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According to a Gallup poll out today in the states, Donald Trumps presidency and his policies have the highest approval he has ever had of 49% of the electorate. And his handling of the Covid 19 crisis has seen him gain in the last week a 5% approval in the so called independent vote not aligned to any of the two parties. If that carries on the toaster will not switch on Tyke.
If you read that in conjunction with the Sunday Times piece from last weekend you can only conclude that when the government say they are following the scientific advice from experts - this means they are only following the scientific advice of experts that Dominic Cummings believes in.
Here's a thought.Foot and mouth disease is a highly contageuos virus. When there is an outbreak of foo and mouth, they demand farmers and vets disinfect footwear, they walk through trays of disinfectant. They even disinfect tyres of vehicles...So wouldn't it be an idea to put disinfectant washes for people to walk through at the entrance to supermarkets? Or would that have little benefit?
Here's a thought.Foot and mouth disease is a highly contageuos virus. When there is an outbreak of foot and mouth, they demand farmers and vets disinfect footwear, they walk through trays of disinfectant. They even disinfect tyres of vehicles...So wouldn't it be an idea to put disinfectant washes for people to walk through at the entrance to supermarkets? Or would that have little benefit?
AdamI have no idea how the concept of HI could possibly have been thought of as a primary policy unless those making that policy were effectively accepting that we would have a spike in cases that would utterly overwhelm the NHS for several weeks. That's why I reacted with incredulity two weeks back when Albie first pointed out on here that HI was Govt policy.I say that as someone who has no epidemiology background, but as someone who is comfortable dealing with numbers and drawing conclusions. I heard back in mid-Feb, Neil Ferguson from Imperial College, saying that in the absence of drastic measures, he expected this infection to double every 5 days or so, to kill 1% of those it affected and to cause critical but treatable illness in maybe 5%. And although he didn't use the term HI, he alluded to it by saying he'd expect the epidemic to infect 40-80% of us (i.e. it wouldn't be able to spread more widely than that because we'd have HI by then).With those numbers, it was relatively easy to see that, if that 5 day doubling wasn't stopped, the NHS would be utterly overwhelmed by critical illness cases by mid-April. Ferguson said he estimated we had several 100 actual cases in mid-Feb. With a 5 day doubling time, that becomes maybe a million by mid-April. 5% of those being critical is 50,000. But we only have 5000 ventilator ICU beds.By mid May, unchecked, there might be half the population infected, maybe 1million needing ICU treatment - 200 times more people needing critical care than we had beds for. At that time, a policy of soft mitigation (hand washing, distancing) was all that Govt was pushing. I'd assumed they were getting advice that this would be enough to massively increase the 5 day doubling time and "flatten the peak".Turns out that was bullshit. It was never remotely possibly to flatten the peak sufficiently without the sort of lockdown we now have. HI as a policy was effectively accepting that 50-60% of us would get infected over the next few weeks.That means that the policy of HI was implicitly accepting that we would have half a million deaths from CV-19 in May-June and a non-functioning NHS from April-Aug leading to God knows how many other avoidable deaths. Back in early March, I hadn't fully realised there was an alternative. I thought we maybe had to face that because the economic effect of a huge shutdown would be worse. I didn't have the economic knowledge to take in the fact that we actually DO have mechanisms to deal with the effects of a lockdown. So there always WAS an alternative. It's just that, from late Jan to early March, the Govt was choosing not to follow the alternative, and was having a policy of (in the reported words of Dominic Cummings from late Feb) "protecting the economy first and if a few pensioners die, too bad".That approach cost us six weeks of prep. And, quite incredibly, while Govt policy was to accept the NHS being overwhelmed, no one was lifting a f**king finger to bring in more PPE for NHS staff.Like I say, we are where we are now. But there is a f**king huge inquest to be had when this is over.
260 deaths in last 24 hours
Quote from: Filo on March 28, 2020, 02:13:37 pm260 deaths in last 24 hoursf**k. That's not good. We are clearly off the China trend now.
This is still the result of people’s behaviour from last week, when some people thought it a good idea to get one more piss up in before the restrictions and generally not following the advice.I’ve popped to the supermarket earlier and it appears the message might finally be getting through, the trouble is there is about a weeks lag before the effects of the restrictions start to have an impact
Quote from: BillyStubbsTears on March 28, 2020, 02:33:50 pmQuote from: Filo on March 28, 2020, 02:13:37 pm260 deaths in last 24 hoursf**k. That's not good. We are clearly off the China trend now. Wheres our strong leadership, the lockdown needs enforcing by police and army now, if not out of hand already, its getting there at an alarming rate. In a wierd sort of way I’m glad my parents are no longer here to go through this
Argh right. So we’ve probably got another week at least of high increases then before we can hope to see the restrictions taking effect. Not going to be a great week ahead then
Quote from: Filo on March 28, 2020, 02:44:03 pmQuote from: BillyStubbsTears on March 28, 2020, 02:33:50 pmQuote from: Filo on March 28, 2020, 02:13:37 pm260 deaths in last 24 hoursf**k. That's not good. We are clearly off the China trend now. Wheres our strong leadership, the lockdown needs enforcing by police and army now, if not out of hand already, its getting there at an alarming rate. In a wierd sort of way I’m glad my parents are no longer here to go through thisjust been for my daily walk, streets were deserted!!! Some folk are listening.... :-)