COVID-19

Interesting, informative, balanced (and quite long) article. No easy answers, it seems.

According to this bloke, if the virus just disappears quickly, that's a bad sign - it means that it's behaving like previous flu pandemics and will likely come back with a second, much worse, wave. He thinks it's better if it rumbles on at a low level with sporadic localised outbreaks. But he also seems to think it won't go away until we have herd immunity, unless we get an effective vaccine.

https://www.bluezones.com/2020/06/covid-19-straight-answers-from-top-epidemiologist-who-predicted-the-pandemic/

 

Looks like Whitty and Vallance could be thinking about quitting.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8419007/Ministers-fear-scientists-Chris-Whitty-Patrick-Vallance-quit-two-metre-rule.html

Tough one because I do feel the 2m does need changing to 1m ASAP.

 

Surprise surprise. No Whitty or Vallance or indeed any scientific/medical adviser today. Government ploughing ahead alone it appears.

 

No, it most certainly wasn't the right thing to do. It may have been correct for a flu pandemic but not for a Corona virus. Those countries that had experience of dealing with Sars and Mers didn't see it that way. South Korea and Vietnam shut down fast and hard and successfully kept their numbers low, despite having much less notice than us. But it didn't occur to our dimwitted, isolationist, arrogant excuse for a government to talk to those countries and seek their advice.
The main reason we went for herd immunity to start with (apart from sheer idleness and stupidity) was the belated realisation that ten years of running down our PPE stocks and Public Health systems meant that we couldn't track & trace or protect our front line workers properly. Only when they realised that 'taking it on the chin' and letting the virus spread unchecked would kill between a quarter and half a million people did they change tack. By then then virus was well established here, leading to longer lockdown and disastrous economic consequences.

 

Had they gone in hard and early with proper countermeasures I'm convinced our picture would be different. For anyone saying hindsight I've said this consistently since early march after I'd started to recover from what me and my family think was corona, I wasn't tested at the time as I first became ill in January and it lasted until the start of march. The data was there for anyone who could put two and two together to see this was gonna be bad.

 

Good news

 

I see the virus has resurfaced in China again, The biggest spreader of viruses worldwide is air travel which should have been clamped down on much harder to control the spread

 

It is and I can't believe we are talking about air bridges and going on holiday etc. The boarders need to stay shut with the measures in place.

Boris needs to make it clear that it isn't going to change and stop this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8429607/Quarantine-free-air-bridges-allowing-Britons-holiday-not-isolate-arrive-two-weeks.html

 

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/jun/17/nhs-covid-19-contact-tracing-app-no-longer-a-priority-says-minister

The list keeps getting bigger...So this world beating tracing app no longer a priority

 

Why would you turn it off?

 

That isn’t the app, that is the piece of coding in the operating software that the apps use.

 

I wonder what the make up of the team was that decided to grant the development to NHSX.

 

no. You will have to download the app. Every government have designed their own app.