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Further to that, I've just had an email from my daughter's school to say that someone there has been put in self-isolation (not specifying whether it's an adult or a child, fwiw - and I do understand the difference between self-isolation and being diagnosed etc) - that the PHE guidance still remains the same, that the risk is low, but that they would also allow it as authorised absence if parents decide not to send their children (which is like, unheard of, lol). What does THAT mean? Essentially, it should be ok but actually we're not taking responsibility if it's not?

Separately, the council are releasing a statement shortly, apparently.
 
sheothebudworths said:
I work in the kitchen at a school in Brighton.
We have, today, been given hand sanitiser to use (on top of the normal handwashing) but that seems a bit lame when we have a cashless system, using fingerprints, for the kids (and in addition to that, they quite often don't work unless the kids blow on their finger first*). :facepalm:

I have mentioned this several times today, not in any mental, panic-stricken way, just quietly a bit... erm HELLO! :hmm: but it seems to have been largely ignored/played down (in favour of not panicking, I guess).
My manager told me she had suggested they santize the kids hands at the tills but that there was no way of ensuring that was done but the SLT member I spoke to was very upbeat/dismissive about the whole thing - that we should just be taking guidance from PHE, comparisons to flu/some stuff about people with weakened immune systems, which is not what seems to follow, neccesarily, going on the info from this thread - and I get that they don't want to scare anyone, particularly kids, but I'm also a bit wtf about it all, too. :confused:



*I quite often SUGGEST they do that :oops: although obvs not right now!
Click to expand...

I wish I was surprised to hear of this frustrating and difficult, disempowering situation.

There are grotesque inconsistencies in terms of official attitude towards risks from surface contamination. And people such as yourself are not encouraged to spot the obvious vectors and then bloody well do something about it. There are just extremes of reaction or inaction, and banal generalised advice in response to your concerns.

Its a shame it is this way, not just because of the actual impact on disease spread, but also the psychological point of view. People tend to feel better when they feel there is something they can do themselves to help. And, along with poor information quality or timing, background existing lack of trust in authorities, and a whole bunch of other stuff, failures on this front contribute to panic and low morale.

Anyway, people spot the inconsistencies and lose faith. For example one of the questions in Brighton right now seems to be why they have cleaned the doctors surgery but not the pub, stuff like that.
 
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sheothebudworths said:
Further to that, I've just had an email from my daughter's school to say that someone there has been put in self-isolation - that the PHE guidance still remains the same, that the risk is low, but that they would also allow it as authorised absence if parents decide not to send their children (which is like, unheard of, lol). What does THAT mean? Essentially, it should be ok but actually we're not taking responsibility if it's not?

Separately, the council are releasing a statement shortly, apparently.
Click to expand...

Some specific people might have to take responsibility for specific failures at some point. But nobody is going to take responsibility for people catching this disease in general.

There has been some concern that the public health message globally and in China so far, having focussed so much on the possibility of containment of this disease, will cause a loss of faith in authorities if/when it becomes obvious that containment has failed. So we are still in an awkward moment on this front, where people still hope to avoid wider spread and obviously hope to avoid themselves and their families getting it, and contacts of known cases are being traced, leading to specific local fears. But at the same time the 'dont panic, wash your hands etc' message is in place and really does apply to both this stage, and a future stage where containment is not on the agenda any more, just attempts to slow and reduce overall spread.

What that message means is what it looks like, the are giving you a small nugget of info and letting you make your own call on what to do about it. Their advice is completely constrained by following the national template message, there isnt really room for deviation from the standard advice, and it will only change when the government/heath services decide to change it. So in most cases officialdom will be reduced to parroting exactly the same thing. The info could be better, eg if the exact timing of events relating to the person under self-isolation were known, maybe it would be slightly easier to judge the risk. But since there are so many unknowns or broad ranges with this virus, certainties would still be rather hard to come by.

I dont know what decision I would make in that situation myself. If a wider outbreak was completely inevitable then I'd probably be somewhat content to risk me and my family catching it earlier on, before the health services were overloaded. If it were likely to be contained and never more than a limited outbreak, I'd obviously be rather keen for us all to avoid it completely.
 
two sheds said:
I've decided I'm avoiding people and not going anywhere. So no change there then :)

I'll be hopefully following the progress of vaccines though.
Click to expand...
Good luck with that. I think I read it takes months to design them and to get through testing and ready to deploy is over a year. No way will this thing not have reached everywhere before a vaccine comes out.
 
elbows Christ, that last line is stark and depressing but I get it.
My workplace has long been demoralising and shit, btw, so that's nothing new but yeah, no less frustrating - I think they could largely accomodate the kids who may feel very anxious, while also spreading some short (?) term better hygiene practise etc.
My worry is never, ever just about me and mine, fwiw - it's just equally worrying that they're putting in measures which are plainly pointless while they ignore the bigger issues, while at the same time relinquishing any responsibility but allowing parents to make their own decisions - very confusing.
It's irritated me for a long time that the work culture and very definitely the culture at schools, too, along with financial punishments to schools for absences etc, has been shtty about taking time off for illness (and therefore spreading it all over) but right now it's pissing me off more than ever before.
 
sheothebudworths said:
I work in the kitchen at a school in Brighton.
We have, today, been given hand sanitiser to use (on top of the normal handwashing) but that seems a bit lame when we have a cashless system, using fingerprints, for the kids (and in addition to that, they quite often don't work unless the kids blow on their finger first*). :facepalm:

I have mentioned this several times today, not in any mental, panic-stricken way, just quietly a bit... erm HELLO! :hmm: but it seems to have been largely ignored/played down (in favour of not panicking, I guess).
My manager told me she had suggested they santize the kids hands at the tills but that there was no way of ensuring that was done but the SLT member I spoke to was very upbeat/dismissive about the whole thing - that we should just be taking guidance from PHE, comparisons to flu/some stuff about people with weakened immune systems, which is not what seems to follow, neccesarily, going on the info from this thread - and I get that they don't want to scare anyone, particularly kids, but I'm also a bit wtf about it all, too. :confused:



*I quite often SUGGEST they do that :oops: although obvs not right now!
Click to expand...

Fingerprinting kids for dinner?!

What does you data protection officer have to say about that? Who’s fucking bright idea was that?
 
sheothebudworths said:
elbows Christ, that last line is stark and depressing but I get it.
Click to expand...

Its not supposed to be insanely depressing, because it is supposed to sit hand in hand with the idea that large numbers of people will eventually catch this illness but wont even realise they've had it, or will only have a rather mild illness. Although I wouldnt push that idea too far either, because I could still make that claim and have it be true even if rather large numbers of people were also getting seriously ill or dying. Anyway this sort of carries on into next point....

My worry is never, ever just about me and mine, fwiw - it's just equally worrying that they're putting in measures which are plainly pointless while they ignore the bigger issues, while at the same time relinquishing any responsibility but allowing parents to make their own decisions - very confusing.
Click to expand...

This ties in to why I keep saying we are at an awkward moment. One of the reasons we dont bother with some of these measures when its another illness like flu, is that engaging in an immense response tends to rather quickly end up showing the absurd futility of the situation, the huge gaps, the failure to take ideas and measures to their natural conclusion.

It's irritated me for a long time that the work culture and very definitely the culture at schools, too, along with financial punishments to schools for absences etc, has been shtty about taking time off for illness (and therefore spreading it all over) but right now it's pissing me off more than ever before.
Click to expand...

Yeah all that I'm saying applies to the huge contradictions in attitude on this front too. I wondered if there might be a more permanent change to attitudes after a flu pandemic, but in the end the death rate of the H1N1 swine flu was not sufficient to change attitudes even during the first waves of the pandemic, never mind later on. The same could happen with Covid-19 given some more time, or it might remain a very grim and different picture which renders a fair chunk of what I've been saying in recent posts irrelevant.
 
Someone today said they didn't know what the fuss was about because this is no worse than ordinary flu. And they were a smoker. I think more than 50,000 infected and more than 1,000 dead, just in China, makes this rather more significant than the flu.

And make no mistake it is coming to Britain, and everywhere else, I wonder what the global infection and fatality rate will be in a month's time?
 
So, what about the 2 UK prisoners? Does this mean the cat is fully out of the bag? Or...adjusts tinfoil cap...is this Porton Down doing an experiment on what theyd perceive as disposables
 
elbows said:
If that sort of thing were in use anywhere I had some control over, I might try to focus on cleaning the surface in between each use, rather than the hands touching it, if it were in any way more practical.
Click to expand...

Yep - germ factory, for sure - absolutely no way it'll get cleaned with each use - it's hundreds of kids coming through 5 tills, during short periods. The alternative is to look them each up, manually, which takes far longer, too.
There was no hand cleaning, let alone anything else, done on the till I was working by today, either (not sure what happened elsewhere but I expect it was the same).

The BHCC council press briefing was apparently just the council leaders holding up those 'Catch it, bin it, kill it' signs. :thumbs:
 
weltweit said:
Someone today said they didn't know what the fuss was about because this is no worse than ordinary flu. And they were a smoker. I think more than 50,000 infected and more than 1,000 dead, just in China, makes this rather more significant than the flu.
Click to expand...

Too early to say, it's getting loads of media attention because it's new, flu rarely gets in the news despite the fact that annual flu epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290.000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths per year.

Source - WHO
 
we
cupid_stunt said:
Too early to say, it's getting loads of media attention because it's new, flu rarely gets in the news despite the fact that annual flu epidemics are estimated to result in about 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290.000 to 650,000 respiratory deaths per year.

Source - WHO
Click to expand...

We covered this some pages back. Seasonal flu kills a much smaller percentage than the current figures of Coronavirus.
 
MrCurry said:
So it’s “Covid-19”

www.bbc.com

Coronavirus disease named Covid-19

Researchers had been calling for an official name to avoid confusion around the virus.
www.bbc.com

Catchy.
Click to expand...

I forgot to say earlier that I am glad about this bit:

"We had to find a name that did not refer to a geographical location, an animal, an individual or group of people, and which is also pronounceable and related to the disease," the WHO chief said.

"Having a name matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatising. It also gives us a standard format to use for any future coronavirus outbreaks."
Click to expand...

I'm glad I wasnt around in the days when flu pandemics tended to be widely named after a place. eg the 1968 H3N2 flu pandemic was 'Hong Kong flu', 1957 H2N2 was 'Asian flu'. Mexico was strongly associated with the 2009 H1N1 pandemic origins, but early detections were also in the USA and the swine aspect of it made it easy to involve an animal name for that one.

Speaking of the H1N1 pandemic, although initial UK cases were found only sporadically to start with, and it was a number of months till an outbreak really got going here, attitudes were a bit different compared to this coronavirus from the start. Mostly because within days of the H1N1 first being properly revealed, the WHO publicly concluded that containment was not a realistic option. So although there was an early emphasis on trying to reduce the spread, there wasnt really quite the same sense of attempting containment and detection of every case like there is at the moment with UK Covid-19 infections.
 
Part-timah said:
We covered this some pages back. Seasonal flu kills a much smaller percentage than the current figures of Coronavirus.
Click to expand...

But also note that the current figures dont mean that much, so for now I have not settled on any real sense of how Covid-19 death rates will end up comparing to flu.
 
Part-timah said:
we


We covered this some pages back. Seasonal flu kills a much smaller percentage than the current figures of Coronavirus.
Click to expand...

We did, but it's worth repeating, severe cases of flu result in around 1% deaths, the current death rate of severe cases of Covid -19 is estimated at around 2-3%, but many experts expect that percentage figure to drop.

So, it's more on a par with flu, than SARS (10%) & MERS (30%+).
 
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elbows said:
I forgot to say earlier that I am glad about this bit:

I'm glad I wasnt around in the days when flu pandemics tended to be widely named after a place. eg the 1968 H3N2 flu pandemic was 'Hong Kong flu', 1957 H2N2 was 'Asian flu'. Mexico was strongly associated with the 2009 H1N1 pandemic origins, but early detections were also in the USA and the swine aspect of it made it easy to involve an animal name for that one.
Click to expand...

China even banned Mexican travellers to China in 2009. I am fully in favour of closing off all air travel, if only because coming from China to here means going from high infection control to low infection control. Another part of me senses that it's too late, say goodbye to loved ones now.

One contact has told me their friend's brother and mother have both died in Hubei.

Weibo has an interview with Beijing virology professor explaining that for this coronavirus 2 secs is enough for transfer if host has a high load, otherwise 15 seconds.

Weibo has stories of whole families dying, leaving only children.

Other Weibo highlights are still no beds for people in Wuhan, desperate appeals for any slot being retweeted.

Plus some charity organisations receiving elderly people's entire life savings to buy medical equipment etc.

Some patients with symptoms get DNA tested again and again up to 5 times before a positive result, so some patients were sent back home after a negative result.

One of the construction workers on the new Wuhan hospital from another province discovered he was infected when he returned home.

One guy was cleaning worker on the railways and didn't know he was infected and rode on loads and loads of busy trains in all directions back and forth throughout the Chinese spring festival period before infection control was properly instituted.

One Hong Kong family had a family meal around and all 8 are now infected.
 
Part-timah said:
So, what about the 2 UK prisoners? Does this mean the cat is fully out of the bag? Or...adjusts tinfoil cap...is this Porton Down doing an experiment on what theyd perceive as disposables
Click to expand...

We are still only at the stage where people are going to be detected if they have recently travelled to certain countries, or show up as a contact of another known case. And its a big mistake to think about prisoners as some monolithic population that have all been locked up for ages.

There is not enough info about the prison stuff yet, and a positive test result has not been declared, but if the one piece of info I got is accurate then the reasons this one has shown up is travel related (probably combined with symptoms but thats just a complete guess by me):

www.oxfordmail.co.uk

Coronavirus at Bullingdon - Two people being tested

Prisoners at HMP Bullingdon are being tested for coronavirus.
www.oxfordmail.co.uk www.oxfordmail.co.uk

'A source told the Oxford Mail this morning that prisoners were told about the tests today, with one of the prisoners suspected to have the virus having recently been in Thailand'
Click to expand...
 
cupid_stunt said:
We did, but it's worth repeating, severe cases of flu result in around 1% deaths, the current death rate of severe cases of Covid -19 is estimated at around 2-3%, but many experts expect that percentage figure to drop.

So, it's more on a par with flu, than SARS (10%) & MERS (30%+).
Click to expand...

It's not directly comparable as global impact is a function of death rate, transmittability and mutation plus probably other factors like seasonal variation. We don't have enough data yet to compare impacts of different diseases.
 
Supine said:
It's not directly comparable as global impact is a function of death rate, transmittability and mutation plus probably other factors like seasonal variation. We don't have enough data yet to compare impacts of different diseases.
Click to expand...

Indeed, hence why I posted it's 'too early to say'.

There's too many scaremongering posts appearing on here, at present there's no reason to worry in the UK.
 
cupid_stunt said:
We did, but it's worth repeating, severe cases of flu result in around 1% deaths, the current death rate of severe cases of Covid -19 is estimated at around 2-3%, but many experts expect that percentage figure to drop.

So, it's more on a par with flu, than SARS (10%) & MERS (30%+).
Click to expand...

You missed the key point “severe cases of flu” and irresponsibly tagged “severe” onto Coronavirus.

Out of all recorded cases of Coronavirus the mortality is just over 2%. You are not comparing it to all cases of seasonal flu.
 
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