It looks like to me just a comfort pill for the public. They basically acknowledged that they can't handle the crisis already. So what they gonna do? They want it to appear to be an advice from expert, to persuade the public, rationalize a forced decision.
The uncomfortable truth is, the British government have weighted cost and benefit, and they have decided, the death of thousands or more is not worth the cost of near-absolute lockdown of a country, It might lead to total breakdown of the economy, full-recession, and that may cost more lives anyway. These elder people are old enough anyway, and the death rate for young is just 0.2%. (which rise to 1.3% for people elder than 50, and 6% for elder than 60 according to data from China)
What does those number mean? If you and your partner's parents are elder than 60 years old, there is 25% chance, at least one of them will die. That is, very likely, you're going to hear it from your best friends that one of their parents died from COVID-19. Are you okay with that? (Under the assumption everyone will get infected anyway). And beware, these statistics are not final, and mostly from patients who received some level of medical care, although we do not yet know how many of those heavily-ill patients received intense care. Without medical care, the number could easily double, after all, it takes time to die, that's just how lung disease works.
Back in reality, the UK wants to infect about a cool 40M people (for the herd immunity!). Last I heard they expect 50% (20M) to get it in a 3 week interval. Meanwhile they have about 4k ICU beds, which are at close to capacity already. Assuming cocooning works so great that only 3% of people need urgent care (rather than a more likely 5-10%) and only for one week on average (again, unlikely!), that's 200k people for 4k beds for a period of 3 weeks. Surely the fatality rate for those 3% is going to be way over 60%. At which point you have close to half a million dead in those 3 weeks alone.
I'd like to see numbers for a realistic scenario where this strategy does not result in something in the millions of deaths.
I guess we'll see, won't we. I mean for all the panic about Wuhan, fewer than 3.2K people died there so far, and when it all winds down, the death toll will likely be below 5K people. Probably fewer than died of flu complications in the same time frame. Given that the vast majority of the cases are not acute, probably most of their metro population was exposed to the virus, which is tens of millions of people.
I know that extreme measures were taken to stop the spread (and such actions are infeasible in the West), but they did contain it: there are very few new cases or deaths.
So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that, especially if older people are isolated.
I think you kinda missed the part where the UK is trying very hard to infect the majority of the population and China is trying very hard to stop more infections from taking place. Successfully it seems.
> So no, there won't be "millions of deaths" or anything close to that
I showed you some simple arithmetic, based on official figures from the UK government. Can you come up with better numbers or point out an obvious flaw in my calculation?
There are no reliable estimates of overall fatality of the virus. Only the estimates of how many people _who required treatment_ have died, which the press deliberately misinterprets as the overall fatality rates most of the time, because higher numbers drive more clicks. Watch epidemiologists speak about this: they will go out of their way to point out that we don't know these percentages, and we won't know them for quite some time. Your "numbers" are bogus. You can easily see this if you look at the _initial_ estimates of H1N1, SARS and MERS. While COVID19 does appear to be deadlier, _nobody_ knows what the fatality rates will look like population-wide. Anyone who claims otherwise is full of shit. What we do know is that the numbers we currently have are the very uppermost bound of what's possible.
Nope, SARS and MERS are way deadlier than Covid-19, not just in initial estimates. South Korea tested hundreds of thousands of people and we have the Diamond Princess. That makes it unlikely that we are overestimating CFR by an order of magnitude due to uncounted mild cases. If you have someone reputable who thinks true CFR could be as low as 0.1%, please share! As far as I can tell no one believes it can be significantly below 1% for a country with similar demographics as the UK.
The reason why Covid-19 is scarier than SARS is precisely because it has a lower fatality rate, allowing it to spread instead of killing its host before they can spread it.
Not true. These estimates are of overall fatality based on number of people diagnoised. Not based on those who required intensive treatment. That means we have crude estimate on death rate for people showing some symptoms. Crude in a way not everyone in the pool is recovered, or dead for that matter, so it's not possible to be that accurate yet, but it will only be higher not lower.
Wouldn’t we only have a crude estimate on the death rate for people diagnosed with the virus? If we find that many people are not getting tested for the virus and just recover by themselves, then it’s possible for the fatality rate to be lower.
Well, those asymptom case can also infect others. In all likeliness they will infect others, multiple others. So if epidemiological root trauce is done right, we would find those asymptom carrier.
This doesn't mean those cases are "asymptomatic". Most people who get the disease fare about as they would with a flu. I'd also venture to guess that most people do not go to the hospital unless things are really bad (e.g. they can't breathe on their own). Furthermore, because not everyone at the hospital gets tested, I'd also guess that there's a number of cases where deaths are misattributed to plain old flu, too, since it's the flu season still, and some of those who are dying "of coronavirus" would have died regardless.
Well. How is common flu any different? Most people don't get tested and they just recover, if any, a lot more don't. So seeing those two numbers on the same page should mean something, even if you doubt the accuracy based on the assumption a large quantity of people aren't tested.
Wuhan disagrees with your argument much more than it supports it. The Chinese response in Wuhan -- after the failure of the initial attempts to suppress any news of the virus -- were swift, draconian, and competent. They locked everything down, heavily restricted travel, erected 16 temporary hospitals (just for that region alone), and pumped a ton of medical supplies in to it.
So the argument that follows from that is, "these are the measures required to achieve fewer than 3200 deaths."
Which is something I explicitly pointed out. Shit like this isn't going to fly even in the UK, let alone in the US, so they seem to be acknowledging this simple fact and thinking of what they realistically can do in the absence of such "draconian" lockdown abilities. Which I think is smart. Especially if you consider that _any_ lockdown can't last for very long for economic reasons. A month or two at most, after which you start over. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you build up herd immunity.
The issue with that approach though is how do you effectively prevent reinfection of the region when all counter measures are suspended? Another carrier could reinfect the region again and all that previous work came to nothing.
It's never "nothing". For all we know (or don't), the virus might (or not) slow down spread during the warmer months in Europe and the US.
Perhaps it could be effective enough to have multiple 2-week lockdown periods (eg. separated by 2 or 4 weeks non-locked-down periods), just to slow down the spread so health care systems can keep up?
There is so many variables at play, and no simple model could come up with "the best" solution, if there ever is one.
By contact tracing, quarantine of people who are suspect, and social distancing.
Look at taiwan , singapore, hong kong, macau. You can totally slow it down to a reasonable number of new cases daily such that the hospitals can handle. Just don't start like wuhan, iran, italy...
> It looks like to me just a comfort pill for the public. They basically acknowledged that they can't handle the crisis already. So what they gonna do?
Well, they could do what every other developed country is doing: implement social distancing measures. Social distancing can't stop the spread of the virus, but it can slow the spread down.
People seem to have an impression that the case fatality rate (CFR) has some fixed value somewhere between 0.1% and 4%, and that the CFR is set in stone; but obviously there are many confounding factors, such as access to ventilators. If a sizable portion of the UK population contracts the virus all at once, the NHS will be overwhelmed and many otherwise preventable deaths will occur (see the graph near the end of this BBC article [1]). In contrast, social distancing would "flatten the curve", reducing the burden on the NHS (eg, see this interactive Washington Post article [2]).
The uncomfortable truth is, the British government have weighted cost and benefit, and they have decided, the death of thousands or more is not worth the cost of near-absolute lockdown of a country, It might lead to total breakdown of the economy, full-recession, and that may cost more lives anyway.
And so begins the Great Reaping. Get rid of the old and the sick, so the nation can move on, freed of the burden of caring for an elderly population that consumes but does not produce.
The problem is they might reap much more than intended. I'd really like to see estimates of how many economically productive members of society will get caught out by the fact that sadly they can't have life-saving treatment after an accident (or will get a nasty covid infection post-op) because the health system shut down for weeks/months or gets permanently gimped (if it kills off or traumatizes enough doctors and nurses).
Also, what are the chances nearly all of the recovered infected are in near mint condition post-recovery? If it turns out non-trivial numbers now have permanently reduced lung capacity or pregnant women produce a lot of wonky babies, what then?
That's not quite the point though, is it? The point is total breakdown of the economy, full-recession, and that may cost more lives anyway. The idea seems to be that you can decide: do you want thousands of deaths, or do you want thousands of death and an economic collapse?
Our establishment are very detached from the hoi polloi. One need only look at WWI unarmed charges from trenches. Not sure much has changed since this time on their side. On the pleb side I think the assumption that the upper crust are competent has changed.
We've just had years and years of austerity in the UK, imposing a huge toll on the most vulnerable in society. The government repeatedly said there was no money. Then they turn the taps on when it effects them. They clearly do not care about the bulk of people.
Put those two together and you have the ingredients for a big uproar.
Thousands already died in Italy over the last several days with less than 20,000 cases (most of those cases are still active so thousands more will die in the coming days before the lockdown even shows effect, if it is effective). You're looking at millions dead if a significant portion of the population is infected.
Especially the 2% figure holds when intensive care is available. But if you plan to let millions get infected at the same time, there won't be any intensive care- there will probably be no care at all.
I find one argument supports the delaying tactic is that lockdown won't work especially troubling: because you are eventually going to lift it, it won't work. Here's thing, it's always a matter of when, not never.
Lockdowns are to buy time for vaccination. That will be the optimal solution. Unfortunately, the time when the vaccination will arrive is unclear, at the earliest time expected is 6 months, but it will more likely to take more than a year. New treatment method are also being tested, like make use of blood from those who have recovered (Apparently I do not mean to drink those like vampires do). The UK government may think it will take much longer fo find effective treatment or vaccination.
>These elder people are old enough anyway, and the death rate for young is just 0.2%
The numbers we're seeing from The Netherlands, Italy and France show that over half the people in the ICU are between 30 - 60 years old. I'm not convinced the 0,2 % is accurate anymore.
Well, with no isolation whatsoever that's an likely outcome, it's not possible to know at this time since we don't really have any other country opt to use such desperate measures, and hence no stats available.
The uncomfortable truth is, the British government have weighted cost and benefit, and they have decided, the death of thousands or more is not worth the cost of near-absolute lockdown of a country, It might lead to total breakdown of the economy, full-recession, and that may cost more lives anyway. These elder people are old enough anyway, and the death rate for young is just 0.2%. (which rise to 1.3% for people elder than 50, and 6% for elder than 60 according to data from China)
What does those number mean? If you and your partner's parents are elder than 60 years old, there is 25% chance, at least one of them will die. That is, very likely, you're going to hear it from your best friends that one of their parents died from COVID-19. Are you okay with that? (Under the assumption everyone will get infected anyway). And beware, these statistics are not final, and mostly from patients who received some level of medical care, although we do not yet know how many of those heavily-ill patients received intense care. Without medical care, the number could easily double, after all, it takes time to die, that's just how lung disease works.