Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Let’s just pray they have actually put in some procedures to protect care homes this time.

It's just applying exponential growth theory, based on the last few weeks showing exponential growth allegedly.

Seems a reasonable theory at this point in time.

If you're all running around doing the things you're doing now, and the virus is growing at the rate it is now, this is how exponential growth works.
In the model, you'll have to account for "how many have been affected/who are seriously affected/what's the proportion of people in the population now at risk with 50k cases a day? what does this mean in terms of deaths per day? "

what about it do you think is bullshit?

I was thinking that, I remember the government claim 50,000 death is “worse case scenario”, only to actually hit near that prediction.

If that what they think what may happen, as much as I distrust the government, that sound sadly, realistic.

Universities only back this week as well.

It's just applying exponential growth theory, based on the last few weeks showing exponential growth allegedly.

Would like to see the calculation of how many days it would take before the entire population is infected based on that level of growth.

World Population = 7.8bn

Starting from 3000 now and doubling every week. It's log₂(7.8bn / 3000) = 21.31 weeks

3000 * 2²¹ = 6,291,456,000
3000 * 2²² = 12,582,912,000

22 weeks from now = Monday 22nd Feb 2021

Feb half term ski trip next year looking doubtful.

On Sunday Feb 21st of course, only half the world would be infected

Herd immunity stops you ever getting to 100% infection however, right?

Sick.

Unless the infected start hunting the living, err, un-infected.

Herd immunity stops you ever getting to 100% infection however, right?

Yes, if it were just one particular strain then herd immunity should prevent it getting past ~80% (although timings will vary a lot between individual countries/areas).

If the news about mutations and multiple strains is true then 100% of the world population could end up being infected by at least one strain.

The care home death numbers are a massive scandal but I think the media focus purely on case numbers & deaths misses the point that hospitalisations are a much bigger problem. From a "keeping the system afloat" perspective care home residents dying without going to hospital places very little strain on the NHS. Large numbers of younger people getting sick and spending a few days in hospital or a few weeks in ITU is a nightmare.

Like you say, there were a lot (~20,000 iirc?) of care home deaths in the March/April wave. If even 5,000 of those had instead been hospitalisations of younger patients the NHS would probably have keeled over, certainly in London/Birmingham. Hospital admissions starting to rise again should be a massive signal that some kind of intervention is needed...not sure what form that should take (hopefully Chris Whitty has some ideas).

Leak of proposed Scottish restricitons:
https://twitter.com/AndrewSparrow/status/1308058139082854400

So no doubt that will be England a week or two later

Should this happen we are in the privileged position of being there when the hospitality, live sports and live entertainment industries died

so no doubt that will be England a week or two later

“We don’t want to go into a lockdown too early otherwise people will get bored and break the lockdown rules”.

live sports

On the other hand, TV viewership was up over 60% globally for premier league matches in the second half of last season so there is talk of a cash windfall for Premier league football if that continues into this season.

Somehow, even at the end of times, footballers managed to earn more money.

One of the drivers for that was hospitals releasing untested people back into carehomes... yes about 50% so 20K people.

But yes hospitalisation rates going up is also a problem, indeed once there are enough cases it will become a real issue. What happened to those Nightingale places?

Germany had local teams checking up on people and giving them oxygen to try to stabilize that way, before it got so bad they had to go into hospital. Will that work here? I doubt the infrastructure is there, maybe they are doing trials?

It would be awesome if there was something reliable you could use to check if you really should go to hospital but I don't think that exists. And if cases go up enough, even with the most care you end up with full hospitals.

I don't know either... I got an oxygen finger clip at home, bought a thermometer to ensure we don't call for help unless really needed, but also don't delay help if needed (oxygen saturation dropping below, say 90, is not a good sign) bought a forehead thermometer to make temp checking easier but what can you really do?

And so off we go into another lockdown potentially and I really hope they won't close the gyms as I really need to get out of the house during the coming darkness and I already bought all the stuff I need from shops :)

Somehow, even at the end of times, footballers managed to earn more money

Their pay cut will come when us shit munchers can't afford our Sky Sports subscriptions any more.

As if Merthyr didn’t have enough to worry about

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I bought a forehead thermometer last week as girl friend was feeling ill and nowim paranoid because my temperature always seems low <36C.

Immense amounts of text have been written

Well, that's for sure.

Although the current position seems to be that the broadcasters are getting partial refunds as the product being provided isn't as promised.

As I've said before, HS2 is largely on the same template as high-speed trains in Europe, whose remit is basically to facilitate business travel.

This really isn't true. HS2 is quite different to grand rail projets on the continent (which largely compete with/are designed to take business from airlines) in that one of the main reasons for building it is to create capacity for more local services by moving long distance services onto the new line. See:
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/news/89694/hs2-capacity-britains-existing-rail/
But also:
https://www.railtech.com/infrastructure/2020/07/21/hs2-will-unlock-capacity-of-three-mainlines-in-uk/
https://www.railengineer.co.uk/the-capacity-benefits-of-hs2/
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2019/10/02/more-evidence-that-hs2-is-more-about-capacity-than-speed/

The UK has a huge capacity problem and it sure ain't a myth. We have a railway network which is - unlike just about all other countries, because we invented it - fundamentally Victorian. Because of this the carriages have to be narrower, stations have shorter platforms (unless they've been extended), infrastructure is very outdated. We also spent years not spending any money on maintaining it. And so on. And on top of this there has been huge passenger growth in recent years without any significant capacity growth.

Sure, you could fix this by completely revamping the current network - extending station platforms, replacing bridges and tunnels, lengthening trains, replacing signalling and other infrastructure. But it would take years and years and years of disruption to rail users, cost a fortune and - given the UK's track record for upgrade projects - possibly not even work properly at the end of it.

In short: it would be completely unworkable.