Government consider quarantining people who arrive in UK from abroad.

[DonPeffers]

6 hours ago, jeff oakley said:

 

I know for a fact via my wife that they were planning the Nightingale hospitals in early January 

 

The interesting thing in this piece is how everything has focused on Covid and no consideration by the scientific people was given to how many lives will be lost because of the lock down and the longer term issues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking back to January Jeff, it was mid-Jan i was at the doctor and saw the nurse to bandage a badly cut finger having fallen off a stepladder (old duffer syndrome). Upon leaving I said I'll see you in about 9 months for my asthma review and the nurse was very quiet.

 

It was much later I wondered (with covid hindsight) if the nurse was aware a deadly pandemic was heading our way and many older ones might not be around.

 

Your comment about lives lost because of lockdown, missed appointments, especially cancer, is spot on.

[jim_l]

A bit disingenuous of the guardian to pick a figure of 18.1 million and three months prior to the lockdown. Most of that 3-month period is an absolute and complete irrelevance in the context of how this virus has been managed.

 

One month before the lockdown - there were 2 cases in Spain, 4 in Italy, 9 in the UK, there had been no community transmission in Europe, and there had been no deaths.  At that point we were still 3 weeks prior to WHO declaring a pandemic, and even on the 5th of March the Lancet published an article stating that the virus need not result in rapid large-scale outbreaks”

 

So, more honestly, they might have asked questions about the 2 weeks leading up to lockdown, where the damage was done.    

 

Even in 2 weeks 3 million people would fly into the UK, or more with Brits coming home, so you can’t stop them coming in, and you can’t quarantine 3 million people. 

 

Options might have included closing airports to all but repatriations, selective quarantine, but how? I wouldn’t have diverted testing capacity from anywhere else.

 

Temperature testing at airports is window dressing, needle in a haystack stuff, CNN reported that US authorities had screened more than 30,000 passengers by mid-February without catching any cases, and at least four of these passengers later fell ill with coronavirus. If I understand correctly nobody has any symptoms during the incubation period and many don't have any symptoms at all. 

 

So instead of the increasingly prevalent crystal balls, I prefer to ask, what should we have done differently given what we knew at the time.  Which has been tough for every government on the planet, but will much better inform us for the future. 

 

 

 

 

[DonPeffers]

05 may 2020   https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/least-20000-people-infected-coronavirus-arrived-uk-lockdown/

 

"At least 20,000 people with coronavirus arrived in UK before lockdown amid lack of restrictions

Arrivals would have infected some 50,000 more people, given WHO assessment of average transmission rate at start of March."

 

"At least 20,000 people infected with coronavirus entered the UK before the lockdown, but fewer than 300 of them were quarantined, official figures reveal.

These arrivals would have infected some 50,000 more people, given the World Health Organisation's assessment of an average transmission rate at the start of March of between two and 2.5."

"Figures provided to the home affairs committee by the Home Office show that, between January 1 and the end of March, 18.1 million people entered the UK without any health checks, including people from coronavirus hotspot countries. Of these, just 273 were quarantined."

 

With hindsight it seems early lockdown and mask wearing helps. Portugal locked down 13 mar 2020 before any deaths.

[Steve (sdh2903)]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52594023

 

Crazy. Not at the start of the infection curve, not at the peak, not during lockdown, I know the end of May sounds good.

 

 

[BigSkyBrad]

My cousin who lives in Oz, flew home to NZ for a couple of weeks to help my uncle fit EFI to his B-series MGB-GT. NZ locked the front door a day after he arrived, and said all those who had just arrived had to self-isolate for 14 days, which he didn't mind as he would be working on the car, and staying in the family home. After the isolation period he was able to get on a repatriation flight back to Oz (he has dual passports), but on his arrival was taken to a state-paid hotel near the airport to sit out another 14 days!

[jim_l]

 

Very clever piece of reporting Don,    "At least 20,000 people infected with coronavirus entered the UK ....  official figures reveal"  no 'official' credited with the numbers, no explanation of how the numbers were arrived at?  It then cleverly goes on to mention the WHO and the home office in subsequent sentences, lending some credibility without saying either of those bodies provided it.  

 

Anything to get you to click, anything for a headline , but quite clever.   I am not singling out any paper, they are all doing it, it is all about headlines and clicks. 

 

Here is the Express from Feb .  

[DonPeffers]

One indisputable fact is our covid death figures are very bad and let's see what announcement comes from the PM on TV 7pm 10 may 2020.

[jim_l]

Absolutely agree Don, our figures are bad, worse than reported to date I think, unfortunately though it will be batted between parties and newspapers from now until the next election, the parties and newspapers will all find data to support their beliefs, we will hear the government repeat 'we followed the science' until we are sick of hearing it. 

 

A lot of these factors,  that would affect each nation's figures, will be up for discussion: 

1) How the numbers are compiled, there is no standard, so deaths in the UK are recorded ‘with the virus’ even if it is only suspected but not tested, or if there is another primary cause of death but the virus was present.

2) Multiple occupancy of houses and homes, so if you have more ‘family’ homes and fewer ‘single’ residents, then it spreads more quickly. More people in care homes – more transmission.

3) Population density, if we live, work, shop in closer proximity, more transmission, why London and New York are hard hit.

4) How ‘connected’ you are, so London, business connections to China and all Asia’s major cities, and New York, all very had hit due to international travel.

5) How many of your population are elderly

6) How many of your population have underlying conditions or have had medical treatments that lower their immune systems response. General population health, fitness, obesity.

7) What strains of the virus hit your country, there are different strains, more virulent strains have hit Europe and the near coast of the US, weaker strains elsewhere,

8  ) How soon you lock down internally, people behaviour, do they observe the lockdown? Do they socially isolate, how well do they do the things that bring the transmission down.

9) How much testing, contact tracing and isolation do you do? MASSIVE impact on how many get the virus and how soon you start treatment of those that realise they have it.

10) How soon you stop incoming cases, stop flights or quarantine.

11) How effective is your healthcare, availability and quality.

12) How prepared were you in terms of  PPE ,Testing Kits,  A contact tracing App, trained users, etc.  Seems to me the SARS 2003 countries have done so well in their response. 

 

Mistakes have been made, costly ones, enough to bring a government down?  senior heads rolling? don't see it, no appetite in the country and Brexit to do, 

 

Jim

 

 

 

 

 

 

[DonPeffers]

The current Government will be in power until Dec 2024 (Fixed Term Parliament Act) and the only thing I'm interested in Jim is not losing lives needlessly and not wrecking the economy so jobs lost take ages to replace and salaries, holidays, pensions etc are at a much worse level than before.

 

WHO declared covid an International Health Emergency 30 jan 2020.

 

"The Home Office has insisted that the scientific advice showed that placing restrictions at the border would not have had a significant impact on the spread of the virus in the UK."

 

Further down the Guardian article they quote Sir Patrick Vallance ( government’s chief scientific adviser)....

.https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/05/just-273-people-arriving-in-uk-in-run-up-to-lockdown-quarantined

 

"Vallance said many of the cases came from the “high level of travel into the UK”.

“One of the things that it looks like very clear is that early in March the UK got many, many different imports of virus from many different places,” he said. 

“So we see a big influx of cases probably from Italy and Spain looking at the genomics of the virus in early March, seeded right the way across the country (UK).

"Whether that was people returning from half-term, business travellers or not, we don’t know."

“But a lot of the cases in the UK didn’t come from China and didn’t come from the place you might have expected, they came from European imports and the high level of travel into the UK at that time.”

[Steve (sdh2903)]

14 minutes ago, jim_l said:

our figures are bad, worse than reported to date I think

 

I'm not so sure on that. I actually have a sneaking suspicion most of the figures are innaccurate.

 

Take Germany for instance. They have approx 20% less confirmed cases than the UK. Their death toll is only a quarter of the UK yet Germany has a higher number and percentage of people over 60.

 

How is that possible? Is Germany's health care system that far ahead of the UK? Does it have a far healthier population? Are they using a different reporting system? Are they using actual cause of death rather than the contributory covid19 as the UK seem to be? 

 

 

[jim_l]

Reinforcing my point precisely Don, the papers report numbers like 18 million, three months, 20,000, because big numbers get clicks, I said the 3 months is an irrelevance in the context , which remains true, and it likely remains the case that restrictions at airports in January/February would not have had a significant impact on the spread of the virus in the UK, but would have affected the economy and probably killed our airlines completely. 

 

Sir Patrick specifically mentions early March where we got cases from Italy and Spain, this is where we messed up, reported cases in Italy and Spain combined then were less than 2000 and people had just started dying.  That seems highly unlikely now, those numbers fooled us.  With hindsight a shutdown of our airports, apart from repatriation, in early March, would have reduced the impact here by a huge amount. 

 

If we want to hold the government to account and learn real lessons for the future we need to be realistic about what we knew when, and how fast this happened - not bandy about irrelevant numbers and timelines. 

 

Acting so we are "not losing lives needlessly and not wrecking the economy "  in the context of this virus is a tough call you have to admit. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Blatman]

The government are in a no win situation and it matters not whether the incumbent is red or blue.

What we need in this situation is a dispassionate and non-partisan analysis of what we knew and when so that lessons can be learned and implemented in future by a government of any persuasion.

 

If the opposition were to try to make political hay by second-guessing based on hindsight, I would hope we would all see this for what it is.

By all means disagree. Ask questions. Hold the governments feet to the fire. Honest disagreements are perfectly fine and we need more of them.

But the minute any politician says "I would have done x, y, or z" is where the real problem lies because what any of us would have at the time and with the information available at the time is unknowable.

 

As for the press reports, I've been saying for weeks that our press have served us very poorly in recent weeks. They are more concerned with their advertising revenue that actual reporting of facts. And this thought has literally just come to me... With lockdown in place I'm betting the traditional print media have realised they can really push their on-line subscription readership so maybe there is a case that the sensationalism of many of these stories is more squarely aimed at the bottom line than anywhere else. They seem to have forgotten to do their duty in all of this.

[Arm]

Take the politics out of the debate cos until then it will not make any sense.

 

As far as I can see we have minimal options. Containment or mitigation.

 

Containment. No one goes anywhere and we sit and wait and hope the virus will die out. Full on lockdown. No one knows if this will work or when the virus was introduced.

 

Mitigation. Really difficult subject to rationally discuss as it's the you are going to get exposed. In a controlled manner and the nhs can cope. Currently we are in that position.

 

I can't read anymore the UK should have done this or that or locked the borders down. The population wouldn't go for containment.  Its was too late. Just move on from the petty politics.  Its wearing thin and not proving anything.

[jeff oakley]

7 hours ago, Steve (sdh2903) said:

 

I'm not so sure on that. I actually have a sneaking suspicion most of the figures are innaccurate.

 

Take Germany for instance. They have approx 20% less confirmed cases than the UK. Their death toll is only a quarter of the UK yet Germany has a higher number and percentage of people over 60.

 

How is that possible? Is Germany's health care system that far ahead of the UK? Does it have a far healthier population? Are they using a different reporting system? Are they using actual cause of death rather than the contributory covid19 as the UK seem to be? 

 

 

 This is easy to explain. In Germany if a person dies of a heart attack but they had Covid, the death is heart attack. In the UK that same death is treated as a covid death.

 

Take care home deaths, many in care homes are on end of life care plans, again we record differently to others and the figures are usually a week or so behind coming from the register of births and deaths whereas hospital deaths are daily.

 

And this is the problem, unless every country recorded exactly the same way comparisons are not helpful to anyone other than the media who love death and destruction.

 

Figures can be spun, a big one with no mention is that 98% of people who get it recover but 2% of the UK population is a big one.

 

People will argue over this for years with the opposition wanting to use it to out Boris and hopefully there will be a recognition that whoever was in charge this was never going to be easy to get right.

 

I know at the moment there is a huge number crunching exercise on all reported covid deaths, in the NHS to see where the lessons could be learned and practices changed. How does obesity affect the outcome, does the virus affect Bame worse than others and if so why? Could it be that many who were Bame were also obese?

 

This is not an easy task and will hopefully let us learn more and how to deal with it better.

 

 

[Paul Hurdsfield - Joint Manchester AO]

On 08/05/2020 at 16:33, marcusb said:

Straight to Mi6 HQ 😎

Shhhh