I was going to add, it seems unlikely that the Chinese aimed the virus with only the metabolically unhealthy in mind. So maybe there was no conspiracy.
The only way we could be truly rid of this thing would be to try to exterminate it like we did with smallpox and the only reason we were able to exterminate smallpox was through vaccination, until we have a vaccine that is reliable this thing will be a scourge as it is already global. And while smallpox has been eradicated, there are still samples in several laboratory locations around the world. If anyone wanted to engineer a bio weapon smallpox would be the virus of choice as we know a lot about it, there is a vaccine but there is not much in the way of stockpiles so it would be deadly before enough vaccine could be manufactured.
Well some in the west might see euthanizing the old, the weak and infirm as an economic blessing so why would China do them a favour, sorry that's a rather sick speculation
That’s why despite me also having doubts like Dom and BigMac, I tend to err towards the outbreak not being engineered by the Chinese. I have to say I can’t believe the conspiracy theory on this. What I do think is that we in the west have let ourselves down a bit and been responsible for our own vulnerability. Me included.
That reminds me of the HSE photo depicting a forklift truck lifting a forklift truck lifting a load....
oss, sorry if this has been covered already--- have you run a model of the expected fatalities in the UK based on the present numbers and with the measures in force now? i know a figure of 10,000 had been called a "good result "on tv when it started.
I should have used a double decker bus and a low railway bridge but there is too much implied real tragedy in pictures like that, just grabbed the first silly thing I could find.
You have to use a variable R0 to do that and I'm using a constant R0 which is unrealistic but I'll give it a shot.
This and my other attempts don't account for the lag in deaths hence I said they were simplistic, they are really just illustrations of how the numbers behave but it does not account for the lag in deaths, so as I tail off the R0 after 27th of March I am using this to achieve the same effect but it is crude and incorrect as the R0 should have dropped rapidly during the first two weeks of the lockdown and should already be as low as 1.3 or 1.1 or at least that would be my gut feeling, if it is not that low then this is going to go on a lot longer. So it says maybe 30, 000 cumulative deaths by this time in May maybe, it could be anything from 15,000 to 45,000 more likely but that's just a gut feeling from looking at this spreadsheet and knowing the limitations of the model.
is there a gov dot uk model that shows similar ? i wouldnt be surprised if its 10 thousand over the weekend.
My belief is that it will be less than that. I believe we are peaking right now. Cross fingers. If you add today’s death figures to yesterday’s and divide by two then the trend is dropping. That’s me being optimistic.
It's taking up to five weeks for people to die so there is a long tail, France had a dramatic increase today I hope we don't see the same over the next two days.
There will be but their models won't be back of a spreadsheet envelope ones like mine. They were credibly hoping for about 20,000 compared to their own estimates of 200,000 to 600,000 if they had done nothing. But you can't keep it that low (20,000) and also achieve herd immunity so this is not over by a long way. If you opened up the country again but you still had 1000 cases you didn't know about you would repeat the whole sorry episode within 7 or 8 weeks.
"But we are not seeing an acceleration" let's be optimistic https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52206510 Extract from link For weeks up until Friday's figures, the number of deaths had been doubling every three and a half days," he said. "Had that trend continued, we would have seen close to 1,400 deaths today. "So 786 is better than that, although it's still too soon to know what's causing it. It could be a big bottleneck in reporting - we've seen that after previous weekends - or genuine evidence that growth is truly slowing down. "More hopefully, for almost a week, daily new cases have been holding steady at about 4,000 a day, suggesting that, while we are still seeing new cases, the growth in this figure could be stalling."
well--we have to open for business sooner rather than later. Any ideas about what we all should do then ? masks ? social distancing ? problem is that will soon wear off.
Pray. More seriously stay at home for months, use masks at work not to protect yourself but to protect others when out or at work, wear goggles where possible don't occupy small unventilated spaces with anyone else, only go out for food only travel for work, and keep washing very regularly. Even with all that you will still get it eventually. I will not be able to relax until there is a vaccine and I don't think I will get on a plane, I might have before it became clearer how this thing kills and that the odds were as bad as 1 death in 25 for my age group, purely selfish on my part but now I can't see me travelling for a long time so I don't know when I will next see my kids.
My uncle Joe gets cremated on the 21'st,only 8 family members can attend. Aunty Marion got out of hospital today, all the street turned out to see her and cheer, bitter/sweet time for the family.
