Erm…
Social distancing please.
I want rid of this disease ASAP.
No shurkers.
No clever dicks.
No invincible teenagers.
Just due your duty, reduce contact and socially distance.
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Slightly dangerous thinking
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I didn’t know volunteering to help the elderly was dangerous thinking. What a nice person you are.
We are mirroring about 2 weeks behind Italy.
Volunteering is great BUT significant risks. Please consider your circumstances & interaction with others.
I used to be an NBC officer in the RAF; we had all the kit & were trained how to use it & carry on operations.
Covid19 should frighten everyone more than they have EVER been frightened before about a health crisis. We (the public) can really screw things up - but it isn’t just “you” - you can be an unknowing carrier (non-symptomatic) & infect others.
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Have you got a source for that photo? I think it is likely real, just a source would be nice!
Sent to my wife by a doctor friend - however, if you want to back-plot, there are probably other on-line statistics.
I keep looking at this one (link has been posted before but a useful reminder) which seems to up-date regularly & doesn’t push any national line. You can look at specific countries & move back through the fatality figures, etc. All seems to match up.
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What we need the number crunchers to do is publish like for like figures based on ordinary years. Who is to say that in a bad flu year, things aren’t similar if not worse. We seem to have got to state of madness with this.
Comparing us and others with Italy is poor reporting for many of the reasons mentioned ref Italy’s population deomgraphics. Although we might eating more pasta than the Italians, if shop sales are anything to go by. Also on mainland Europe people can wander around with no restrictions so who knows who has got to where with this, just wandering around. We may still have an open border, but with entry points that can be properly controlled. It made me smile that borders across the eu have been reinstated. Maybe the folly of FOM will come home to roost and borders are put back after this has cleared.
Nope, was in an outlying area of Paris the other day - in France you can only go a certain distance (500m?) from your house for exercise, etc, otherwise need a permission letter to do essential activities. Hotel reception / shops had one metre spaced lines so you maintain distance from the next person.
Italy & Spain - schools shut down, people took kids for short breaks to holiday homes, or visited relatives. As a result, Covid19 was spread AND local health resources in regional areas became swamped. Guess what’s happening right now in UK? People whizzing off to camping sites, taking their caravans, diving off to the holiday homes in Cornwall, Norfolk, Wales, wherever. Guess what will happen in about a week’s time…?
Yes, we had had flu epidemics, but the risks / fatalities for this outbreak are SO much higher, especially with no vaccine & (as yet), no speedy test to confirm health status - especially one to show if you have had Covid19 (i.e. anti-bodies present) to show that you might be “safe” to work.
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The sort of restrictions have only been in place for a short time. In borderless eu free for before any restrictions came in, you could have landed in Portugal and then wandered around between countries and covered the mainland unchecked and that could still happen now as I will bet that rural areas are not as well monitored as large towns.
Schools may have shutdown here but from speaking to my mates in schools, there is more than enough to keep the cherubs busy for the next 2 weeks and schools are still open if people fit the criteria, and if mum and or dad are still working, they won’t be just going off and if they did what would they do? Many if not all attractions and activities have shut, pubs and cafes are take away. Disappear to holiday homes by all means, but unless it’s a well appointed one, you’d be basically imprisoning yourself. Most holiday area attractions don’t fully open until Easter and I imagine if like in my area the holidays aren’t for another 2 weeks and you can’t see things changing that quickly.
Regardless I would like to see figures for bad flu outbreaks compared to this and underlying conditions for those who died, as currently it would seem that those that have died will more than likely have done so any way. BTW I speak as someone with parents and in-laws in their 80s and 90s, so more than accustomed to the potential for flu each year.
If people just keep a sensible perspective we’d be fine, but in light of the media and SM that is nigh on impossible.
Interesting BBC podcast about infection / testing - especially within the first 10 mins, where an Italian doctor (& specialist - works at Imperial College - Prof of Microbiology) lays out the testing programme that they actioned for a local town (3500 inhabitants - ALL tested at cost of €100K though). Testing (in order to reduce future infection) & associated over-load of the health-care systems + vaccine production = key measures.
In an average year we lose ~600 to flu.
Some years this increases dramatically, in 08/09 there were 12,000 flu deaths in this country.
What we don’t get from a flu season is a colossal drain on the medical resources and tens of thousands of people put in need of hospitalisation. And that’s why we’ve got this “madness”, because this one does cause that, and that’s what the measures in place are trying to avoid.
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This is a useful resource a lot in the US are using:
The thing the models don’t include is how many of the Corona Virus deaths are likely to have died anyway.
We know that we have 8000 deaths per year from Flu and that those deaths are above and beyond those who would’ve died anyway.
The current best figure we are getting for the UK is 20,000 deaths on the low end and 500,000 at the worst end. But how many of those would die without the disease we don’t know yet and won’t know until well after it’s happened.
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The problem is that working to a worst case scenario and just mentioning a number like ½million has got locked into people’s head as what will happen and is causing the nonsense in the shops and currently no one is doing anything centrally to control this.
Unlike during WWII, unfortunately today figures of potential deaths were kept quiet and anyone mentioning anything was done for sedition and I think we need that now, just to calm everything down. Although what 24 hour news would do is beyond me. Normally rational people at work and where I live have almost gone bug-eyed loco. I also think they should stop to highlighting every single new case and death, as this is also stoking panic in people. Although the media love it.
I feel for shops as they were caught out by the spanners and are on the backfoot trying to do their best. When I was in ASDA earlier today there were signs saying no more than 3 of any one thing and a message of the same repeated over the tannoy. Still a lady (ASDA worker) going along all the tills and putting what people had over the this number currently being allowed in a shopping trolley and another was going to put this back on the shelves. A couple of trolleys I saw were predominately pasta (of all types) and all manner of tinned foods. Obviously people going into supermarkets either can’t read, are deaf (I was in there for about 20 min and heard the message probably ½ dozen times) or just too stupid to be let out alone.
My brother is SLT at a large Secondary in Northants - the issue is not the work to keep them busy, it is the ever dwindling numbers of staff to look after them.
In his case they are not far from having to close regardless due to ratios. I am sure his school is not alone.
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That is the weirdest way of screenshotting I think I have ever seen.
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BBC have a good article on numbers at the moment.
To summarise UK as a whole experiences 600,000 deaths ordinarily. It is almost impossible to know how many of these, or how many extra are due to the virus. Also at the moment, anyone who sadly passes and is found to have the virus in them then counts as a virus death, but without knowing if it was the virus that caused the death.
Whole article very worth a read, not nice as none of it is, but helps make sense of some of it.
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I’m talking about the online work they’re setting, not physically going in to school, which seems to be for a few kids but only if their parents want to take it up.
One of my mates said they are doing a rota to accommodate those that do come to school, but it’s a moveable feast. I asked about the online work and the kids doing it. He said the parents have had letters and emails and the kids packs with instructions and assemblies telling them how to do it (the parents have had these emailed to account for the feckless kids) and those that don’t do it parents will be getting texts and emails advising them that this is how school will be and they are expected to ensure their children do it. All the kids have individual log ins to the system the school are using and have to submit the work. He’s also said staff have to login to the school system each day, with teachers expected to set work and acknowledge the work being done. He has said in effect the school is setting a full day’s work each day, the only exception is PE, but in his words they don’t do much any way, hence so many have leadership roles.