Coronavirus - is enough being done to contain it?

Boris is being advised to find away to get out of the lockdown by a key advisor

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-bo...14319.html

(04-04-2020 11:26 )Rammyrascal Wrote:  Boris is being advised to find away to get out of the lockdown by a key advisor

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/coronavirus-bo...14319.html

Thank God for that, at last a bit of common sense.

^So the inhumane figures stack up like this:

It is estimated that up to about 80% of the population would have to catch it to have herd immunity.
The population of the UK is around 67.8 million.
With a 10% death rate for those reported cases the maths add up to approx 5.4 million deaths.

There are estimates that only about 1 in 5 people are taken into hospital and they aren't included in the cases total. That reduces the possible deaths to about 1.1 million.
The government estimated that 250,000 would die if we did nothing to stop the spread.

However these figures are only if the NHS can cope with so many people getting the virus at the same time.

It adds up to a lot of deaths. How many friends & relatives can you afford to lose.

I hope that my figures are incorrect

Just checked Skylinewebcams,which has cams from all over the world,the one in Brighton Sussex shows people ignoring the advice to stay indoors,same in Dublin,where as in most of Europe the streets are deserted.

There is no such thing as herd immunity, without a vaccine. Allowing people to catch it to gain immunity is not a strategy, it's just 'survival of the fittest'.

This is the same crackpot, right wing ideology, that's coming from some Republicans in the US. Thank fuck the wider scientific community was able to turn Boris away from this. This is what can happen when Cummings is given free hand to hire weirdos as advisers.

It's becoming increasingly apparent that Boris has been asleep at the wheel over this. Procurement of supplies for the NHS should have started 6 weeks ago. Now we're practically at the back of the queue for everything, on the global market.

They were too busy back-slapping over Brexit and fantasising about the future to pay any attention to the runaway train coming down the track.

If the NHS comes through this in one piece it will be in spite of the Government, not because of it.

He has to find a way not only to end the lockdown, but also to prepare for the after pandemic return to normal life and business without rushing head first. It has to be a staged ending so people can adjust the best they can.

2 mobile telephone masts have been set on fire as idiots react to the conspiracy stories that 5G is linked to Coronavirus. We also have idiot Babeshow girls promoting such nonsensical theories. Step forward Georgie Darby, Delia Rose & Bella Mendez

^what has the fire done to the 5G network and what have the babes been saying?

basically some shit on Twitter that 5g causes the coronavirus and because of that some twats have been destroying masts

surprised there is plenty of tin foil in the shops the amount of these lot that must be wearing it to protect from the radio waves

Achieving Herd immunity is what is happening all over the world, including Britain, as we speak, at different paces and lag times. Herd Immunity is what causes the cases and deaths curves to fall rapidly after the peak and an outbreak to stop. The pathogen (can be either virus or bacteria) runs out of new susceptible people it can infect and so dies out. Indeed the common cold works just like this each winter in your workplace - once most of you in the office have had it it runs out of people to infect and dies off. Until it mutates the next year and starts all over again because we are not immune to the new version.

All pandemic and local epidemics reflect this process.

The strategy is to artificially flatten those curves and spread the process over a longer period of time by inhibiting infections through social distancing so that the NHS ventilatory and staffing and bed capacity is not exceeded and so more lives can be saved. The total number of infections will be the same order of magnitude but spread over a longer period. A very harsh lockdown will artificially almost halt the transmission but it will resurge with a new wave if socialisation is restored and new cases are present to kick it all off again, until herd immunity is achieved. In the early containment stages the idea is to halt transmission for long enough to eliminate all infective cases and stop the outbreak, as they do with MERS or Ebola. Those viruses are less ferociously transmissible so this is easier. Coronavirus SARS COV-2 is extremely infectious hence it has gone through communities like wildfire. By the tine you get to pandemic mitigation stage halting it is impossible and you simply have to ride the curve as a community.

A mass vaccine is many months away and not relevant to herd immunity presently.

We are Shielding the most vulnerable 1.5 million as far as possible because they are extremely likely to die and must not be exposed to the natural process of the pandemic and herd immunity. Once the rest of us have herd immunity and the pandemic is over the chances of them coming into contact with infected individuals will be minimal because as I said above the virus will have died out due to no available hosts in the community. The shielded group will be the ones that get the vaccine eventually but the hard truth is that they won't get any protection for months other than social isolation and won't be safe until after the pandemic has run it's natural course and we have herd immunity.

An interesting footnote is that really lethal viruses with short incubation and infective windows times don't cause pandemics because they kill their hosts before they can infect others. They are literally too lethal to be successful. It isn't good to kill too many of your hosts if you are virus because you need the host to survive and be "good" at passing it on to as many as possible. A serious global pandemic occurs when a virus hits the "sweet spot" of infectiousness and lethality. It happens about once a century, the last being Spanish Flu 1918.