Strange timing for this comment. Yesterday's was the best and most informative for a while.
SARS CoV-2 coronavirus / Covid-19 (No tin foil hat silliness please)
- Thread starter Don't Kill Bill
- Start date
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) is joined by CEO Duncan Drasdo and Financial Director Andy Green from the Manchester United Supporters Trust for a special episode on all things behind the scenes at Old Trafford including a brief history of MUST and their aims today, views on INEOS and Sir Jim Ratcliffe so far, and the Old Trafford regeneration.
I see no situation in which everyone is going to qualify for it anyway. I can only see it being given to those who need the flu jab for example, the elderly and physically vulnerable/unwell......I can't imagine this being rolled out and mandatory to the entire population, which should keep the anti-vaxxers happy I guess as most of them tend to be younger.
Seems many parts of the US and some Euro countries have gone mask crazy due to the announcements but here in Greater Manchester I rarely see them and perhaps have even reduced usage. Some of the Aldi workers who did before don't even bother now, can see it being quite uncomfortable for long periods, plastic gloves can get very sweaty too and the virus lives on them far longer. For people just nipping out for a short time to a shop I can see masks being worth it during a lockdown.
Out of curiosity, what information did they give us that we didn't already know? We know we're not going to see a sudden drop in cases or deaths and it's a marathon not a sprint. We know its too early for lockdown measures to be released/lessened. We know a vaccine isn't coming overnight. What exactly was the new information? For me, it was nothing but repeating the general information.
Actually, yeah, BAME demographics isn’t the issue here. This is about testing. Uk testing of mild/community cases has been practically non-existent from day one. So their mortality rates base on confirmed cases will be higher across the board.
I know there’s been a big severity bias in Italy too but they ramped their testing up and up, over the course of the epidemic so must be getting a lot of milder cases by now, right? Those milder cases will inflate the total case number, without adding to the death toll.
I think this depends on the government and the capability of the people in it. Some governments are more interested in not getting the blame than actually doing what is right... Those that are more interested in the economic effects should be all over this... Regardless, having a huge supply of facemasks should be one of the top priorities in all countries. For protecting the healthcare workers first and foremost, and then as a method to opening up the society in a responsible way...
I reckon some people in every government is aware of this possibility, but I'm not sure if these are the right people. Party politics is not a meritocracy... This method would be feasible in less populated countries with the industrial capabilities to ramp up production of these masks. Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Switzerland and Sweden (but they are herding).
Did throw that number out there without anything to back it up...
Table 6: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2190272/
From a 5 min search(will come back to this when I have more time.). Only skimmed the paper, so will not vehemently back up my original %... But the difference between with and without mask should not be underestimated.
I did not include the average stupidity of people when guestimating that number. Pubs and clubs are not a must, so they should be closed for the foreseeable future, regardless of availability and usage of facemasks.
This. They are mainly testing those who are sick enough to be hospitalised, therefore you're going to see a much higher mortality rate because if you get hospitalised with this, you are in big trouble for the most part. The majority of people are still and have still had mild to no symptoms and haven't required hospital visits.
Maybe so, but I imagine that here in Norway they would start with the most vulnerable and critical personel, and then advise everyone else to line up and get it. More and more of the commoners take the flu shot these days is my impression.
That’s grim but the way that care homes feature so highly in death tolls around the world might put their findings in context. The average 70-80 year old in a care home has a hell of a lot lower life expectancy than 70-80 year olds overall.
Goes without saying, I only read the abstract, lazy turd that I am. They probably discussed this potential bias in their conclusions.
Herd immunity is a HIT % of total population. I think the idea that you could infect most young people and isolate older people to the end of achieving a degree of overall herd immunity is just wishful thinking.
Eventually yes, I'd imagine so. But for the 'needs must' situation straight off the bat, it'll be the vulnerable only.
I know what herd immunity is. This initiative wouldn’t be about trying to achieve it. Just make a start. But yeah, keeping the young vermin apart from the rest of society is probably an insurmountable challenge.
This is exactly one of the reasons the WHO give for not (yet?) recommending their use [PDF document][web link]:
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If the mortality figures from France are accurate (0.53% of all cases are fatal), that means about 3 million people in the UK have caught the disease (which amounts to about 5% of the population). I think that's a reasonable guesstimate, given the number of people I personally know who've caught it.
If the doubling rate were to go up to every 3 weeks, it'd only take 4 months to get to 48 million infected. I really don't think that eventual herd immunity is out of the question (given that covid-19 will be with us for at least 18 months). You can't lockdown totally for the full duration, so the virus is going to continue to proliferate.
If the doubling rate were to go up to every 3 weeks, it'd only take 4 months to get to 48 million infected. I really don't think that eventual herd immunity is out of the question (given that covid-19 will be with us for at least 18 months). You can't lockdown totally for the full duration, so the virus is going to continue to proliferate.
I doubt that we are going to see mandatory vaccination for the entire population, that would be a monumental task in terms of logistics alone and as far as I know you "only" need 60-70% of the population to achieve herd immunity anyway. I reckon they are going to offer it to the people who are most at risk and perhaps make it mandatory for certain jobs, e.g. healthcare, they could probably also enforce it as mass events, demand organizers to also check for a vaccination card at the gates. As with other
It doesn't sound reasonable given the whole world has less than 3 million confirmed cases.
People who are asymptomatic are unlikely to ever get tested. People with mild symptoms will probably never goto hospital and get tested.
There's a lot of room for people who will get it and never be tested. Especially in the UK.
I have read quite a bit about masks in the past as i lived in Asia for a few years where they are common and far better understood. The West is just getting to grips with the idea. It's fairly well known over there that they don't do anything to prevent you catching anything, and may even make it more likely because they encourage you to touch your face, but they do help in preventing you spreading what you do have. This is why surgeons wear them.
In Italy it is law to wear them because the government wants to stop spread from people who don't show symptoms or know they have the virus. Still, when I'm walking miles away from anywhere, i just keep it on my chin in case the police drive past.
A little bit maybe, but taking the 10 day current average time from symptoms to death, we still have a ~10% fatality rate. At one point it was up closer to 20%. 3,500 people tested positive 10 days before we posted 919 deaths.
Tests are up to around 60,000 per day but there is still no widespread testing of asymptomatic patients available to my knowledge.
For sure, but do we think the UK have only caught 4.5 % of their cases?
Yeah or just do them when they have something new or important to say, then people will definitely tune into the ones that are on. Maybe minimum once a week if there hasn't been one.
0.53 of France's population is 355,000 dead people.
Herd immunity either requires 11-70 million dead, depending on what Ro and HIT ends up being, or a vaccine.
Okay? I'm well aware of this. I'm not sitting in my 'ivory chair' to suggest that friends could deliver food essentials whilst you quarantine for 1 week. Regardless of their living conditions (which was never brought into question from my initial gripe about the guy, you've brought it up) if you have tested positive, you stay home for the week.
Why are you bringing this up? I think you're completely missing the point of my initial post. Positive? Stay home. Feel OK? Of course you can go out for exercise, walks, food shops etc, but there's no need to do it in a full fecking hazmat suit and gasmask.
Again, my initial post was about a man going food shopping with his wife in full hazmat suit and gasmask. The guy wasn't out partying or anything, I don't know why you're going down this tangent.
I don't understand people who wear facemasks in their car while driving alone (and they're not delivery men or the like).
Doesn't it get annoying to wear it more than you need to?
Doesn't it get annoying to wear it more than you need to?
We have to in our Comune, the Mayor has made it compulsory - and everyone's on their own in their cars. It's daft. I even have to put the mask on to walk across the road to the bins, and there's no-one around.
TL: DR: Are the general public using PPE to avoid extreme cases which they may find themselves in or are we actually using it because these cases occur quite frequently?
I don't fully understand your comment that masks don't prevent you from catching the disease. Respirators stop both inhalation and exhalation of particles/droplets. Surgical masks prevent exhalation of droplets and yes, they would prevent an infectious people from spreading the disease. I think what you are saying is that if everyone in the general public wore surgical masks, there is no need for respirators because there wouldn't be any droplets in the air to breathe in anyway, which I do agree with. I wasn't trying to dismiss this point in my earlier post and I am sorry if it came across that way.
The first point I tried to make was more about just how necessary is it for the entire general public to wear masks? There is already a wealth of research which shows how droplets disperse and evapourate. It isn't clear to me though why surgical masks are truly necessary in the first place. This is because I do not understand how often conditions occur where the droplets exhaled from an infected person (who is not wearing a mask) remain both suspended in the air and do not evaporate quickly. To avoid this scenario requires the need for a mask, but the effectiveness of the masks worn by the general public then really depends on how often this scenario occurs. If the scenario hardly ever occurs, then one could argue the masks aren't really that effective at all in terms of limiting the overall spread.
As I said above, I do understand the need to err on the side of caution but we shouldn't stop studying or understanding the science.
The second main point I made was that so much emphasis is made on masks and we don't really know if they are significantly better for the general public than wearing gloves, or if it is preferable for the general public to wear both or maybe it is better for the general public to wear just gloves. It broadly follows the same argument as above. In essence are we just using PPE to avoid extreme cases or are we actually using it because these cases occur quite frequently? The science isn't clear to me here. My personal feeling is that the cases tend towards the extreme rather than the norm but its just an opinion.
I don't buy into this argument that just because Asian countries wear masks they have been significantly better off or they "better understand" them. I don't doubt it has helped, but again, there are several factors such as using apps to trace people and forced isolation. My personal opinion is that the significant reasons these countries have been better off is a lot to do with previous experience with dealing with virus outbreaks, the app which tracks users and the lockdown measures. I think in the case of the app and lockdown it has been enforced more strictly than what would probably be allowed in western cultures, I may be wrong though.
The graphs are a bit pointless being shown every day, ultimately it's only being used to re-inforce the discipline measure of lockdown.
Anyway today's deaths:
514 in England (Hospitals)
17 in Wales
58 in Scotland.
Seems overkill, I imagine anyone you share a car with would be living with you.
Yeah that's got lost in the underlying health issues. These people weren't going to drop dead next week or the week after in most cases. Sad to see 10 years life just been taken away in a week or two.
Sadly this is what I feared. Wearing masks needlessly for situations that don't warrant them. I agree with both of you, in the situations you describe there doesn't appear to be any need to wear them.
What I suspect has happened is the governments issued a blanket law which just made them compulsory to wear everywhere, to avoid the alternative scenario where they list each and every situation where they are necessary. It is understandable why they have done the former and not the latter.
A pathologist who announced Covid19 to be serious way before our politicians and WHO admitted it was going to be went into detail about the flaws of the current Hydroxychloroquine studies.
Interesting listen actually.
Interesting listen actually.
Yes I agree, the story is unfolding only as fast as the science can be developed, which is not fast enough for the 24/7 news cycle. Its the same with procurement of PPE and other matters where there were no mass production lines already in place, or the logistics of procurement that can keep up with the demands of a pandemic. The ability to provide our own PPE and similar needs is something the Government will have to face afterwards, as unfortunately this is not the last pandemic we can expect.
However the need to 'feed the cycle' means that broadcasters, presenters, news type media formats are all trying to find a different angle to play up and grab the viewing stats. Unfortunately this seems to always be from a hindsight perspective and is at times unjust on people under pressure on their watch who for the most part cannot spin the wheel any faster.
On the subject of masks...i have seen some pretty appalling behaviour by men of a certain age wearing masks in the supermarket.
One was wearing a full acrylic face mask with side filters - straight out of "contagion" film - and he was literally just barging people out of the way so he could get his few items and leave.
I've also lost count of the number of men I've seen wandering aimlessly through the shops wearing a mask but whistling at the top of their vocal strength - spraying the inside of their mask with sputum and god knows what. So I'm concerned about some people seeming to get a false sense of security behind a mask. Then again, plenty of people seem to be able to wear a mask and NOT be a massive idiot.
I’ve just seen on the BBC that Sweden have announced a much bigger increase in cases than normal and also withdrew speculation about how many people have got the disease after admitting they made mistakes with the science
They already have higher per capita numbers than all other Scandinavian countries. Was only a matter of time until this would come out.
Edit: The official totals are messed up.
Yesterday, 18,100
Today, 18,738 but +616 should make 18,716.
Not sure if this happened before and they just add in some other deaths from nurses or is Patel doing the adding up today?
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they said 25% of people in Stockholm area would have it or have had it at may 1st.