Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Covid-19

Maybe BJ was drawn to a fellow adulterer...

Granted his breaking of quarantine was to say the least, foolish, his track record in epidemiology has been pretty good. I don't know what papers you are referring to but his work on the epidemiology of a wide range of diseases has been world class. So I don't know why you think his predictions have been poor...

The reality is the figures aren't looking promising .

Forgetting all of the expert predictions and software modelling, it would have been a pretty brave decision not to have locked down when we did with the way the virus was starting to ramp up in Italy in advance of the UK. If you had been running the country at that time what would you have done ?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but they were making decisions in real time with limited information and we do currently have a higher level of mortality than the rest of Europe. If there is a chance of herd immunity developing, we will probably have a higher level of immunity than most of Europe except Sweden as our lock down has not been as severe, so in my mind we are sitting somewhere in the middle.

Herd immunity is still an open question, sadly.

We are paying the price now for the early complacency when the government was sat on its hands and people were being told that it's just like flu with a 1% fatality rate.

Now we have the highest toll in Europe and >14.5% fatality rate based on 31k deaths from 211k cases so far.

In my country the federal prime ministers are very euphoric about their relaxation measures. Mrs Merkel, with whom I did not always agree, has done a good job in the Corona crisis. She is very worried because the federal states are pushing very far ahead. For example, Mr. Söder, the President of Bavaria, has pushed through tough lockdown measures at the beginning. I thought that was good and safe. But now he wants to reopen hotels and restaurants very soon, I think in a week or two.
I wish everyone the best, but I think we are wrong to think that the summit is over. It's a little bit like wanting to get rid of the fire brigade because they are good and effective at putting out fires, which is fatal but popular at the moment.That's the wrong logic. The successes are misunderstood in the sense that the lockdown was and is not necessary. Simply because a major catastrophe did not occur. It's crazy because nothing worse has happened, many people believe nothing should have been done.

Another point, our population is partly a bit confused because the units of measurement are changing. In the beginning there was the question of how many days before the rate of infected people doubles. Later on, the question was how high is R0. But it made sense. In the beginning it was about the "entry" into the pandemic. But if for example 500.000 people are infected then even a doubling rate within 10 days is no longer a good value. It is good as long as we talk about maybe 1000 cases.
With larger populations R0 becomes more important.

And now we are at a crossroads. If there's a herd immunity, loosening up is gonna be the better way. But you're gonna have to protect more vulnerable groups.
If the herd immunity doesn't work, then you have to build on the success of the lockdown and isolate new cases. Keep it down until a vaccine comes along... hopefully.
But this last way means extremely many tests and in short intervals, and a lot of patience and willingness in the population.

Tim

Surely the issue is we simply don't know how many cases? (What we do know, is how many people tested positive of the tiny proportion of the overall UK population who have been tested). And without knowing the real answer of how many cases - but with a huge sample bias because those tested are in the main the severely ill presenting at hospital, we don't know the true fatality rate.

I don't disagree that, without this data, we should work on the worst-case scenario (which is probably the observed fatality rate) and make public policy accordingly.

The early 'complacency' (but not the PPE débâcle) may be ascribed to a naieve trust in the value of herd immunity - which I still believe was abandoned because the strategy was too hard a political sell and the Imperial study was just a convenient marker buoy about which to change tack. Of course, the real reason for changing direction should have been because the science doesn't yet tell us whether Covid-19 confers lasting immunity or not - and here too we should base policy on the worst-case assumption, which we are.

True, and we don't really know how many deaths are really due to Coronavirus either, many analysts are placing the actual death toll much higher.

https://fullfact.org/health/covid-deaths/

Thanks - an interesting read.

I suspect the under/over reporting of CV-19 as a Cause of Death on a Death Certificate (and therefore in the RBDM data which forms part of the overall Government numbers) changes markedly on or around 25th March when the CoronaVirus Act 2020 came in to UK Law. Previously, Doctors outside a hospital certifying a death in the community (ie at home or in a Nursing Home) were guided that the proximate CoD should be e.g. 'heart failure' or 'pneumonia' in the absence of a positive CV-19 test, which of course the deceased would not have had outside a hospital environment. After 25th March, BMA were very quick to guide GPs that CV-19 could be given as CoD on a Death Certificate / Cremation Form if it was a probable cause even in the absence of a positive test. Given the high number of Death Certificates my wife is signing right now, there isn't time to split hairs about which patients definitely died of CV-19 and which patients probably died from CV-19 but almost definitely died with CV-19. So currently most GPs would be erring on the side of over-reporting CV-19 as CoD.