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I am interested in what is happening in other countries certainly and they sort of explain how this virus is able to build up infection rates so quickly when undetected and un-isolated but selfishly I am most interested in it not getting a foothold here out of fully personal reasons. As a former smoker, of one of the age groups that is highly affected, I just don't want to become a statistic myself!

And I know quite a lot of people who probably wouldn't survive being infected.
 
Due to my previous points, I will now travel back to May 2009 in order to give an example of what was being said at the time about the UKs swine flu stance.


Flu experts are looking very closely at Britain — and some have decided that the U.K.'s swine flu-fighting tactics are seriously off the mark and may be hiding a much larger outbreak.

Since Britain has the most confirmed swine flu cases in Europe, how the outbreak develops here will have a significant influence on whether the World Health Organization decides to raise its flu alert to the highest level — a pandemic, or global epidemic.

British authorities have relied on an aggressive strategy to try to snuff out the virus before it spreads, blanketing suspect cases and anyone connected to them with the antiviral medication Tamiflu.

But experts criticize the strategy for wasting valuable medicine and say there's little point trying to contain swine flu, which the WHO says is at least as infectious as regular flu.

British health officials have confirmed 112 swine flu cases — the most in Europe, ahead of Spain, which raised its total to 111 on Thursday. Still, that number has raised eyebrows among experts for being suspiciously low, given swine flu's infectiousness and its rapid spread elsewhere.

Rumors have swirled among health officials for weeks that Britain's caseload is far higher than officials are admitting.

"It's odd that we haven't seen more cases in Britain after the initial burst of cases," said Andrew Pekosz, a flu expert at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Osterholm called Britain's official numbers "meaningless" and said while authorities were not hiding cases, they also weren't looking very hard for the virus.
 
The enormous political, economic and other issues that can factor into these events, and how governments respond to them, is one of the main reasons I found it necessary to pay very close attention to potential pandemics and nuclear accidents in the first place.

And it is not just the 'usual suspects' who may indulge in downplaying and distorting the picture. We expect it from countries like China and Iran, because of existing framing. But other countries may easily do it too. eg Japan had its own flavour of bullshit that was on display during the Fukishuma disaster and again with this coronavirus. But the differences in approach between different nations is one of the things I exploit in order to get a better picture overall. These may be big differences, or small ones. For example in 2009 it seems like the UK governments approach to swine flu was not identical to Scotlands devolved health authorities approach, and these differences might even be part of the story as to how come wider community spread of H1N1 was detected and announced in Scotland before England.

Even though I am not at all glad to see the stage that things have started to reach with Covid-19 in various countries, I am at least glad that I am no longer reliant only on info from China to tell the story. It is impossible for me to judge the extent to which recent numbers from China tell the whole story. eg I cannot tell to what extent the numbers have been deliberately influenced to show a trend they wanted to show, or whether the data actually provides an accurate sense of how much draconian restrictions can affect the outbreaks.

Not that the numbers from any other country likely tell the whole story in those places at this stage either. We know that even where governments want to find the full picture, cases will be missed. And in countries that dont want to discover an alarming reality, there are ways to avoid looking in all the right places, at least at the earlier stages. Combine that with unavoidable lag in discovering the picture due to technical and practical reasons, and my desire to get a true sense of what is going on cannot hope to be met yet, even without the layers of political slipperiness.

Looks like China is arresting citizens who post their situations on social media if it doesn’t fit the official narrative.

 
Oh one more bit from that previous 2009 swine flu article I quoted.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is testing up to 400 specimens a day. But the British health agency has refused to say how many tests are being done daily. The U.K. is also only testing people with a history of visiting infected countries like Mexico or the United States, or people with links to already-established cases. That limited criteria means authorities could be missing lots of other cases if the virus has already spread into communities.

"There's no reason to think this virus would behave differently in Europe than in North America," Pekosz said. "The numbers in the U.S. and Mexico suggest that once you have a certain number of cases, you can seed a relatively wide outbreak."

At least we have been announcing the number of tests this time, thats a start. And at least one expert said a while back that we were testing pneumonia cases more generally now, but sadly I havent seen that discussed enough in the press or official documents, so I cannot really make many claims about current level of UK surveillance for Covid-19.
 
It seems only a few days ago this was restricted mainly to Hubei and Wuhan, but also the rest of China. Now we have many cases in wider Asia and a foothold within Europe.

On a slightly different angle:
a survey of small and medium Chinese firms found millions on the verge of collapse.

The Chinese Association of Small and Medium Enterprises said around 60% could cover regular payments for only one to two months before running out of cash.
 
I am now having a look at a government review of the UK 2009 pandemic response. I can already see some vague references to aspects that came up in that previous article, but nothing worth sharing yet.

I did however find something on the communication and terminology front which is kind of relevant now, at a time where we are seeing the concept of containment redefined by WHO etc before our very eyes.

Although communications materials were in general good, certain terms used during the pandemic were unclear and caused confusion. Given the critical importance of the public clearly understanding the advice being given by government, some of the terminology should be revisited. In particular, ‘containment’ was used to describe a strategy which was not intended to contain the disease but to slow the spread. ‘Reasonable worst case’ was also confusing as it was used for a scenario in which each parameter was a reasonable worst case, but when combined they resulted in an increasingly unlikely scenario.

From executive summary of https://assets.publishing.service.g...ile/61252/the2009influenzapandemic-review.pdf
 
It seems only a few days ago this was restricted mainly to Hubei and Wuhan, but also the rest of China. Now we have many cases in wider Asia and a foothold within Europe.

On a slightly different angle:

Wow, this could likely hurt China way past recovery - many companies will not want to be so solely reliant on China for manufacturing anymore and be looking to limit their exposure by outsourcing to other countries.
 
In China even non smoking men get pressured into having a fag once in a while and at least until a decade ago the fags were stronger and had a higher tar content than anything usually available over here. Don't discount air pollution though.

Speedy recovery from respiratory infections has been the biggest revelation about stopping smoking for me. If it turned out to kill smokers in large numbers that might finish off smoking as a pastime for good.

I hope it wipes the grins off the smug fuckers who smoked in the restaurants around Nanjing university (not all of them, just the particular ones who laughed at my Korean friend when she asked them to stop).
 
I am now finishing up my look back at 2009 pandemic, and issues relating to the timing of pandemic declaration, differences between Scotland and rest of UK.

I got what I was looking for in terms of the issue of community spread. This is from a Scottish review of the Scottish response to that pandemic:

During the containment phase, surveillance was vital to assess if and when sustained community transmission was occurring (defined by European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) as ‘Five or more confirmed cases’, occurring in a ‘third administrative geographical area’, in a seven day period, without travel history in past 7 days to a country having reported confirmed case(s) AND without traceable links to a confirmed case.’ A ‘third administrative geographical area’ is stated to correspond approximately to a population of 500,000).

In the Scotland during the period from 24 May until 9 June 2009, two overlapping time periods were identified with five sporadic cases (i.e. without links to detected cases or their contacts) within a seven day period (24-30 May five cases and 26-31 May five cases).

For comparison, WHO pandemic declaration happened on June 11th.

Anyway sorry for straying off into 2009 H1N1 flu stuff this evening, hopefully it is clear why I went down this path now. I dont intend to harp on about these themes from now on unless emerging current events provide a direct reason to do so.
 
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Oh one more bit from that Scottish report, since the reproductive number for Covid-19 has been discussed in the past on this thread. I find it interesting to see what picture they had of that number for the swine flu by the end of May 2009.

Data collected via the case investigation forms on cases and their contacts, were used for a number of statistical modelling purposes including an estimate of the reproductive number (R0) : the average number of new cases in the population resulting from transmission from a confirmed case. If the value of R0 is above 1.0 it indicates that there is sustained transmission within the population. By the end of May, the estimated values in Scotland were higher than 1.0 by the two methods used for estimation, 1.53 (95% CI 0.98-2.78) by the Farrington method (Farrington et al., 2003) and 2.34 (95% CI 1.87 – 2.80) by the Wallinga method (Wallinga and Teunis, 2004). At this time, these values were higher than overall estimates for the UK.

I suppose since I am so bloody interested in various kinds of lag of public info, I should compare some of these date from this Scottish report to what the UK and the Scottish health authorities said publicly on certain dates. Whether I can actually find all the necessary traces of that stuff now I do not know.
 
I cannot find the government public health messages from 2009 that I need to do that bit properly, and dont have time to watch Scottish government videos from 2009 . Cut corners instead, found my own posts on u75 for the period in question. Here are a couple of snippets most pertinent to my point.

May 26th:
Looks like Scotland has got a highly probably case who has no known links to travellers or other swine flu cases:

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | Probable swine flu man 'critical'

The man is 37 and critically ill, has other infections and underlying health problems. It sounds like they admitted him for the other problems and happened to find the probable swine flu during testing.

I wonder how long the stuff about the tamiflu containment strategy appearing to be working will remain in the daily briefing, I guess its only a matter of time.

June 3rd:
Various press conferences & media reports are that WHO is moving closer to Stage 6 global pandemic declaration, considering that the swine flu is now spreading locally in some communities outside North America. They are trying to add some extra stuff to their scale so that they can account for changes in disease severity, impact on specific countries, and may not be keen to move to stage 6 until this stuff is in place.

The Scottish Health Minister is starting to talk about wider spread, and moving beyond the attempted containment phase, and the WHO has Britain as one of a number of countries it describes as 'in transition' between limited travel related cases and wider community spread. They are obviously keen to avoid any danger of causing panic, economic consequences etc and so it might take a while longer for this situation to be fully accepted and talked about, but they probably cant stall it for too much longer without risking credibility.

OK thats most certainly it for me on the 2009 UK stuff now, I just needed to get this stuff out of the way in one session, so I didnt have to keep restating the point and context. I have certainly satisfied my own curiosity about 'lag'.
 
I see the Guardian have been talking to 'sources' and poking around the existing influenza pandemic plan.


The existing influenza plan demonstrates how the UK normally has no stomach for internal travel restrictions or the cancellation of mass public gatherings. I wonder if this will change or, if not, how the disparity between that and actions taken in other countries will be explained. Still, this may be less of an issue depending on timing and whether any other countries demonstrate a different approach, more like the one the UK normally favours, first.

Interesting to see a little bit of timing mentioned too. I wonder how this will stand the test of time.

The Department of Health believes it will be not until about May that it will be clearer what impact the virus is having on the UK, the rough estimated timescale between any initial arrival of the disease and its fullest extent.

If necessary, ministers could deploy emergency martial law style powers under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, although few think it will come close to being necessary.
 
The pressure of 'Do your job no matter what' will mean many "D'Oh!" moments: Hokkaido woman infected with coronavirus served lunch at local elementary school - The Mainichi

The woman complained of a sore throat on Feb. 13 but worked the next day, and did not go to see a doctor until Feb. 15. Her two co-workers have been put on leave until the end of this month as a precautionary measure.

A man in his 40s who lives in Chiba and works in Tokyo was also confirmed to have the virus. He began suffering from joint and muscle pain on Feb. 12 but went ahead with business trips to Hiroshima and Gifu prefectures, in western and central Japan, respectively. He traveled by shinkansen bullet train and occasionally by rental car during the trips, and developed a cough and fatigue on Feb. 14.
 
The Department of Health believes it will be not until about May that it will be clearer what impact the virus is having on the UK, the rough estimated timescale between any initial arrival of the disease and its fullest extent.

How on earth can we guess now that May is its fullest extent? Why not April or June or November?:confused:
 
I see the Guardian have been talking to 'sources' and poking around the existing influenza pandemic plan.


The existing influenza plan demonstrates how the UK normally has no stomach for internal travel restrictions or the cancellation of mass public gatherings. I wonder if this will change or, if not, how the disparity between that and actions taken in other countries will be explained. Still, this may be less of an issue depending on timing and whether any other countries demonstrate a different approach, more like the one the UK normally favours, first.

Korea took the first approach for a while (no internal travel restrictions no cancellation of mass public gatherings) but is now having to make a massive retread

Crowded places “are an important indicator of ‘normality’ and may help maintain public morale during a pandemic”.

This is absurd to me. Not having cross-infection raises morale.
 
Korea took the first approach for a while (no internal travel restrictions no cancellation of mass public gatherings) but is now having to make a massive retread

Crowded places “are an important indicator of ‘normality’ and may help maintain public morale during a pandemic”.

This is absurd to me. Not having cross-infection raises morale.

Yeah, people dying will be severely bad for morale too.
 
The cases in Italy are fascinating, but my Italian is bad!

I imagine it's possible staff or others at the hospital must have been unwittingly infected and spread it to yet others during his ten days at the hospital or until they tested him for COVID.

Can anyone translate this?
 
The cases in Italy are fascinating, but my Italian is bad!
]

I imagine it's possible staff or others at the hospital must have been unwittingly infected and spread it to yet others during his ten days at the hospital or until they tested him for COVID.

Can anyone translate this?
Google translate:

Coronavirus, who are the victims in Italy
The elder of Vo 'Euganeo was the first for whom the infection was lethal. The Casalpusterlengo woman visited in Codogno and the cancer patient


With four deaths today, Monday, coronavirus-related deaths in Italy rise to seven. The news was confirmed by the head of Civil Protection Angelo Borrelli . All the victims (except one) lived in the two outbreaks identified in Northern Italy and on which it was not possible to confirm a possible connection . The Lombardy Region denied a seventh case (it concerned a Crema cancer patient admitted to Brescia). The contagions do not stop at the moment and it is expected to assess whether the measures introduced in seven regions of Northern Italy will be able to limit the epidemic. Here, however, are the patients who died positive for Covid-19.
* Adriano Trevisan, 78 years old from Vo 'Euganeo (Padua) died on February 21st. He had been hospitalized for about ten days at the hospital of Schiavonia (Padua) with a diagnosis of pneumonia. Since he had never been to China, only a few days before his death he had been tested for coronavirus, a positive result. Trevisan frequented a bar in his country together with a friend who in turn found positive.


* A 75-year-old woman residing in Casalpusterlengo, one of the municipalities in the "red zone" of Lodigiano, dies on 22 February. Fatal for the woman would have been a visit to the Codogno emergency room at the same time as the so-called "patient 1" was there, the thirty-eight-year-old from Codogno from whom the entire infection is believed to have started. The swab on the virus was carried out post-mortem on the Casalpusterlengo woman.
* Angela Denti, 68 , from Trescore Cremasco (Cremona) dies on Sunday at the Crema hospital. She had a very compromised clinical picture : she was admitted to the oncology department with a diagnosis of cancer and had a heart attack shortly before her death. Following a respiratory crisis, she had also been found positive for coronavirus.
* An 84-year - old man from Villa di Serio died in Bergamo, at Papa Giovanni hospital: he had been transferred there from Alzano Lombardo hospital with a clinical picture already compromised and positive for coronavirus.
* An 88-year-old man born in Caselle Landi and residing in Codogno is the fifth victim of the coronavirus in Italy. The town of Lodigiano and is one of the ten centers included in the "outbreak" by the decree of the Ministry of Health and the Lombardy Region.
* An 80-year-old man residing in Castiglione d'Adda ( one of the villages of the Lombard "red zone" ) died at the Sacco hospital in Milan. Thursday he had been hospitalized for a heart attack at the hospital in Lodi. Initially he had been hospitalized in resuscitation but a positive test result had been transferred to Milan.
* A 62-year-old man residing in Castiglione d'Adda died in the afternoon at the Como hospital. It is the seventh coronavirus-related victim in Italy. Castiglione is also one of the municipalities included in the outbreak of the Lodigiano area. Also in this case it is a patient who already suffered from other heart diseases and had to undergo dialysis.
 
Clinical trials take up the longest amount of time in vaccine development, so China will probably be able to shave at least a few months of the usual development time by experimenting on people in gulags.

From today’s headline article on BBC news website:
The state-run Global Times reported that scientists had made progress on developing an oral vaccine, with a professor at Tianjin University taking four doses with no side effects.

But experts warn that until full clinical trials have taken place it is unclear how safe or effective the vaccines will be and it could still be months before they can be made widely available.

Whether it is this, or another vaccine, we could soon be in a position where there’s a working but as yet not fully tested vaccine and the dilemma will be how much testing should be untaken before making it widely available? Are the risks of side effects worse than allowing the outbreak to continue and spread?

Maybe we will see more authoritarian countries giving a vaccine to their population to mitigate economic damage, while more western liberal countries hold back and follow the rules, with full clinical testing?
 
Iran claims 61 cases and 15 deaths so far.

If we assume the 2% mortality rate, which is probably too high, then that means there should be around 750 cases in Iran, and therefore 689 people who are currently/previously infected and they don't know about.

The 2% figure is probably too high, due to Chinese under-reporting/under-testing, meaning there could be way more than 1,000 in Iran infected and going about their business.

Surely the same is true for other countries like Italy, and now we see Tenerife is probably next.

I can't see how this can be anything but a full-blown pandemic now (and have thought that for a while, tbh).
 
Iran claims 61 cases and 15 deaths so far.

If we assume the 2% mortality rate, which is probably too high, then that means there should be around 750 cases in Iran, and therefore 689 people who are currently/previously infected and they don't know about.

Your logic doesn’t take into account the time between infection and death, which is estimated to be at least three weeks. So your statement maybe should say “therefore there were a further 689 cases three weeks ago”. Since then, with each case transmitting to multiple other people and the resulting snowball effect, who knows how many cases today. In fact only by looking at the number of deaths in three weeks time can you draw conclusions about the number of people who are infected today.

This is why it’s wrong for people to be looking at the stats which show only 14 UK cases and concluding there’s no ongoing outbreak within UK. It can be, and I would say it’s likely to be the case that there’s uncontrolled onward transmission happening in most countries now, and that we’ll only see the numbers which back that up in a few weeks time.
 
Your logic doesn’t take into account the time between infection and death, which is estimated to be at least three weeks. So your statement maybe should say “therefore there were a further 689 cases three weeks ago”. Since then, with each case transmitting to multiple other people and the resulting snowball effect, who knows how many cases today. In fact only by looking at the number of deaths in three weeks time can you draw conclusions about the number of people who are infected today.

This is why it’s wrong for people to be looking at the stats which show only 14 UK cases and concluding there’s no ongoing outbreak within UK. It can be, and I would say it’s likely to be the case that there’s uncontrolled onward transmission happening in most countries now, and that we’ll only see the numbers which back that up in a few weeks time.
Yep, I forgot to factor that in. Thanks!
 
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