Hygiene at supermarkets during Coronavirus epidemic

[Nearholmer]

14 minutes ago, raymw said:

The above charts are most likely based on best guess results, and doctored to present the view that the publisher wants. If

They look exactly like the charts updated daily on Wikipedia, with all sources cited, and all government official figures, to me.

 

They are legit.

 

All of them are ‘checkable’ against relevant government sources.

[adb968008]

26 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

They look exactly like the charts updated daily on Wikipedia, with all sources cited, and all government official figures, to me.

 

They are legit.

 

All of them are ‘checkable’ against relevant government sources.

100% spot on.

 

There numbers have been very trustworthy right since January,.

There presentation is identical for every country (and state where relevant) using the same template format.

 

in short..  they are about as uniform, standard and unbiased as your going to get. This whole wiki section throughout, unlike most pages, is well scrutinised and moderated.

Edited May 7, 2020 by adb968008

[Reorte]

5 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

100% spot on.

 

There numbers have been very trustworthy right since January,.

There presentation is identical for every country (and state where relevant) using the same template format.

 

in short..  they are about as uniform, standard and unbiased as your going to get. This whole wiki section throughout, unlike most pages, is well scrutinised and moderated.

 

Agree with this. The data on Wikipedia seems to be presented as evenly as is possible AFAICT. There'll be significant differences between the sources of data due to countries handling and reporting the numbers differently, but the presentation is as consistent as it's possible to be AFAICT.

[Nearholmer]

But ...... to get a real ‘feel’, you are better looking at seven day rolling averages, which smooth out weekend recording lag etc.

 

If you look at those, it’s crystal clear that UK deaths per day are on a falling trend, which would doubtless tail off asymptotic to zero if no change was made to anything.

 

UK cases OTOH are not falling noticeably, but fairly steady at c4500/day, as increasing testing reveals previously unrecognised cases and the disease spreads slowly, and decreasingly.

 

Less easy to access for other countries are hospital admission figures, which are also falling in the UK, which suggests that much of the increase in cases is indeed the detection of mild or asymptomatic cases.

 

I guess that timing/nature of release of lockdown in different places is largely about the capacity of their health services and NY may need to go even more gently than the UK because it’s health services need more recovery time ....... it’s hard to tell how buttered the respective health services really are though, because Governor Cuomo uses mildly hyperbolic language while our bods use very dry scientific language that could make a total melt down sound like an interesting phenomenon observed in a lab!

 

 

[DCB]

Our UK scientists use highly respected guesswork by highly respected scientists.   Just a bit worrying that their projections for Sweden having a transference ratio of 4 by now were slightly out as its actually below 1.   The one just about indisputable fact is that public transport has spread the virus.   Yet public transport still runs. People breathe out the virus, it lands on plastic, remains viable for 24 hours plus, someone else touches that surface, touches their face with the same digit and bingo...   The Victorians had it right. Compartments so your own family bubble could travel together. Looking forward to the Airbus 380  separate compartments.  

[adb968008]

4 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

 

UK cases OTOH are not falling noticeably, but fairly steady at c4500/day, as increasing testing reveals previously unrecognised cases and the disease spreads slowly, and decreasingly.

Todays is 5614, thats the 7th highest day recorded, in an 8 day period thats recorded 4 of the 10 highest numbers. 

 

Were not talking 4000*7 days = 35k new cases this week... This weeks figures are trending towards 6000* 7 days = 42k new cases a week... or the entire Chinese Outbreak every 2 weeks...

 

You can call 5600 today “mopping up the leftovers”.. but the floor is definitely still very wet.

 

Theres been an increase of 32 cases in my suburb of 200k people this week, to 698.. sure thats not many, the local newspaper tells us deaths are at 517 cases... spin that however you like, thats not a good survival ratio.

 

When the lockdown started, we had 1 case in In our area, which was only detected after death... (the first death in London). It is said the death rate is 0.5% of the actual having caught it... 517 (according to stats on “inyourarea.co.uk”) in my area, as 0.5% of the infected suggests 100k have caught it.. or 50% of the local population... Ive seen a lot of ambulances, and I mean that..its been rather scary to hear the frequency over Easter weekend, but definitely not that many, and I admit its been much less the last week or two.

 

So if your suggesting the death rate is dropping and the case rate is ok, then survival rate must be much worse than global average... you cant have it both ways.

 

 

 

 

Edited May 7, 2020 by adb968008

[Nearholmer]

5 hours ago, adb968008 said:

So if your suggesting the death rate is dropping and the case rate is ok

I don’t think I said either of those things.

 

I said the number of deaths per day is dropping, which it is. That says nothing about death rate per capita. And, I said the case rate was steady on a seven day Rolling average.
 

I certainly share your concern about survival rate for those hospitalised, it seems pretty blooming poor to me. Our area has a population c266k, and last time I checked (a few days ago) 479 people had been hospitalised to date, of whom 139 (29%) had died.

 

[EDIT: that is actually a slight misinterpretation on my part, 479, since risen to 484 'confirmed cases', which may not be exactly the same as hospital admissions, and 139 deaths, not all of which may have happened in hospital, so the "hospital survival" rate may be better than I thought.]
 

Maybe the UK admits to hospital only the very, very sick, where other countries take into hospital people who are less sick. If that isn’t it, then it suggests that our hospitals might be really struggling to save people.
 

 

Edited May 7, 2020 by Nearholmer

[adb968008]

8 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Maybe the UK admits to hospital only the very, very sick, where other countries take into hospital people who are less sick. If that isn’t it, then it suggests that our hospitals might be really struggling to save people.

Both of those suggest to me to be valid reasons for maintaining the lockdown, until either or both are improved.

[Nearholmer]

You don’t need to convince me.

 

My good lady needs to be shielded following cancer treatment, and I’m really concerned about how that can practically be done if schools reopen and if on the rare occasions I go shopping I’m exposed to infection that I could then import.

 

But, the present status surely can’t be maintained for many more weeks - its unaffordable and impractical, and it will become unpopular, which will end it in anarchic disarray.

 

Not easy times!

 

 

[Steamport Southport]

Worth bearing in mind many of the deaths being recorded are now ones that happened over a month or so ago. Many of which weren't classed as being C19 and many which hadn't happened at hospitals, but at home or in a care home.

 

Notice it declines, then rises? That's not the death rate just the amount that was registered that day.

 

Most of those charts are pointless.

 

 

 

Jason

[monkeysarefun]

6 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

If you look at those, it’s crystal clear that UK deaths per day are on a falling trend, which would doubtless tail off asymptotic to zero if no change was made to anything.

 

The fatal weakness of the UK lockdown as an attempt to reduce the virus seems to me the refusal to halt incoming flights/ships  or at least vigourously quarantine the new arrivals - most other countries now have some form of this.

 

  Seems madness to me to have you all locked down while  showing you graphs of how good its going and grasping any slight deflection of the curve as proof that the end is coming  yet still letting in untold numbers of potential new cases ready to spread it all around again .. Or am I missing something?

[Nearholmer]

1 hour ago, monkeysarefun said:

yet still letting in untold numbers of potential new cases ready to spread it all around again

 

Well, yes, except that the "untold numbers" now are very tiny indeed, so probably represent a tiny incremental risk. A drop in the ocean given the already existing prevalence of the bug.

 

IMO, the big issue isn't what is happening now, but what was happening earlier this year. I couldn't understand why international air travel with non-quarantined entry continued for so long then, and I still don't understand now why that was. And by this I mean between all countries, not just to/from China.

 

When all this lot is over and it is time to "learn from what has happened", decisions to allow international air travel to continue for so long must surely come in for some very hefty scrutiny. Why did the fact that China restricted travel internally so decisively in the third week of January not act as red flag (appropriate, eh?) to the rest of the world? 

 

Maybe I'm looking with too much hindsight, or "doing a Trump", but I've been exercised by this for so long that there are probably posts from me on RMWeb moaning about it in early February.

[monkeysarefun]

21 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Well, yes, except that the "untold numbers" now are very tiny indeed, so probably represent a tiny incremental risk. A drop in the ocean given the already existing prevalence of the bug.

 

 

Thats good then, the reporting I've read implies the UK border is still unrestricted. Assuming that bat soup isn't a little known UK delicacy (but you have black pudding haggis and toads in the hole so it might be for all I know) then like us, your initial outbreak was caused by a few people arriving from overseas.

 

In our case it was 3 travellers coming in from Wuhan at the end of January. Luckily and rather surprisingly given our PM's reputation as being  a bit of a bible-bashing mini-Trump the government enacted lockdowns, quarantining,  comprehensive testing, contact tracing and social distancing very early on and as a result seem to have nipped it in the bud here.

Today there is a cabinet meeting to discuss beginning to ease restrictions which is a good thing but I have been enjoying less cars on the road and all the parking.

Edited May 7, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[Nearholmer]

13 minutes ago, monkeysarefun said:

Thats good then, the reporting I've read implies the UK border is still unrestricted.

 

I think it is true that borders are unrestricted from a Covid entry perspective. I had a ferret around on the government website, and it tells arriving travellers to go home, then follow the same rules that apply to everyone else, so your "off the plane and into a supermarket queue" remark is broadly correct: if a person needs to do essential food shopping once they get home, they can. They certainly aren't required to quarantine.

 

There was a cryptic reference to the possible need to control borders in the future in the Government Covid briefing today, so I guess that is about to change. 

 

But, in practice very few people indeed are arriving into the UK.

 

The question of how and when it first got here is a deep mystery, about which there are many anecdotes and much speculation; many people are convinced they had it over the winter. The first confirmed cases were on 31 January, a Chinese student studying here and a member of their family (visiting from China I think), but c2000 people had arrived from Wuhan alone in the preceding fortnight, and gossip suggests that it might have actually got here before Christmas.

 

As a parallel, there has now been a case confirmed in Paris in mid-December, where a doctor recently remembered a patient with then inexplicable symptoms and got the lab to run tests on samples they still had. The chap had not been abroad, and the tentative explanation they have is that his wife worked at the sushi counter in a supermarket near the airport, and carried it asymptomatically from either an arriving air traveller or a Chinese colleague.

 

In short, the arrival of Covid in Europe is nothing like as clearly defined as it seems to be in Aus and NZ, and I'd wager the same applies for the USA. It had possibly been circulating as an inexplicable form of pneumonia for a while, possibly even causing deaths, before "confirmed cases" emerged in the form of recent arrivals from China after the the thing had been identified and named in China.

 

Thinking about it, a really crazed conspiracy theorist could devise a story in which it originated in Europe, was carried to China, there to be isolated and named, then carried back. A sort of parallel of the 1918-19 "Spanish" Influenza, which seems now to be thought to have begun in the USA, but certainly didn't originate in Spain.

[monkeysarefun]

33 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

A sort of parallel of the 1918-19 "Spanish" Influenza, which seems now to be thought to have begun in the USA, but certainly didn't originate in Spain.

 

 

Yes, everytime I see Donald Trump intimating he might sue  China for damages due to his "Chinese flu" I think how I'd love to  see his face  if we in turn hit him with demands for damage caused by the "Spanish flu" !

 

(Which according to him began in 1917 and ended the first world war...)

Edited May 7, 2020 by monkeysarefun

[Bernard Lamb]

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

 

 

 

But, in practice very few people indeed are arriving into the UK.

 

 

According to my informant there were 27 inbound flights at LHR yesterday.

I have no idea how many people were on them.

That was apparently the busiest day for a long time.

It does show just how far the restrictions go in some sectors.

Bernard

[Ron Ron Ron]

9 minutes ago, Bernard Lamb said:

According to my informant there were 27 inbound flights at LHR yesterday.

I have no idea how many people were on them.......

Very few passengers on most flights.
Most of the long haul passenger flights have been operating for the vital cargo capacity, rather than to carry people.

 

Many of the long haul flights from China have been bringing in medical supplies since the end of March and early April, with no passengers on-board.
As well as the underfloor cargo holds being full, lightweight cargo (e.g. boxes of lightweight items such as PPE) has been carried in the passenger cabins, instead of human cargo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Ron Ron Ron]

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-virgin-flies-in-millions-of-pieces-of-medical-equipment-from-china-11968311

 

https://www.virgin.com/news/fourth-virgin-atlantic-cargo-flight-brings-hundreds-thousands-ppe-items-china-uk

 

https://mediacentre.britishairways.com/pressrelease/details/86/Our-Operation-398/12237

 

https://mediacentre.britishairways.com/pressrelease/details/86/Our-Operation-398/12263

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8229741/BA-flies-2-5-million-pieces-PPE-China-UK-government-asks-help.html

https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1273036/ba-plane-delivery-ppe-personal-protective-equipment-nhs-supplies-pictures-coronavirus-uk

 

 

.

 

Edited May 8, 2020 by Ron Ron Ron

[Ron Ron Ron]

 

[Andy Hayter]

3 hours ago, Bernard Lamb said:

According to my informant there were 27 inbound flights at LHR yesterday.

I have no idea how many people were on them.

That was apparently the busiest day for a long time.

It does show just how far the restrictions go in some sectors.

Bernard

 

It is also worth considering that some, perhaps many, were internal flights.

Certainly I know that Belfast - LHR and Glasgow - LHR are still operating one flight per day.  It is also important to remember that these days flights are needed to carry mail (remember that, bits of paper with messages on - or in my case small boxes with kits and bits in).

[Nearholmer]

Well, as I said yesterday, it looks as if quarantine is coming for travellers into the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52594023

 

 

[monkeysarefun]

17 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Well, as I said yesterday, it looks as if quarantine is coming for travellers into the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52594023

 

 

"Industry body Airlines UK said the policy needed "a credible exit plan" and should be reviewed weekly."

 

Credible exit plan - "when things get better, stop doing it..."

 

there. sorted for them ffs.

[polybear]

 

8 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Well, as I said yesterday, it looks as if quarantine is coming for travellers into the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52594023

 

 

 

And about time too.  I guess their defence in not doing it sooner will be "The scientific evidence wasn't available to support it".

It makes much more sense to do it immediately, and then revert back if it's shown to have no benefit.  It's not hard....

 

7 hours ago, monkeysarefun said:

"Industry body Airlines UK said the policy needed "a credible exit plan" and should be reviewed weekly."

 

Credible exit plan - "when things get better, stop doing it..."

 

there. sorted for them ffs.

 

Aussie common sense at it's very best.  Love it Don't fancy a job helping out our Government, do you?

[Nearholmer]

There are a huge number of jobs at stake in the future of the aviation industry, and a lot of shareholders’ money, so all sorts of pleading, wheedling, and being tortured by dilemmas are inevitable, but I agree with others: quarantining has to happen until it is no longer needed, and that probably means until everyone is successfully vaccinated or until personal air supply exists on ‘planes.

 

Which means no time soon.

 

The affect of ‘aviation depression’ worldwide will be really big stuff for the UK, because Rolls Royce is heavily dependant upon aero engine earnings, is a significant export income earner, and acts as a ‘tractor’ for engineering in this country. Turbines are probably the most prestigious manufacturing specialism that the UK has left.

[caradoc]

12 hours ago, Nearholmer said:

Well, as I said yesterday, it looks as if quarantine is coming for travellers into the UK https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52594023

 

 

 

As I said earlier in this topic, should passengers not be tested before boarding the plane, and only allowed on if they are clear, thus avoiding potentially infecting fellow passengers and crew, and exporting the virus ? If they test positive, quarantine for the designated period at origin, if tested again and clear, then allow them to travel.

 

One thing about this dreadful virus that seems pretty clear is that it has been transported around the world by, primarily if not entirely, airline passengers.