Why You Must Act Now (2023 Update)

The ones that have got away with it are mostly island states and like the UK they tested aggressively and did contact tracing. Most Far East countries people always wear face masks in public when they are sick.

Now they have closed their borders as well. UK managed to flat line the Covid-19 outbreak for quite a while before losing it. The tendency of people who are sick with cold symptoms but not very badly affected to still go into work was very probably our undoing. Statistics from the Diamond Princes suggest that half the healthy people with the virus show no symptoms but tested positive see:

I don't like his trick of showing "not infected" graphs as a way of hiding the factor of 3 difference in the infection rates between 70+ and fit healthy adults 20-50. The teenage 20% infection rate is worrying.

Italy did the opposite (and the US followed the same crazy path) - totally inadequate testing and the disease spread widely by asymptomatic carriers or people with mild symptoms continuing to go to work when ill.

It helps. In exponential growth the closer to unity you can get the daily growth factor the slower the curve rises. UK has just locked down essentially bankrupting all consumer facing high street businesses! France has done the same lock down measures only more so but also promising money to businesses to tide them over the crisis.

It is even harder for the health professionals - they have to continue to work even as other systems like childcare collapse around them.

No. It is slower than that. UK's best estimate to criticality is 4-6 weeks.

I can't find the latest Imperial college report that so spooked the government last night that they went into panic measures but I have found one for seasonal flu based on 35% population vulnerability which you can roughly scale up by a factor of 3 to get an idea. Fig 3 in:

Except that at present we don't have any effective prophylaxis and the need of 30% of hospital admissions for oxygen or ventilators is a very serious problem. There are only 5000 such beds in the entire UK and the model shows that would be an order of magnitude too few at the peak.

USA could well get into crisis sooner since the CDC pandemic response team was largely destroyed in one of Trumps earlier anti-science purges.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

The one where the UK is getting it totally wrong at the moment is that they have said any family member with symptoms entire family must self isolate. This sounds OK at first glance *BUT* many medics marry other medics so you lose two trained staff each time one of them gets sick and if they do have coronavirus you really need to test for it.

People that have recovered no longer need full PPE since ordinary barrier nursing will be sufficient protection for them and I strongly suspect that running out of PPE mid-pandemic will be the next disaster.

There is no realistic treatment for the disease beyond helping people to cope with the symptoms and oxygenation or ventilation if they are unable to breathe. UK only has about 5000 ventilators and the health minister has been asking JCB if they could knock some up on their heavy tractor production line (they mostly make quarry trucks and earth movers).

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

UK was doing that with reverse contact tracing and held the baseline down for more than a month. But the thing that makes it almost impossible is that something like half of all those infected show little or no symptoms but are still shedding virus. That is based on the preliminary statistics from the Diamond Princess cruise liner. The only decent sized exposed population to be fully screened so far.

UK has just passed that point (at least in London) and so the government has panicked and applied a lock down to the entire country. There have only been a total of 6 confirmed cases to date in my very rural county.

I think he is saying that it is now very close to home. Not just an abstract concept for him now. I'm involved in the planning for my village to ensure that the now quaranteened elderly can get shopping delivered to their door. There are a lot of them in rural Yorkshire. Young people cannot afford to live here any more.

Those extreme measures will only work though whilst they remain extreme. The moment you allow social contacts again the thing will take off.

You can smother a fire but unless you completely extinguish it then it will come back again the moment you lift up the fire blanket.

I can usually find the reports that the government is citing although in this instance the actual Imperial College research is still not out.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

It's a news client thing. Apparently Forte Agent needs that to stop it from breaking lines.

For slrn, if I write a single line it stays a single line. It complains when I hit send, but the line doesn't get mangled.

You'll have to figure out what if there's a way to disable wrapping in xnews.

--
  Jasen.

Our foreign friends often fail to understand that our government is a system of independent states with their own health departments, each able to react and respond. Unlike our smaller European friends, we're not bound by one central agency, nor one central bureaucracy.

Cheers, James Arthur

"A February report reveals that the US has about 170,000 ventilators."

Why does the U.K. have so few?

Cheers, James Arthur

.

The reactions and responses aren't always that good. Pence is notorious for shutting down the Planned Parenthood offices in his state, who turned out to be the only people doing free HIV testing. He kept his evangelical suppo rters happy, but created a local HIV epidemic in the process.

James Arthur does have a sentimental fondness for even the daftest conseque nces of the founding tax evaders somewhat clunky attempt at a constitution, but many his foreign friends have much more sensibly constructed social sy stems which do work rather better.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Perhaps?

Don't be silly--if you go into the real world instead of social media, you'll see that we're already encouraging each other. If you don't see that, then when this has run its course, you need to move to a better nabe, guy.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

0195-X/fulltext

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Don't go by any of that, these figures are changing by the minute. The epid emiologists now estimate that less than 14% of the infected people develope d symptoms serious enough to seek testing or treatment. This means they wer en't included in the mortality statistics, making everything about 1/6 of w hat they have been reporting.

The UK government has been underinvesting in the NHS for more than a decade now. Under normal circumstances they don't need all that many ICU beds and they really have cut things to the bone.

They are also massively short of doctors and nurses too. They cut the funding for nurse training don't pay the latter well enough for them to stay in the NHS. Private locums and contract nurses get much better pay.

They are presently asking for retired medics (potentially in the high risk 70+ age group) to re-register and provide emergency cover.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

Thanks. Someone sent me a link to it directly earlier today.

The one thing that strikes me about their simulation is that comparing "do nothing" peak in June to their best scenario merely delays the inevitable by 5 months and creates an even higher spike in mid-November: Fig 3(A&B) green line in the above.

Looks like schools will shut down at Easter and for the foreseeable future to try and keep the profile under the critical care capacity.

The original slowly build herd immunity strategy was probably correct from a purely technical point of view but politically unacceptable to have to tell the population that possibly 1% of them were going to die.

Have to wait and see what sort of rabbit Rishi Sunak can pull out of his hat tonight. He's my MP and an impressive guy but I don't envy him the job in hand (or for that matter the new head of the Bank of England).

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

the

I gather you are talking about the population of Taiwan at about 23 million , but I don't recognize the abbreviation "mio". Several pages of Google wi th -water excluded still did not turn up any reference to this abbreviation . Can you explain?

--

  Rick C. 

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Phil Hobbs wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@electrooptical.net:

As I stated. SOME folks ARE still of good character and live with high integrity and honor. Sorry, but we are the exception.

The retard voter turn out for the dangerous buffoon proves that.

I use exactly ZERO "social media". Except that now Usenet qualifies too.

WTF is a "better nabe"?

Neighbourhood.

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

If we sheltered our oldsters whilst the WuFlu made its way through our invulnerable youngsters, 80% of the herd could be immune in just a few weeks.

We're kind of doing the first part already by default. But maybe aggressively protecting those who can tolerate the infection, is actually putting our vulnerable population at increased risk.

Cheers, James Arthur

Testing for this virus is not like connecting your oscilloscope to a circui t. First it takes over a day to get a result. Then there is a non-trivial false negative result rate. Then there is the delay in being infected and testing positive or showing symptoms. Considering that medics will be dea ling with a lot of people it makes sense to me that anyone with a reasonabl e possibility of being infected should go into quarantine at least initiall y.

None of which is relevant to the issue of testing.

--

  Rick C. 

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That's the danger of this disease. Starting with 6 cases still will show e xponential growth unless something is done to limit the spread. So in 9 da ys you have 60 and in 18 days you have 600, etc. Only two things limit thi s growth. One is that people figure it out and maintain isolation. The ot her is that so many people are infected that the exponential curve ends. T hat would be around 8 weeks into the infection starting with 6 people.

The food issue is on my mind. In January I had no transportation and so wa s in "self-quarantine". Very rural here with no delivery of anything. I a te most of the old canned goods and nearly everything from my freezer. I a lso lost 10 lbs. Then in Feb I was sick with something for over 2 weeks. I don't think it was CV19, rather the flu perhaps. This time I had stocked up again, but ran out of my staples. Now I am looking at running out of s taples again and I just don't know if I need to start opening cans of beans or just go to the store.

Don't know about the UK, but the government in the US doesn't actually do a good job of getting the point across. They are big on using measured tone s rather than conveying information.

The two things that drove it home to me was Win's link...

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Great graphs and very clear explanations.

The other thing was just using the data at

and taking the slope of the line on the log plot. That clearly shows an 8-

9 day for the number of infected to grow 10x. Extend the graph and the res ults are inescapable. Once I did that I started texting my close friends. Seems the rest of the world (well, my world) is coming to the same conclus ion.

I am impressed that companies are starting to shut down and let workers sta y home. I guess they realize they will need workers when this is over.

--

  Rick C. 

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Indeed.

I also note Fig 4, where an on-off-on-off set of measures is simulated for 2 years to see how it can modify the weekly admittance to ICU. Neither the ICU peak's interval nor the peak height changes much, which is rather depressing. It isn't clear (to me) how much the overall death rate and herd immunity change in that time.

But it does look like either you survive infection or your life depends on a vaccine becoming available.

Mine is the "fragrant" Liam Fox.

I imagine people around Cummings and his ilk are thinking unthinkable thoughts like - short term: - reduced bed blocking - more inheritance tax income - long term: - reduced pension payments - reduced care payments - reduced pressure on the NHS - more houses becoming available, reducing the pressure to build more - more stamp tax income as people move - a hard brexit ain't our fault - lots of opportunities to bury bad news - city/government isn't to blame for the (overdue) stock market "correction"

Me a cynic? Shurely shome mishtake.