Based on your reading of the article, how lethal do you think it is?

It's not lethal to the human species, it will just clear out some of the dead wood. Wheather it is civilised is another question.

:cool:

Sepia and puce.

In a dream lastnight, death walked into the room, as I was staring to see him, the lights were extinguished. In the total darkness I felt helpless and woke up with a fright.

If you were going to paint a picture of the sound of a fart, what colors would you use? Don't say brown

It's difficult to avoid the smell, but I would probably use khaki, or Olive green. Whereas for the smell, it would be a rainbow palette.

If find a bottle of fizz and BBC 6 music goes down quite well on a Friday night. I recommend Tom Ravenscroft at 9pm, Its Iggy Pop before 9 which is good after a drink.

Yes there are some hospices just for palliative care, but many double up as long term care homes. Also there is a grey area around which patient is a palliative care patient and which is a long term care patient.

It was Norwich hospital, but I can't confirm who refused to go in to the facility, as I heard a doctor from the hospital talking on talk radio about the rumours.

A hospice facility isn't a care home. It's palliative care.

The're interchangeable around hear. The're all heading in the same direction and the same point about the staff holds.

Yes, I'm British, I don't see the relevance though?

Everybody who goes to hospice is about to die. But I take your point. A sudden outbreak in a community where no one has immunity yet could briefly overwhelm the system. So the cancellations of large gatherings makes sense.

The staff in the care home are an issue, they could be lumped into the group of healthcare workers. They work in a healthcare community, or a hospital. It is imperative that such communities don't get infected because it is highly disruptive*.

Weirdly some of these facilities will be required to admit infected acute cases, while protecting the healthcare workers from infection. There may even develop a circumstance where acute cases are warehoused while they die ( khaki tents).

An issue with banning large gatherings has been highlighted, in that it might result in numerous small gatherings in confined spaces. For example holding football games with no crowd, resulting in many fans congregating in pubs to watch the game on big screens.

P.s. I'm not expecting you to reply to all that, I'm addressing the whole thread really.

*an example of disruption occurred in a hospital near me the other day. There was a scare that a patient with a persistent cough had the virus, he was tasted and found to be clear, but in the meantime rumours spread far and wide that there was an infected person in there. This resulted in healthcare workers, cleaners and maintenance staff not going in to work.

I was listening to a representative of the main ventilator manufacturing company, which makes many of the ventilators which are purchased in the world at the moment. He was saying that they have had many urgent orders from across the globe for many thousands of ventilators. The interviewer asked, can you step up production to 24hrs. He said, that in a good year they sell 500 ventilators, they may be able to increase by a few hundred over the next year.

Looks like there's going to be a short fall of maybe 50 million ventilators.

Could be, Covid19 has been matched to a virus found in Pangolins. The trade in Pangolin scales for Chinese medicine has increased massively over the last few years. The price per kilo is astronomical.

I have found a hole in your argument, I hope you don't mind. But in the UK, it is the elephant in the room.

Remember your 87 year-old neighbor? He didn't burden the healthcare system too much. If he did visit the hospital, he was dispatched to hospice care as soon as compassion would allow.

If he does go to hospice care, he will kill off everyone else in the care home. So he won't be allowed in, again he will be taken to a tent. In the UK plans are being put in place to isolate care homes, I don't have the figures, but it will include over a million people. Then there is a large constituency of people who are medically compromised, or with an underlying health condition, over a million again. Then there are all the health and care workers, who do the caring of all these folk, a few million there. They might bring the virus into the protected group. If they become ill, they will have to go home, or go into a tent. This is just the tip of the iceberg, the larger group is everyone over 70 years of age, who will soon become isolated.
We will soon become tent city, khaki coloured.

I was informed, before toilet role violence, that rubbing almond oil on the anus is good for Corona.

So this might be the new normal if and when there are pandemics, even less dangerous ones

I am sure we can learn to adapt and prepair for such epidemics, but as yet we are sorely ill prepared. Hopefully there will be much more effort put in to epidemiology now with real data to work with.

22,000 people in the US have died of the flu THIS YEAR already. HIV? How about heart disease which kills nearly 20 million a year. Cancer, around 10 million. Malaria, 1 million. Corvid ... at worst it may, just possibly, nearly compete with cancer this year. If I’m being honest I think it’s more realistic to view it as maybe competing with malaria.

I took a look and the statisticians are suggesting that the mortality due to heart disease is around 650,000 per year,
https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm
Also cancer deaths are about the same level, in the US.

Unless you are referring to global figures, but you and ssu appear to be discussing US figures.

With Coronavirus we are being told that every country is likely to loose a few millions of citizens in the next few months due to something theoretically avoidable. That is the difference and it is unclear what degree of action will cause a significant reduction in these figures. No one knows how this will end, or if an effective vaccine will be found. Hopefully it won't be to bad and we will pull through with our civilisation unscathed. And we take this as a wake up call for what you suggest next.

The real issue is what will happen when the next strain comes around. That could be terrible - they’ve been warning about this for years already.

I suggested alcoholic mouthwash, I don't know how well it went down.

Or that could all be bullshit, but you heard it here first!
— unenlightened
Now that's a catchy phrase!

Brilliant! I missed that one.

we could try swilling the virus out of the mouth and into the stomach with an alcohol solution every ten minutes. In fact there are some good brands out there ready to use, like Smirnoff, Jack Daniels etc.

Yes, this is right, but I wonder if the economy will be able to sustain itself intact for extended periods where no one is working. It's going to have to be a balancing act between economic considerations and health considerations.

I think that the economy will go into a deep recession in the UK immediately, simply due to the lack of trade in travel, events and hospitality and it's knock on effects. I think we could get through this for a couple of months with help from banks, grants and tax holidays. But that is just the tip of the iceberg, it exposes large numbers of people who are a couple of wage checks away from being homeless, or in debt and an equally large group of people who are maxed out on debt, including mortgages. Once house prices start to drop significantly then the problems become entrenched in negative equity etc.

We were going to have a rough ride anyway with Brexit, before Coronavirus came along. It's turning into a perfect storm with Johnson and Cummings at the helm, blind to anything outside the comfort zone of the privelidged classes and wealthy exploiters. Doggedly following an ideological course of cutting all ties with the EU by the end of the year come what may. He is adamant that he won't ask for an extension to the transition period, currently up to 31 Dec' and intends to broker a trade deal with the EU by June. The very fact that he is not accepting the seriousness of the crisis and allowing an extension to negotiations shows that he is not concerned with getting it right, but only holding on to power long enough to get it done what ever the cost.

The ideologically driven Brexiters have risen up and grabbed control of the reigns in the UK and are accelerating the Brexit train towards the abyss at maximum acceleration just to ensure we go over the edge however bad it gets. This is an existential threat for the Conservative party, because if it fails at this point, they are facing a decade or more of a socialist agenda which would strip out the privelidged wealth of the privileged classes and condemn them to electoral oblivion. They will fight tooth and nail to preserve their privelidge and Brexit was an important step in their struggle against a growing desire for a more social democratic direction for the country.

but that they didn't realize the deaths would be so high as to crash the system s is the incompetence

They may have known this, but that it was already to late, they were between a rock and a hard place.
Johnson's economic advisors would have informed him how fragile the UK economy is at the moment and that any wide reaching measures adopted would bring the house of cards tumbling down. So they couldn't do anything that could compromise the economy. Instead they came out with the strategy line of delay and just keep washing your hands all the time. They might have also known that the number of deaths and the chaos in the health care system would crash the economy as well, but again, there was nothing they could do to prevent any of it.

No10 has been helpless right from the start and the sooner we have everyone staying in their homes except for food shopping and essential trips, the more likely we will be able to ride the first wave intact.

I have grave concerns about the US, it looks like the're going to have a rough ride.

Yes, I agree, all these notions they had about protecting the economy will backfire. The only way to protect it would have been to ban flights in December. Although, I doubt that would have been sufficient, because the virus will become endemic across most of the world anyway, so you would have to close your borders permanently and hope a vaccine is forthcoming.

As I thought, you don't know what leadership is.

I hear you, but I differ in my reading of the situation in No10.

When I described the political reaction to Johnson's strategy, I was not supporting it, only describing it. In my opinion the team managing the government's response is developing this strategy, they do have some strategic thinking going on, but they are lazy and naive about the magnitude of the crisis. As usual with a Conservative government, they are naive and live in an ivory tower. Their raison d' etre is to keep the privelidged classes in power and generate enough wealth to support their privileges. But the current government is the Vote Leave campaign, they are ideological fundamentalists and their doctrine is to leave the EU and become a Singapore on Thames. In this they have left behind the moderates in their party and are recklessly pushing forward the implementation of their ideology.

This being the case, what is most likely to be going on is that they are in a chaotic mess, with a fundamentalist driving forward their agenda come what may, which will include the calculation that the economy must be protected, or all is lost. That a lot of old and poorly people will die, which will actually bail them out of the healthcare and care home crisis. They will now have to formulate someone, or some process to blame. For this because the public would not tolerate such ruthless plans in government. All they need to do is say that the UK situation is different and the virus was to blame for the million or so deaths. And any flack that comes their way will be blamed on the expert advisors and the previous Labour government of 1997-2010, for bankrupting the country(not true by the way). It doesn't matter how bad it gets, they will still get Brexit done.

I heard that the toilet paper craze started in Australia, where a newspaper staged a scene of empty shelves. In fact they had taken the toilet paper off the shelves and stacked it behind the camera.

We're over the peak of toilet role panic now.

What happened to your post?

There is a row in the UK about the government's explicitly stated strategy of doing little in the way of interventions, with the aim of establishing a heard immunity.

I know that they are being advised by some of the world's top epidemiologists, but there is a growing suspicion that the government is limiting the strategy to one of a number of models provide by them. The model of blunting, or smoothing out the peak of the epidemic while accepting that at least 80% of the population will become infected anyway. In the aim that this degree of infection will generate a heard immunity and subsequently smooth out any following peaks.

Many people consider this a gamble, a risky strategy, which in the light of the lack of understanding of the virus could go horribly wrong in the initial peak of infection.

The charge against the government is that they have been advised about the fragile state of the economy and the critical degree of underfunding and recruitment crisis (Brexit) within the health system. That they are scarred of such collapse during the critical Brexit period and rather have adopted this strategy to put the strain on the risk of hundreds of thousands of old people instead. Well they are all going to die soon anyway.

Make Britain great again.

According to him he is quite concerned, probably more so than any leader before him.

Yes, I agree that he's concerned, about the pandemic, not about his troops though, they are off the radar for now. Oh and also any US citizens in vulnerable countries*. He's displaying the behaviour of someone in a sticky situation way above his pay grade. Let's hope he's got some level headed advisors left, after his purge of people he doesn't like around him.

All he's doing is desperately being all things to all men. Contradicting what he said the last time he spoke, distracting from hard questions, attacking and othering anyone, or administration he can pin a target on. He hasn't even realised that leaders around the world are struggling to comprehend and deal with the magnitude of the crisis. He just sits there with his arms tightly crossed and reacts to events in anyway that he can do with his salesman rhetoric.

Where's the leadership?

Or, do you still not know what I mean by leadership?

* I mean countries with poor healthcare systems, which are poorly prepared for 10% of their population to require hospital treatment in the next few weeks.

He disrespects his office when he ignores the genuine concerns of US citizens in his actions. I already told you this and you ignored it.

I'll ask you again, to what extent is the President concerned for the wellbeing of US troops in what is soon going to become a hell hole in the Middle East and Asia?

I think it's time we brought NOS4A2 in from the cold. He would get so much more out of these discussions if he were in the free world(free thinking world). He's stuck in a straight jacket outside the door.

All he needs to do is give a sign that he's willing.

See I was right Trump has got the virus, he was living it up with Bolsanaro the other day, who was diagnosed yesterday. Off with his head.

Trump can't admit that he needs testing, because it would weaken his machismo. Powerful populist leaders like him and Johnson have to remain invincible alpha males at all times, or they might fall to the level of all those weak marxist and communist leaders over there, on the other side. It's essential for Machiavellian divide and rule.

Off with their heads.

Shame he couldn't coordinate with the EU, just place the blame on them instead.

"Off with their heads!"

Too little, too late. Donald "Pandora" Trump

Quite, I was thinking of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, " off with their heads, off with their heads".

So no leadership then. Well I agree it's better than the alternative, which we saw today.

I agree entirely, I was thinking about what could happen after the collapse.

Surely it would have been better had the parade not occurred. The city should have stopped the parade.

And should Trump have banned all flights from Europe today, without consulting anyone in Europe?

The record drops in shares in response to his knee jerk reaction are understandable. They realise that with such an imbecile in charge of the country anything could happen.

Should he be recalling his troops from the Middle East? You do realise don't you that the virus will go endemic rapidly in the populations in the region, causing chaos far worse than we've seen so far. Does he really want to leave his boys there to get infected in a hell hole?

You know what, he probably hasn't even given it a moments thought.

Is Trump going to pull the US troops out of the Middle East and Asia? He should do as he will need them on the ground when the chaos starts. Or is he just going to leave them there to die?

He's a very unstable genius.

I think he's already got it.

Currently there are no restrictions for any EU citizen coming into the UK. No checks, no tests. Also the UK is effectively an EU member until 31 December 2020.

The UK doesn't have any flight restrictions. Also if you fly in from an infected area, you are not checked, or tested. There is simply a notice asking you to self isolate.

Yes a good read and I don't reject any of the theory. But I was listening to a virologist yesterday who said that Covid19 matches to a remarkable degree a virus found in Pangolins. He was suggesting that this virus may have combined with a similar coronavirus found in bats. This points in the direction of Chinese medicine, or bush meat trade. There have been many reports over the last few years of the very high price of Mandolin scales on the black market, most going to markets in China. This has become such a lucrative trade that Pangolins in the wild are in danger of extinction.