COVID-19

Labour shadow secretary Jon Ashworth says that Labour would have put us in to lockdown earlier....would that be the same 'Labour' that took FOUR MONTHS to decide on a leader...disgraceful...

 

The Labour Party was involved with Cobra when we went into lockdown. Whilst the death figures are terrible and we can learn a lot from Germany our death rate is certainly not the worst in Europe we have 20 million more population than Spain 7 million more than Italy and we are the the country with the third largest population density in Europe.

 

C'mon Tony, I know you hate the Labour Party but they are two completely different decisions.

I've avoided getting into political/ideological discussion during the lockdown as I don't think it is helpful. However, I honestly believe we went into the lockdown too late. Our PM was busy shaking hands with people, against advice, which possibly nearly cost him his life.

I had a ticket to see a thrash metal concert on 7th March with three bands. Testament/Exodus/Death Angel who were finishing off their European tour, having been to Spain and Italy for example. I chose not to go as I have diabetes and didn't want to be in a confined space with 2,000 other people. At that point, Italy and Spain were closing down. We kept going for another three weeks allowing Cheltenham to go ahead etc. Subsequently, band and crew members from those groups developed the virus - a couple nearly died.

Our death toll is now the highest in Europe. Our leaders should have done better for us, including starting the lockdown sooner. That isn't hindsight, it was clear what needed to happen.

 

Our death rate is not the highest in Europe if there are more people for the disease to affect the more are going to catch it. Also according to the BBC yesterday it’s not clear that Spain and Italy count deaths in the community

 

Park stop burying your head in the sand. How do you explain Germany who have 20 million more people in the country than us?
Italy and France are not bad countries for us to compare to. Similar population size. We got it horribly wrong. Just admit it. Don’t understand why it’s so difficult for people to admit we got this one wrong and it has cost the country lives. Who are you sticking up for?

 

Most countries have got it wrong compared to Germany but we have a bigger population than other major European countries packed into a much smaller area so saying we have more deaths sadly doesn’t mean we are handling it worse than them

 

I said death toll, not death rate.

 

Yes but if you are comparing how others are doing by death toll then it doesn't give a true reflection. We should wait until we can compare average mortality against this years figures

 

Yes but if you are comparing how others are doing by death toll then it doesn't give a true reflection. We should wait until we can compare average mortality against this years figures

 

Agree that will give us a much truer reflection rather than snapshots.

All the statistics ultimately depend on the method of count and we know that varies between countries.

Notwithstanding that, our death toll being the highest in Europe, based on what we currently know, for me means that our approach for managing the situation is open for challenge: in terms of both quantitative and qualitative information that is in the public domain.

 

In a few months there will be a mountain of figures
Read through them .:...
Or go to VP and watch what is left of our team

I here that ginger midfielder is good but his legs have gone

 

The ONS have said that 11k more people have died than the normal seasonal total , this takes into account Flu - Cancer _ Heart problems etc . So does this mean only 11k have died of the virus ?. France and Spain are only publishing Hospital figures . The only time figures will be relevent is when the Pandemic is under control and look at the death rates above the normal across Europe .

 

Someone said yesterday that the figures we had were of folk dying 'with' the virus but not necessarily because of it...

 

I think the biggest failing we have made came before we had ever heard of COVID-19 we failed as a nation and successive governments to prepare for what was always a possibility.
We didn’t have a large enough equipment stockpile we had no diagnostic capacity which had us playing catch up from the start.
Countries like Germany had planned and they have a massive diagnostic research centre and South Korea also had large testing capacity due to an outbreak of a previous Covid

 

Austerity was the word used by the coalition and then the Tories, then also when Cameron won the 2015 general election, looking at the situation they were negligent for sure after doing a dummy run with regards a future pandemic.

 

Perhaps i did mishear , but the fact remains 17 k died of the flu last year and i think 2 years previous the total flu deaths was 28k . I dont doubt for 1 minute the figures are bad, but the fact that currently all deaths in the UK appear to be Covid related even when the patient had underlying problems which would have sadly killed them anyway . Without going into too much detail , i'm in the high risk self isolating group , if i die with a trace of the virus , it would be covid related , although it would not be the true cause .

 

Particularly true in care homes. I believe in this country if Covid is mentioned on the death certificate even if it is not the primary cause it is recorded not sure if that is true in other countries