimates based on different averages - the chart in your link says; "vs recent years" which isn't very specific - not easy to compare if one country's average is a two year average - and another country has a five year average.

"In April you said you'd not go back to your gym till there was a vaccine"

No, until I felt safe
I do now
If cases return anywhere near the 7,000 level or deaths to the 350 level, I'll be staying home again

Gym is my one indulgence, important for fitness and a healthy old age - but I no longer linger in the coffee shop and SPEND

I used to go daily to restaurants - now I've only been once since lockdown ended, outside only, no lingering for extra courses and coffees

I planned weekly days out in the nearest city to shop and eat out - NOPE

I planned weekly trips all over Germany to historic towns, museums, galleries, botanical gardens - NOPE

I had intended public transport for all of this and to explore - NOPE

clavinova The 9k are the COVID deaths for Germany, which are transmitted electronically every day to the RKI from hospitals, care homes and other institutions

The total deaths don't come from the RKI, but from the German equivalent of the ONS
You can dig in there and find the daily deaths over the COVID period

Germany normally has about 900,000 deaths per year, or 2,700 per day
The peak deaths were 300+ per day

They do their own graph for us, where COVID is the blue year,
or you can dig into the daily stats yourself:

www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Querschnitt/Corona/Gesellschaft/bevoelkerung-sterbefaelle.html

Covid-19 worsening plight of UK migrants

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/29/covid-19-worsening-plight-of-uk-migrants-report-finds

The coronavirus pandemic has intensified the effects of the hostile environment on undocumented migrants in the UK,
with many experiencing loss of income, unsafe working conditions and scared to seek help if they have the virus, a report has found.

The 9k are the COVID deaths for Germany, which are transmitted electronically every day to the RKI from hospitals, care homes and other institutions.

Yes we know the 9,000 figure but I'm pretty sure the FT cite Berlin and Hesse for their other calculations.The graph in the INSEE link (France) compares 2020 with 2018 and 2019, not a five year average.