Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

Status
Not open for further replies.
JemPD said:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politic...ikely-hit-lightning-die-coronavirus-oxbridge/
I cant read the whole article because i'm not a subscriber, but the tag beneath the headline on the front page says
"threat so tiny 'virus parties' may help herd immunity, say Oxbridge scientists"

I despair :rolleyes: :(
Click to expand...

Every time I read articles about kids and schools I get more annoyed. Why does it matter how minuscule the threat to children is (and they’re ignoring the severe illness that can occur anyway)? Do these children all live on their own in some kind of children only colony and feed & look after each other?! No they all live with parents / guardians / families / relatives .. who they will then pass the virus onto... and it will then circulate in the community :rolleyes:

it’s like the whole “protective ring” around the elderly and vulnerable again..Thinking of everything in isolation.. it didn’t work because elderly and vulnerable people very often live with or rely on carers who will infect them!
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
I am interested in the drop off in numbers just this week. It was looking as if the UK was different from most European countries in that the epidemic had been reduced but no more than by half. That suggested that lockdown might not be rigorous enough. But now there is a hint that numbers may fall like other countries.

I wonder if what we are looking at inUYK, Spain and Italy is that if you channel cases into geneoalhospitals with inadequate PPE you get a wave largely due to hospitals accelerating spread to the community and care homes. Once you get some control of that the virus actually dies out of its own accord because inmost situations it does not spread that easily. If lockdown in terms of airport usage and gatherings had come in three weeks earlier there mightn't have been much of a wave at all.

But I see two situations likely to get the whole thing going again. One is large or close social gatherings like the church and the nightclubs in Korea, and the football matches. The other is airports and aeroplanes. Maybe the downturn in the curves is as much as anything just people not congregating and smearing virus allover airports and aeroplanes. So quarantine for fliers seems to me a no brainer. Maybe other eco-no-mic activities could have been saved if we simply shutdown flying at the start. The extraordinary thing is that the airline CEOs seem to have no understanding that the way to get back in business is to have no flights for another three months at least.
Click to expand...

The way I would think about it is there are all these different ways that people interact each with different chances of spreading the virus and where different amounts of the population take part. The spread will then be a function of the numbers of infected people doing each of the activities along with the overall numbers involve and the spread characteristics. That is how I would attempt to go about modelling spread although I've no idea where any data to support a model would come from.

The lockdown clearly reduced some spread paths (I wonder which bits made a difference - I suspect mass gatherings but also people in workplaces where they are close or the aircon could move the virus around). The mass gatherings may be interesting - initially outdoor mass gatherings such as the liverpool madrid match were dismissed as a concern since they were outside but the fact that people were also travelling, staying in hotels, meeting in bars and resturants in more enclosed spaces was forgotten.

I think as the lockdown started its clear that having a health and care sector without proper equipment will have encouraged spread and provided a hub to distribute spread back to families and the community.

The slow tail off suggests that some of these spreading activities are happening - but I've no idea what - I suspect an analysis of the cases that are still coming it could be very informative but I don't see any sign of the government really collecting and using data in a way that could be useful. Data like this from a track and trace system could also be really useful in terms of understanding where spread is most likely - but that again means really collecting data and having the ability to analyze it and an interest in using it.
 
Interesting article about virus was seeding in UK...

"Coronavirus was brought into the UK on at least 1,300 separate occasions, a major analysis of the genetics of the virus shows."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52993734

What amazes me is how "surprised" the scientists were about it being brought in so many times. Surely that was pretty obvious? I know I kept telling people that's what was happening(& they kept telling me not to be alarmist), but I have no expertise whatever... it's not rocket science is it?!
I don't understand how anyone could fail to grasp that if you send a bunch of teenagers on a half term ski trip to a virus hit region, that at least some of them will bring it back. ​
 
Andy said:
Click to expand...

This provides a bit more context to that sound bite.
Prof Ferguson, the top epidemiologist who led the team at Imperial College London that modelled the UK’s coronavirus outbreak, said that scientists underestimated how far the epidemic had spread in the weeks leading to lockdown on 23 March.
.....
However, he added that based on what was known about transmission and fatalities at the time, the measures were warranted.
Click to expand...
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-death-toll-half-earlier-lockdown-neil-ferguson-150750050.html
 
As far as I can see the SAGE people are all gradually finding ways to say 'we should have locked down at least a week earlier' without saying 'we should have locked down at least a week earlier'. Except of course Vallance and Whitty, who are the fall guys. It was their summary that provided the science according to the government.
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
As far as I can see the SAGE people are all gradually finding ways to say 'we should have locked down at least a week earlier' without saying 'we should have locked down at least a week earlier'. Except of course Vallance and Whitty, who are the fall guys. It was their summary that provided the science according to the government.
Click to expand...
Have you been watching today's press conference. Interesting how Boris and Vallance both dodged the question about what would they do differently, Whitty said he had a long list but better testing earlier would be top, but none of them commented on an earlier lockdown even when it was put directly to them.
 
lunarainbows said:
Every time I read articles about kids and schools I get more annoyed. Why does it matter how minuscule the threat to children is (and they’re ignoring the severe illness that can occur anyway)? Do these children all live on their own in some kind of children only colony and feed & look after each other?! No they all live with parents / guardians / families / relatives .. who they will then pass the virus onto... and it will then circulate in the community :rolleyes:

it’s like the whole “protective ring” around the elderly and vulnerable again..Thinking of everything in isolation.. it didn’t work because elderly and vulnerable people very often live with or rely on carers who will infect them!
Click to expand...
And they seem to have completely ignored the nations 700,000 plus 'young carers' (my own daughter had to start doing caring work to help me from the age of 7):

https://youngminds.org.uk/find-help...s that there,chores than other children would.

I admit as someone whose be involved with a lot of these youngsters (in education, mentoring and youth work as well as the personal family link) I am a little sensitive about the lack of support they get, even in normal times. However, it's like they and their vulnerable family members suddenly don't even exist now.
 
Now is not the time to sacrifice public health at the altar of ‘the economy’
As traffic returns to the roads and shops begin to reopen, life in the UK is now a disorienting mix of normality returning alongside a sense that things are still anything but normal.

Reactions are divided between those whose main feeling is relief, and those who feel overwhelming anxiety about a second spike. On both sides, this divide has often been framed as a tussle between the economy and health.

Progressives lambast the government for putting ‘the economy’ ahead of human lives, by prematurely easing lockdown while infection rates are still too high. Meanwhile, polling shows that people have been getting increasingly concerned about ‘the economy’ as the weeks go by, and for Conservative voters it now outstrips health as their top priority.

This week’s prediction from the OECD – that the UK will suffer the deepest recession of any developed economy, as well as the worst death rates – should finally put this framing to bed. It reinforces what should already have been obvious: the relationship between economic health and public health is symbiotic, not conflicting. Framing them as two competing priorities that need to be balanced is wrong, dangerous and a dead-end for progressives. This false dichotomy was used in March to justify delaying lockdown. As it turned out, the virus was coming for the economy whether we liked it or not: by letting it run riot, the UK has actually worsened the damage.
Click to expand...
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/ou...ce-public-health-at-the-altar-of-the-economy/
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom