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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

#371

Post by matz1 »

smcl wrote: post #271
matz1 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So not sure then do lockdown anyway?

Well we actually have a very good idea of how many people would die of Covid if the entire population of the UK got Covid. We don't know how many people have ... whatever you are proposing we compare that against. So faced with the options of "prevent the deaths of over a million people" and "matz1 doesn't like lockdown but doesn't want to talk about or quantify it" I think the choice is pretty clear. Unless you want…

whats the evidence that lockdown can 'prevent the deaths of over a million people' ? Keep in mind Lockdown can cause death as well.

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

#372

Post by smcl »

matz1 wrote: post #371
smcl wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well we actually have a very good idea of how many people would die of Covid if the entire population of the UK got Covid. We don't know how many people have ... whatever you are proposing we compare that against. So faced with the options of "prevent the deaths of over a million people" and "matz1 doesn't like lockdown but doesn't want to talk about or quantify it" I think the choice is pretty clear. Unless you want…

whats the evidence that lockdown can 'prevent the deaths of over a million people' ? Keep in mind Lockdown can cause death as well.

This is coming from the figures the other anti-lockdown guy gave for the number of deaths they expect - 2% deaths of the UK population is ~1.32 million people. If you don’t get covid, you don’t die of covid. If you lockdown, you don’t get covid. It’s a simplification but it’s a start.

What you have said is that people will suffer under lockdown - but you haven’t really tried to quantify that. You’ve decided that’s a lost cause and have moved onto “lockdown causes death” ! Amazing.

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

#373

Post by matz1 »

smcl wrote: post #372
matz1 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

whats the evidence that lockdown can 'prevent the deaths of over a million people' ? Keep in mind Lockdown can cause death as well.

This is coming from the figures the other anti-lockdown guy gave for the number of deaths they expect - 2% deaths of the UK population is ~1.32 million people. If you don’t get covid, you don’t die of covid. If you lockdown, you don’t get covid. It’s a simplification but it’s a start. What you have said is that people will suffer under lockdown - but you haven’t really tried to quantify that. You’ve decided that’s a…

>If you don’t get covid, you don’t die of covid

Likewise If you get covid, doesn't mean you will die from covid. vast majority of people will be fine.

>If you lockdown, you don’t get covid. It’s a simplification but it’s a start

Maybe you don't get covid but if you lockdown, you may suffer/die from starving/mental health issue instead.

>What you have said is that people will suffer under lockdown - but you haven’t really tried to quantify that

Is it really hard to think that lockdown would cause at least some unemployment, some bankruptcy, some mental health issue ?

>“lockdown causes death”

Unemployment has long been associated with a significantly increased risk of death.

I don't have the precise number but how are you sure that the damage from virus is greater than damage from lockdown ?

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

#374

Post by ballenf »

GlennS wrote: post #173
polote wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the government should just let this run its course Isn't it just an opinion? I personally think that way. Why wouldn't I be allowed to think that?

I guess it seems like a surprising view to have (to think that the government should let it run its course)? I mean, the evidence is pretty clear by now isn't it? Countries that responded to the pandemic with swift strong action, especially restrictions on movement, have had the best outcomes for both health and the economy. Countries that tried to protect the economy / their nation's finances by enacting watered dow…

Isn't is plausible, if not expected, that countries with different industries and economic structures would do differently with the exact same kind of lockdown plan?

That is, a country that has a large WFH-capable population would feel less economic pain than another otherwise similar country?

And thus, maybe a swift and harsh lockdown is the best move for one country, but the cons for another would outweigh the pros? That is another country would enter an economic decline that overall costs more lives than would have been saved?

We don't know the answers to these questions, but I think we shouldn't dismiss these considerations.

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

#375

Post by e40 »

_jal wrote: post #243
e40 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A colleague made the point that we need more pictures of overflowing morgues and ICUs and (like is happening in LA) people waiting in an ambulance for 7-8 hours (and some of those people dying because of it). Just like the US government banned (discouraged?) pictures of caskets coming back from war. These images need to be on the news and on news websites 24/7.

Those images have been intentionally suppressed in the US. https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit...

Thanks, I had forgotten about that.

And I think there's a direct line between this suppression and the behavior of many people.

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

#376

Post by _jal »

e40 wrote: post #375
_jal wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those images have been intentionally suppressed in the US. https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit...

Thanks, I had forgotten about that. And I think there's a direct line between this suppression and the behavior of many people.

> I think there's a direct line between this suppression and the behavior of many people

Me, too. And, obviously, so did Severino and his boss.

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

#377

Post by ben_w »

sojournerc wrote: post #214
matz1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How can someone downvote this? 99.9% is low odds...

Sometimes COVID gets compared to flu. Thing is, most people underestimate what flu is like (I suspect this is because of the tendency to say “XYZ got the flu” when they had a common cold).

This is what COVID is like — First roll two D4: If you rolled a 1 in the first, you now have a liver injury; If you rolled a 1 on the other, you lose your sense of smell.

Now roll a D20:

• 1-4: asymptotic but still infectious

• 5-16: somewhere up to “mild pneumonia”

• 17-19: severe symptoms (dyspnea, hypoxia, etc)

• 20: critical symptoms (respiratory failure, shock, or multiorgan dysfunction)

And that’s with treatment. All that “flattening the curve” talk early last year was about making sure people could still get treatment — if you exceed the capacity of the healthcare system, you don’t get to save all the people whose conditions would have been well within your capacity in a non-overloaded system.

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

#378

Post by midasuni »

Havoc wrote: post #350
midasuni wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s from people who sight it before Christmas. Takes 3 weeks from catching it to hospital - that’s still a few days away

And? You think the post Xmas will somehow be better?

No it will be worse. The original post implied we’d seen the effect of the Christmas idiocy. The cases caught on Christmas Day would be ided about Dec 29 and hospitalised maybe about now and into this weekend

The cases caught from Christmas Day and passed on multiplied to the school return on Monday. That political decision will have killed hundreds needlessly, maybe thousands, just because he didn’t want to back down.

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

#379

Post by patrec »

liquorice wrote: post #313
patrec wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking only for myself, I think your opinion is idiotic based on some simple back of the envelope math I did many months ago (when the UK announced its herd immunity plan), relating to hospital capacity, likely peak case numbers, proportion of cases that would need hospital treatment or die and some simple minded guesses about knock-on effects for the rest of the health system. I have not bothered to redo these cal…

I think the conclusion of a death toll estimation exercise may shift if you adjust for expected remaining lifetime. In Scotland, the mean COVID death age was higher than the average lifetime expectancy[1], which indicates that on average those people would probably live There have been a significant amount of excess deaths that are not attributable to COVID [2]. I suspect that such deaths have a lower average age (e.…

> I'm not proposing that we should optimise for life years saved, but I do think that the death of a 86 year old is less tragic than that of a 38 year old, and that we perhaps shouldn't evaluate lockdown vs no lockdown purely based on the percentage of the population which died.

I of course agree with that. Just stating lives lost in isolation is misleading. It simply much easier to use for back-of-envelope math, and generally back of the envelope math indicating a course of action would lead to millions of excess deaths is enough to conclude that probably it won't be a great idea.

> which indicates that on average those people would probably live This is plausible, but it may not be much less than 10 years either. The life expectancy of someone who reaches average UK life expectancy is close to another 10 years. And we'd probably both prefer neither ourselves nor any elderly relatives or friends to suffocate 10 years before their or our time.

> There have been a significant amount of excess deaths that are not attributable to COVID [2].

So this sounds initially plausible (lockdown stress/economic hardship leading to an increase in suicides) but I believe it's bullshit and that these deaths are in fact due to covid. Since we were talking about the UK, let's go back to look at that: the baseline figure of suicides is pretty low (~6k in the UK for 2019, which is 1e-4 per individual per year). The number of excess deaths in 2020 is at least 12 times higher than that. So the suicide rate would have had to at least double to account for a significant part of that. And nationwide suicide rates are quite stable, year-on-year, including, crucially, during times of severe economic hardship.

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

#380

Post by rswskg »

fsdfgsfsdfsdfsd wrote: post #222
GlennS wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it seems like a surprising view to have (to think that the government should let it run its course)? I mean, the evidence is pretty clear by now isn't it? Countries that responded to the pandemic with swift strong action, especially restrictions on movement, have had the best outcomes for both health and the economy. Countries that tried to protect the economy / their nation's finances by enacting watered dow…

I don't think the evidence is clear. There are countries that were unsuccessful with their lockdowns, and countries were numbers were decreasing (because of lockdown or other reasons is unclear). Then there is China, whose numbers can't be trusted. And some remote island states seem to have done well. Most interesting case perhaps Taiwan (which incidentally also belongs to China).

The taiwanese people might have something to say about that.
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