Well of course there's no garrantee and the number of candidates will reduce over time. Like other vacceens. IF imperfectly tested ones are mass manufactured following political pressure, we'll probably see quite obvious signs of that coming down the line. Legislation changes, news leaking about how test procedures have been altered, slackened etc. TBH it's not one of my biggest concerns right now.
Sweden and coronavirus
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Well of course there's no garrantee and the number of candidates will reduce over time. Like other vacceens. IF imperfectly tested ones are mass manufactured following political pressure, we'll probably see quite obvious signs of that coming down the line. Legislation changes, news leaking about how test procedures have been altered, slackened etc. TBH it's not one of my biggest concerns right now.
8ball
1,200 lights
Any good data to confirm it would have overwhelmed resources in the manner generally feared?
The 500k deaths thing was proposed as worse case scenario for first wave wasn't it? The morgs and crematoriums couldn't have coped with that, let alone hospitals.
No ventilator for you Mr only gave up smoking 2 months ago. Freezer trucks, mass graves teratory.
Sorry speculating retro-speculating myself there...
co-op
But....but cLoWnFiSh....
Yes, the 5% figure was one of the early guesses coming out of China, by the time the UK was actually waking up that was known to be too high.
elbows
Well-Known Member
The original UK stance was to do with flattening the curve, and after their major u-turn there has been quite a degree of ambivalence in their stance. People wanted to see signs that the government was actually going to back a proper suppression strategy, but what they often got was more 'flatten the curve' rhetoric. However there have also been some signs that a proper attempt to really contain the virus is on the cards. That doesnt have to mean total eradication of the virus, it can mean continually working hard to get the number of infections down to a really low level, to the extent that the burden on society is vastly reduced and there becomes a much larger buffer between that situation and an 2nd wave.
Contact tracing and border quarantines are examples of policies that are out of step with the idea that the government approach is only to push down on the curve a bit. But in some other areas, the suspicion that the government are not really wholeheartedly buying into the suppression approach is still valid.
June may end up being a helpful guide to some of this, although the potential for much ineptitude to be on display will likely complicate attempts to discern exactly what the government are playing at.
8ball
1,200 lights
Sure, that "worst case scenario" would have been overwhelming. I meant do we have any evidence that the lockdown itself kept is from being overwhelmed now that we know the worst case scenario was an overestimate anyhow.
maomao
普費斯
No-one makes a free choice to smoke anything other than the first dozen or so cigarettes. After that the only way to exercise free will is by stopping. You might want to find a smoking thread to bump if you want to take that one any further though.
8ball
1,200 lights
Thought it was obvious I was talking about the UK scenarios as planned for.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Flattening the curve could result in fewer overall deaths by: keeping within healthcare capacity; and, buying time for the development of a vaccine, more effective treatment, or ways to control the spread which could ultimately lead to full supression. The likelihood and impact of those benefits have to be weighed against the risks of a lockdown (and ways of ameliorating them - including not accepting the current economic/political paradigm as inevitable).
Ideally, long-term lockdown v rampant spread wouldn't be a choice facing the government; they'd have locked down harder and faster, and maybe for a bit longer, and developed effective testing, tracing, and isolation, as well as devising effective alternatives to lockdown as a way of preventing the spread. That way, we'd have a chance of actually suppressing it generally, and stating on top of any local outbreaks.
But they dithered, becasue their responsibility to protect people jarred with their instincts 9and interests) to protect 'the economy'.
8ball
1,200 lights
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
It wasnt obvious given this thread isn't about the uk tbh.
Athos
Well-Known Member
That's not true. I choose to smoke intermittently, becasue I enjoy it; I'm not compelled to do so.
8ball
1,200 lights
Although the economy in the sense of "the productive things that people do" is what keeps everyone alive.
As you said, it was a more particular notion of "the economy" and a narrower set of interests that they were striving to protect, though.
Athos
Well-Known Member
Yes, hence the inverted commas.
8ball
1,200 lights
All of my posts were quite specific, but I guess there is more than one line of discussion going on.
8ball
1,200 lights
Sure, I was agreeing with you.
maomao
普費斯
Athos
Well-Known Member
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
IIRC, the worst case scenario estimated that 66k deaths by August with containment measures and we are already on 44k.
I guess that would be hard to prove. Would have to be modelled on the R rate at the time and a business as usual approach, taking into account the fact many people were already social distancing, working from home etc.
There is this though. Which is more about deaths than overwhelming health services. You can imagine a scenario with a horrific death rate but health services have been temporarily bolstered to cope with it...
Coronavirus measures may have already averted up to 120,000 deaths across Europe | Imperial News | Imperial College London
Strong social distancing measures to slow and suppress the spread of COVID-19 across Europe are estimated to have averted thousands of deaths.
www.imperial.ac.uk
Athos
Well-Known Member
Search results for query: smoking
www.urban75.net
What's your point? They don't seem to support your claim that no-one makes a free choice to smoke, especially as I gave an example of someone who does i.e. me.
maomao
普費斯
My point is I'm happy to have the argument on a thread that's actually about smoking. I can explain how most social smokers are liars.
8ball
1,200 lights
I think we are talking about different scenarios here.
Also, I think we are due further revisions to the number of excess deaths.
8ball
1,200 lights
Or makes a free choice to drive. Obviously all choices are affected by circumstances. For example, I could have caught the tram to work, but feel better about driving in at the moment, and there are plenty of parking spaces right now and the traffic situation is really good.
frogwoman
No amount of cajolery...
I'm talking about ONS survey data where covid was on the death certificate.
8ball
1,200 lights
Yeah. I don't think that will be used as the final measure in terms of extra (or 'excess') deaths occurring as a result of the virus.
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You've not read the links I gave earlier. Maybe you should?
Coronavirus live updates: News & Advice
The latest news and updates on the coronavirus outbreak from China and across the globe. Coronavirus tracker, spread of Wuhan Coronavirus in real time.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Its always open to interpretation. For example people will argue about the amount of time it takes from infection to hospitalisation, since that makes quite the difference as to whether changing trends in various graphs can be attributed to lockdown and other forms of social distancing. The timing stuff is further complicated by the fact that according to various mobility data the government sometimes show at the press conferences, lots of people did not wait for the government to announce a lockdown before they started changing their behaviour in dramatic ways. The lockdown started on the 24th of March but behaviour stated changing massively a week earlier than that, on the 17th, the day after Johnson advised people to avoid pubs etc (but still some days before he ordered them to shut).
Here are some hospital admission numbers for England:
Of course it is not possible for me to absolutely prove that these number peaked on the 2nd April and then declined only because of lockdown & social distancing. But it happened within the timescales I would have expected, I am not likely to write this stuff off as a coincidence myself.
There were also signs that the authorities were deliberately increasing the bar for hospital admissions during the period of rapid increase in cases. There was a story, which I cannot find right now, about how in London they increased the score a patient needed to go into hospital, from 5 to 7, for the crucial period and then downgraded it back to 5 once the moment of maximum pressure had passed. Other aspects of the governments 'stay at home' communications also seem to have made a big difference to how many people sought treatment, so quite a lot of people ended up dying at home rather than going to hospital like they should have. And of course policy on admitting care home residents can also make a large difference to the numbers.
I'm reasonably sure that various establishment scientific and medical figures were shitting it big time between mid March and early April. They realised that their timing was a bit wrong (maybe a model got the explosive growth phase details wrong) and then had to wait several weeks to see whether things would hit the 'lockdown induced peak' before the system was overwhelmed. They just about got away with it, but thats no consolation to all those who died who would not have died if we had been 1 or 2 weeks earlier with the social distancing & lockdown measures.
Mind you, if lockdown had been done with better timing then we would have avoided the staggering number of deaths seen, and that would have given even more people reason to claim that 'see, it wasnt that bad, lockdown was an overreaction'.
