324 Covid Deaths Yesterday, And 2,095 Cases Are They Easing Lockdown Too Early ?

[Gromit]

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

[Deskdiary]

I did parsley. I HATE predictive text.

[naomi24]

Jim, //Assuming what he says is true, isn't that another wake-up call?//

A wake up call to do what? What are you talking about? Getting an answer from you is proving to be difficult - if not impossible.

[cassa333]

People are going to die of Covid regardless of how long you lock down. You cannot wait until there are none or an insignificant number.

Although some don’t like the herd immunity approach I think now is the time to start.

Lockdown those most vulnerable and at risk and get everyone else out. Use all the social distancing measures and all that but basically with the sunshine comes relief of sorts. If there is going to be a second wave it is apparently likely to be in the winter so getting people that bit of immunity now will help later.

The money being spent on paying people to stay home from work can be spent on proper care and the attention the most vulnerable need.

For the vast majority of people the virus is manageable but to keep the entire country down is counterproductive.

Operations have been cancelled wholesale. Treatment for a lot of conditions have been curtailed. Suicide, depression over time increases.

If you think no further than lockdown then you aren’t thinking at all.

I work in a supermarket and people are very good at distancing in the entrance line and the checkout line. But other than that it is no different to before. People wear gloves (not recommended because they get lazy, don’t follow proper hygiene procedures and just spread any infection far and wide) and if they wear a mask at all half of them don’t wear it properly. Of the 100 or so people that work there not one has shown symptoms or been ill with it. Of the customers, well who knows but none of them have passed it onto us only inches away from them and that includes some very old and vulnerable customers that have not stopped going shopping.

[Deskdiary]

Great post cassa.

[naomi24]

//Treatment for a lot of conditions have been curtailed. //

It's estimated that 20,000 cancer patients could die. How to reconcile that? Hmmm.... perhaps we should take a leaf from the Best Answer and erect a monument to those who gave their lives not for the economy, but for Coronavirus.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/28/covid-19-crisis-may-lead-20000-cancer-deaths/

[fiction-factory]

KARL 23:17 " This suggests that some 4500 people under the age of 65 have been recorded as Covid 19 deaths. Had these people lived not in the UK but where the fight against premature death from the disease has been much more successful then the toll might be as little as 180 individuals. "

Wish I hadn't bothered really. Yes I'm sure we could have done better but your post just looks like another unfounded anti British propaganda without anything to support your negative statements and without any constructive ideas.

[Deskdiary]

"Age group Total
Under 1 year 2
1 to 14 years 2
15 to 44 years 456
45 to 64 years 4121
65 to 74 years 6273
75 to 84 years 13404
85 years and over 16962"

If the above numbers sourced by FF are not enough to convince people that the lockdown needs to end, then nothing will short of zero deaths.

[jim360]

I'm suggesting that social care needs to be taken seriously. More investment, more resources, more respect for those working in the sector.

I don't understand why you need a more detailed answer than that. At the end of the last decade Labour started going on about a "National Care Service", although nothing came of it. Theresa May talked about it too but got distracted by Brexit and by losing her majority. It is a known problem that has been going on for decades. It's long past time to take that problem seriously, and perhaps the pandemic and the devastation it has wrought in care homes will act as a prompt to do so. That is my point, that's all I need to say.

[jim360]

The response in New Zealand and its success shows that actually you *can* deal with Covid-19 without sacrificing your citizens. Cassa's post is needlessly defeatist.

[naomi24]

Jim, //I don't understand why you need a more detailed answer than that.//

That's the first time you've given an answer of any sort that actually says something. I had no idea what you were talking about.

[youngmafbog]

New Zealand is a similar size to the UK (10% bigger) but wheras the population of the UK is 70m plus NZ population is under 5 million.

Granted parts of New Zealand are uninhabitable, but then so are parts of the UK.

You are simply manipulating figures to suit your own needs. It stands to reason that a crowded country will have a lot more spread of a disease than one not so crowded. I know you are aware of this so I can only assume you think we are all to thick to think past your continual scaremongering.

[jim360]

I'm sorry ymb but there's no manipulation. I appreciate that New Zealand and the UK have different demographics but there is still plenty to be learned by comparing the approaches and the outcome. So far in New Zealand 22 people have died from or with Covid-19, compared to about 38,000 here. As a proportion of population, the UK has suffered 560 deaths per million confirmed (and probably more), compared to 4 per million in New Zealand. There is no doubt that this is heavily linked to the different responses, and the speed with which New Zealand responded. It's nonsense to suggest otherwise, and it's blinkered to put that down to scaremongering.

[jim360]

As an aside, I will take no lecturing on figures from somebody who is simply ignoring them altogether. You seem to have paid no attention to the excess mortality, which has clearly risen significantly in recent weeks in line with the Covid-19 outbreak in countries that have been worst-affected by it. You're welcome to argue that ending lockdown now is the best course of action, but you aren't welcome to pretend that there was nothing to respond to. Ditto your spurious and utterly flawed comparison to the flu (in another thread), a comparison which has been debunked so many times in the last few months that it can only be a joke to keep making it.

[pixie374]

As with anything at all involving humans... there will always be a difference between the macro and micro.
On one hand, it matters about how your own family, friends etc are coping. And on the other, the country or world, in general, population, business, economics.... The hardest thing is to find the right balance, without being too extreme either way.

[fiction-factory]

NZ have undoubtedly done well on this but I think I thinks its geography is such that it's bound to have done better than Europe. The movement of people between countries in Europe, including people flying from/to USA, is far higher than movement in and out of NZ and Australia. (You can even get to England via dinghy from France whereas NZ is 2500 miles from even Australia.) We could all have predicted at the start that NZ would do better than Europe.

[jim360]

There's also the question of degree of "betterness", though. Do you think New Zealand would have suffered only 22 deaths if they had not responded at all, or had responded two or three weeks later? Even if the death rate was always likely to be low, it needn't have been *so* low.

[jim360]

Likewise -- sorry for multiple posts -- there's a good deal of variation across Europe. Germany has a higher population density than the UK by about 2.5 times, but has suffered far fewer excess deaths. *Why* that is I don't intend to explain here -- almost certainly a mixture of factors including sheer dumb luck -- but the data is there all the same, and it is irritating in the extreme to be falsely accused of manipulating figures and scaremongering by someone who is ignoring the data altogether.

[pixie374]

And naomi... I know I have said this previously, but my stepsister's husband "will" die this year, as his cancer treatment has been stopped due to covid. I can't remember his exact age, but he is certainly under 60. And I doubt he is the only one.

[fiction-factory]

Yes, NZ's figures are on a different scale but I don't believe the difference of that magnitude can be largely down to 'handling it better'. If we are going to compare performance of countries I feel we can best compare ourselves with countries/areas with similar economic, social, demographic and geographic issues to ourselves- France, Italy, Spain, Germany, New York, maybe Japan and Moscow (if we trust their data). Even then our record doesn't look good.

[jim360]

Now, though, we seem to be moving away from the point I was making, which is that cassa's defeatism about being unable to control the virus ignores the success stories around the world. It may well be that by now it's "too late" to do any more in the UK than keep the virus to manageable levels, but on the other hand countries that responded more aggressively have been able to reduce the community spread of the virus to virtually zero. At the very least, that deserves consideration if you are going to claim that people are going to die with/of Covid-19 "regardless" of what we do.