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London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

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Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#301

Post by d4mi3n »

nitrogen wrote: post #199
dandellion wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I'm not sure they're capable of feeling embarrassed or stupid. They get all riled up and start acting out, but it doesn't look like insulting and embarrassing them is working...

Surprise surprise, amplifying division just further amplifies division. We're hearing this: A: "I'm dying inside because of lockdown. I can't work and I'm this close to the end of my rope." Should the response be this? B: "People are dying outside because of COVID. I don't care about your pain. You are an idiot." A: [storms capitol] Or this? B: "This sucks all around for sure. Your pain is real, and I feel it too. Th…

This misses an important fact: not everyone is acting in good faith and what should have been a discussion on public health policy has been turned into a political football.

Good on you if you can help people who are struggling, but recognize that when people push back against the lockdown there are often ideological factors in play.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#302

Post by dj_mc_merlin »

d4mi3n wrote: post #281
dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So let me ask: on what basis did you arrive at your opinion? I will answer this, although more than likely my comment will get killed soon: I believe that the high-risk people (elderly, immuno-compromised, people with diseases that put them at risk) should go into voluntary quarantine if they wish, together with a government package to support them. Anyone who wishes to undergo lockdown can also do so, although wit…

What do you do about folks who don’t have the luxury to choose to isolate? The majority of US citizens don’t have the funds to stop working for more than a week or so. What about all the nurses who die in the line of duty treating all these new infections? Should they be allowed to opt-out of infection risk? I understand the desire to keep things going, but so long as there is community spread the lockdown can never…

> What do you do about folks who don’t have the luxury to choose to isolate?

What's being done about them now? How is this better? They're losing everything they own, their house, and getting $600 from the government? Many would take a chance of corona over that.

> What about all the nurses who die in the line of duty treating all these new infections? Should they be allowed to opt-out of infection risk?

Nurses (along with all healthcare personnel) should always receive priviledged treatment. One nurse dying is not a person dying, it is many people dying.

> but so long as there is community spread the lockdown can never end, and the virus would never go away.

Vaccines will hopefully change that.

.. all good points though, and I thought of them too as I was writing out my thoughts. I'm not fully satisfied with these answers, but I do not believe the direction we're headed in right now is much better.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#303

Post by penteract »

labster wrote: post #49
jpxw wrote: post #33

And yet we still have idiots here in the UK saying things ranging from: * coronavirus is invented as a government power grab * the government locking down is a deliberate ploy to kill small businesses * the government should just let this run its course, it’s Just A Flu TM * hospitals are actually empty (the “proof” being people recording empty waiting rooms in outpatient departments on bank holiday weekends) * coron…

Or maybe these people will keep believing the lie, even after they die from COVID, like the Calormen at the end of CS Lewis’ The Last Battle. Everyone else will be in Heaven, and they’ll be all like, “Let me out of the hospital, corona is a lie!”

Sorry to be pedantic, but you may be thinking of a group of Dwarves, not Calormenes. There was a Calormene at the end, but he did "see the light".

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#304

Post by d4mi3n »

matz1 wrote: post #128
d4mi3n wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That'd make more sense if heart disease had a significant chance of killing people breathing the same air as you.

Good thing that the chance of being killed by covid infected people breathing the same air as me is very very low.

About 2%, currently. Meaning if you walk into a room, spend time in it with 100 other people, 2 of them are likely to die.

The odds are low for an individual. Sadly, 2% is a bigger deal when you get on a bus, walk through an airport, use an elevator, go to a public restroom, or walk down a crowded sidewalk.

This isn’t an issue of your health or my health. It’s an issue if everyone’s health.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#305

Post by dredmorbius »

vondur wrote: post #162
lrossi wrote: post #41

Here is a video filmed in London this Christmas: https://youtu.be/Yz7wJZln6Kw Plenty of people outside. In fact, I would call it lightly crowded, although less than other years. Many people don’t wear masks. It’s not a surprise that transmission has increased. Nevertheless, London looked absolutely beautiful. Not sure if this was worth the risks though.

As far as I can remember reading, Covid does not really transmit when outside. It's mainly happening due to people getting together inside.

My very amateur assessment of national and regional Covid trends is that higher rates of spread seem to correspond very highly with "indoors weather" conditions. That's heating season in colder climates, cooling season in warmer ones.

But yes: people gathering, indoors, largely with recirculated air.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#306

Post by lolc »

postalrat wrote: post #270
jiggawatts wrote: post #9

If a mutant strain of COVID-19 becomes twice as deadly, this "merely" doubles the pressure on hospitals. A constant factor like this can be dealt with. However, an increased rate of spread (R factor) is a change in the parameter of the exponential curve, and cannot be dealt with by any sub-exponential response. The only thing that could possibly work is to change the factor. Rapid vaccination or lockdown. It's imposs…

Nothing in nature grows exponentially. If it did it would overwhelm the universe. YC News is mostly a forum for software developers, which means most of us have a tendency to want to keep things simple. That's fine for simple thinks like operating systems or proving all problems in NP are also in P. But nature is on a completely different level.

We are right now observing exponential spread of a virus. And we don't want to hit the natural end of exponential spread for this virus.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#307

Post by smcl »

frereubu wrote: post #296
smcl wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So by that calculation 1.32 million people (2% of 66 million) would die and we're supposed to NOT react strongly to people who hold that opinion?

To add to that, there would also be a large number of people suffering from long-term complications who may not be able to work and will need ongoing medical care.

Indeed there would. The naive estimate of deaths is bad enough, the knock on impact is a bit harder to wrap our heads around in terms of magnitude, but would still be severe.

Basically - this is not nothing, it’s being treated like a Big Deal because it legitimately is. There’s a lot of talk from the “treatment is worse than the disease” crowd, scant few of whom are experts. And like climate change and evolution deniers many of the arguments seem to boil down to conspiracy theories or the It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia argument - “science is a liar ... sometimes”: https://youtu.be/Zgk8UdV7GQ0

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#308

Post by lolc »

ed_balls wrote: post #62
jiggawatts wrote: post #9

If a mutant strain of COVID-19 becomes twice as deadly, this "merely" doubles the pressure on hospitals. A constant factor like this can be dealt with. However, an increased rate of spread (R factor) is a change in the parameter of the exponential curve, and cannot be dealt with by any sub-exponential response. The only thing that could possibly work is to change the factor. Rapid vaccination or lockdown. It's imposs…

How do we know that lethality ("a") has increased? My understanding is that there is an evolutionary pressure to become less lethal.

The virus getting deadlier is a hypothetical scenario.

Yes we can assume there is selection pressure for more benign strains. But that doesn't mean those strains will win.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#309

Post by d4mi3n »

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #302
d4mi3n wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do about folks who don’t have the luxury to choose to isolate? The majority of US citizens don’t have the funds to stop working for more than a week or so. What about all the nurses who die in the line of duty treating all these new infections? Should they be allowed to opt-out of infection risk? I understand the desire to keep things going, but so long as there is community spread the lockdown can never…

> What do you do about folks who don’t have the luxury to choose to isolate? What's being done about them now? How is this better? They're losing everything they own, their house, and getting $600 from the government? Many would take a chance of corona over that. > What about all the nurses who die in the line of duty treating all these new infections? Should they be allowed to opt-out of infection risk? Nurses (alon…

Thank you for the thoughtful response.

I agree the economic issues are problematic and painful. Sadly, I don’t see a way around a lot of financial pain for everyone over coming months regardless of the status of a lockdown. Depending on your job and industry, there simply isn’t any work to be done while there’s a real risk of death (tourism comes to mind).

I think one big sticking point for me around arguments to reopen boil down to our medical care workers—doctors, nurses, and everyone who supports them. I’m not comfortable telling _anyone_ that they need to die to keep the economy going, especially when our medical workers don’t have a say in the matter.

Re: London will be overwhelmed by Covid in a fortnight says leaked NHS briefing

#310

Post by d1zzy »

war1025 wrote: post #183
markdown wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

22k dead in Florida. I guess if nobody in your family is included in that figure, it's all peachy.

Funny, I didn't see anyone calling to shutter the economy when my dad was dying of cancer. Similarly, I didn't see any great outrage this summer when my uncle died of a heart attack. Death is tragic, but it's also a fact of life. A lot of people have fallen into the trap of making fear a virtue this year.

If "cancer" was this new disease that appeared in 2020 and it was highly contagious I'm pretty sure similar measures would have been taken. Or in other words, lockdown doesn't help combat the spread of cancer but it helps against airborne diseases. On the other hand, we haven't ignored cancer, AFAIK is one of the family of diseases that has most of the research funding going into (at least pre-2020) and it shows, the treatment efficiency for many types of cancer in 2020 is much better than it was 50 years ago.

So then... what's your point?

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