Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Todd_is_God]

Just now, WhiteRoseKillie said:

Oh, silly me. That must be the dementia kicking in - I'm a bit old, and not perfectly healthy you see.

Of course not for anything, you are now playing the reductio ad absurdum  card. Not quite as obvious as picking up your ball and scampering home, but a de facto  admission of having lost the argument.

Words to ponder, kiddo. Yer standard human comes with two ears and one mouth. Maybe there's a reason for that.

What are you gibbering about?

[Jacksgranda]

You should listen twice as much as you talk

[HeartsOfficialMoaner]

Saw this the other day. 

[NotThePars]

Are the govt still funding the full 80% as it looks like or is Alison Thewliss right that it's 60% from the govt and that they're expecting businesses to top up the extra 20%?

 

[welshbairn]

2 minutes ago, NotThePars said:

Are the govt still funding the full 80% as it looks like or is Alison Thewliss right that it's 60% from the govt and that they're expecting businesses to top up the extra 20%?

 

No change till the end of July. Nah, I'm wrong, details not announced yet but employers expected to pay more of the share, no effect on furloughed workers.

Edited May 12, 2020 by welshbairn

[throbber]

14 minutes ago, Jacksgranda said:

You should listen twice as much as you talk

That’s not the real reason we have 2 ears and one mouth though it’s largely down to symmetry.

[NotThePars]

2 minutes ago, welshbairn said:

No change till the end of July. Nah, I'm wrong, details not announced yet but employers expected to pay more of the share, no effect on furloughed workers.

What's to stop businesses sacking those they claim they can't pay

[RiG]

Furlough scheme extended until October (though perhaps tweaks from July):

 

Edited May 12, 2020 by RiG

[heedthebaa]

1 hour ago, WhiteRoseKillie said:

I'm not talking about close, even physical, contact - simply the opportunity to share an open space and see the little buggers playing around.

Ive been doing that for the last week 

[Todd_is_God]

Seems like good news.

I'm fairly confident i'll be working again by July, at least in some capacity

[Jacksgranda]

22 minutes ago, Jacksgranda said:

You should listen twice as much as you talk

 

6 minutes ago, throbber said:

That’s not the real reason we have 2 ears and one mouth though it’s largely down to symmetry.

[ayrmad]

34 minutes ago, Todd_is_God said:

There are less excess deaths currently during this epidemic than in at least 2 bad flu seasons in the last 40 odd years. You can read about them in the article i posted earlier.

You are 'locked away' because of a combination of panic over a new virus that little was understood about, and nonsense models from the likes of Neil Ferguson.

This virus hardly had time to build up a head of steam before we went into lockdown, I don't need to read what Ferguson wrote, I'm capable of looking at numbers and deciding it's not worth the risk to myself, another 2 or 3 weeks without lockdown and people like myself would have been overlooked for ICU over younger and or healthier individuals(quite rightly IMO). 

[Wee Willie]

2 hours ago, Todd_is_God said:

Im assuming given you are not young you've managed your first point pretty well until now.

As for your second point, yes it would seem luck was on your side just three years ago

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/11/30/winter-deaths-hit-highest-level-40-years-experts-blame-ineffective/

The fact you weren't aware of that shows the role the media have played in whipping up fear over a virus we know more about now than 4 months ago.

I'm 77 with underlying health issues so I guess I have managed pretty well.

Of course I stopped smoking in 2012 so that must have helped.

I clicked on your link and when I saw this:

There were an estimated 50,100 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2017/18

I quickly skimmed over the rest cos I bide in Scotland.

2 hours ago, Jacksgranda said:

Same in our household. So the flu vaccine is 100% effective according to our representative sample...

I agree but see above.

[Billy Jean King]

There are 50000 excess deaths March to May than average, just confirmed by Westminster or are the govt now intentionally trying to ramp up death numbers just to emphasize their negligence ? Safe to say if they are willing to publish such a figure it's probably accurate or below the actual. What on earth is the point of pulling two specific years out of for a comparison never mind two which you specifically state were skewed by a bad flu season ? You can only compare excess deaths to an average to be realistic. You appear to be going more full on denier with every day that passes.

There are less excess deaths currently during this epidemic than in at least 2 bad flu seasons in the last 40 odd years. You can read about them in the article i posted earlier.

You are 'locked away' because of a combination of panic over a new virus that little was understood about, and nonsense models from the likes of Neil Ferguson.

 

[bendan]

59 minutes ago, renton said:

R depends on both. It's a probability function that is at least in part a product of both physical ease of transmission and the number of infections within a population. Physically easy transmission on a small scale creates new vectors which drives up the R value as there is an increased probability of infection due to the larger number of vectors available.

Likewise, R didnt plummet to below one just because of lockdown alone. Even with social distancing there is a non zero probability of transmission to create new vectors. The less vectors in the population the less likely that transmission becomes. Driving the transmission rate down is therefore both a function of physical distance and number of cases.

It'd be easier to control a disease in a group of 10 people where only 1 person is infected in a common environment with no social distancing than in a group where 7 out of ten in the same environment are infected - simply because the vastly greater viral load in the group in the second case increases the probability of a minimum amount of that virus reaching the uninfected persons. TTI is pretty much useless in the latter case because if you dont have prior information that 7 people are already infected, you have no means of tracing the virus backwards indeed, it's pretty pointless once most people have it, if one of the 3 uninfected catches it. You just run into a lot of infections and no means of protecting the 3 poor uninfected. 

So the R number will fall as existing vectors, given a degree of social distancing, become uninfectious via either immune system response, or death. That reduces the probability of any other person coming into contact with the virus. The less cases in a population, the less the R value is.

LSHTM define R0 as: "The basic reproduction number, or R0, is the average number of secondary infections arising
from a typical single infection in a completely susceptible population"

https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2020/reproduction-number-covid-19-could-be-below-one-uk-lockdown

You're defining it as something else.

Clearly, if 7 out of 10 are currently infected it would be too late for TTI, but those 7 cases could only infect a total of 3 between them, so R0 would be falling rapidly towards zero. The Scottish government estimate each current infection is leading to between 0.7 and 1.0 new infections ('hovering around 1),  down from about 3 before lockdown (when the WHO said test and trace).

If we can identify currently infected people (by more testing) and trace their contacts (much easier in our current lockdown than otherwise) we can better isolate those people and reduce the reproduction number.

 

[madwullie]

58 minutes ago, beefybake said:

Well, the 'guidance' now is to wear masks in certain circumstances.

Just to recap somewhat....

On 12 th March, the government decided against tracking and tracing. They'd been asleep

at the wheel, and it was too late for that.  In addition, there ideology had spent years chipping away at, and privatising

public services, so there were no resources immediately available to them anyway.

Me ? As soon as the lockdown was announced, I looked at what I had.

My hobby is messing around with cars, so I had some disposable gloves that mechanics use. Typically these

cost £5 at most, for a box of 50 pairs. I also had a couple of face masks that I use, with protective glasses, when

I'm scraping around under a car. 

So  I had some kit , and wore them for shopping right from the get go.

Couple of weeks in, time to get some more. 

With health workers crying out for PPE, where to find some ?

Only place I could see was eBay.  

Ordered a pack of 10 masks from an eBay seller that seemed to have better feedback rating than others.

That's the light blue coloured ones that you see around. Price £11.45. 

8 days later the gloves arrived. Package fitted in 'Large Letter' envelope,

so postage relatively small.  The 'real' price' of these masks in normal circumstances, retail, I'd guestimate to be about £2, £3 max.

The first one I tried , the elastic earband separated from the main mask as I put it on.

Gloves....   The best I could find on eBay was a box of 50 pairs.  £11.99.

Gloves arrived within 3 or 4 days. Quality OK.  I go for Nitrile gloves, non allergenic.

 

My question is...., if guidance now is to wear masks, are we supposed to buy everything

from eBay profiteers ?    Where are we supposed to obtain the things ?

They are expecting you to make your own from an old t shirt. There's a guide somewhere on a govt website. 

[Thereisalight..]

Furlough at 80% until Oct is both good and bad news, good in the sense that people aren’t going to be made unemployed, but bad because there’s obviously still sectors that won’t be back until at least then including mine (events industry). What else is likely not to be back until Oct? 

[madwullie]

Also you can get semi decent ones off etsy. They just need to be a cloth covering iirc, doesn't need to be medical grade or anything 

[Billy Jean King]

It's only 80% if your employer agrees to contribute to bring it up to that amount, govt will not be paying 80% beyond July.

Furlough at 80% until Oct is both good and bad news, good in the sense that people aren’t going to be made unemployed, but bad because there’s obviously still sectors that won’t be back until at least then including mine (events industry). What else is likely not to be back until Oct? 

[Todd_is_God]

25 minutes ago, Billy Jean King said:

There are 50000 excess deaths March to May than average, just confirmed by Westminster or are the govt now intentionally trying to ramp up death numbers just to emphasize their negligence ? Safe to say if they are willing to publish such a figure it's probably accurate or below the actual.

Well no, it's impossible to hide excess deaths as all deaths are recorded.

50,000 excess deaths in the UK is broadly similar to the 50,100 excess deaths in England and Wales alone from the last 'bad flu' outbreak in 2016/17 which, despite us having effective flu vaccines already developed, and concentrating it's deaths on an extremely similar demographic as Covid-19, raised not a peep, nevermind a several months long shutdown of the economy and severe restrictions on what people can and cannot do.

Edited May 12, 2020 by Todd_is_God