By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions. We in turn value your personal details in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
Please log in or register. Registered visitors get fewer ads.
Amazed that self service tills are still in use at supermarkets.The risk of infection from the number of people who use these in a day must be high I will avoid at all costs.
I should hope the Chinese would help. They caused the outbreak. No one seems to mention this fact. Bat soup! Then not telling the world till it had got a good hold in China. China has some filthy areas (Shanghai market) and spitting seems common place. Sit back and await the flak!
And furthermore I would expect China to expect something in return. Use of ports for naval vessels etc. Most of their help given in Africa has provided them with ports, raw materials etc. Don’t expect charity from China.
Even so the Chinese had no need to get involved, even if there is an element of feeling guilty about being the place that it all started. The EU however, you might expect to help out a member state experiencing a major catastrophe. The lack of such support will be an eyeopener for many Italians who are at best unsure about the value of being in the EU .
Indeed China does have a lot to answer for. Not least because they tried to cover up news about the virus when they were warned of it's existence by prominent Doctors and scientists, even to the point of threatening to imprison those warning about it..... and furthermore, by allowing free travel of residents for the Chinese New Year celebrations well after they were fully aware of it's serious nature.
Italy has suffered greatly with Corona Virus, probably due to there being 100,000 Chinese nationals (mainly from the Wuhan area) living and working in Northern Italy, and many of them flying freely between Milan and Wuhan and back, or vice versa in order to visit families for New Year. The Chinese nationals in Italy being an indirect result of China's economic "help" to during the Italians recent financial crisis when the Chinese invested heavily in various struggling industries. Had the Chinese authorities clamped down on free travel in January or early February, the outbreak would have been much better contained.
What actually caused the virus to infect people is still to be determined, but it is thought likely that the consumption of unpalatable (to us in any case) meats such as Bat which is widely eaten in parts of China is the most likely source.
It now appears that China is over the worst infection rates (for now) and thus, their help is both wanted and necessary.
leaving aside flak on your first assumption, your last comment seems ironic on a Football Forum made up of fans who will have spent years watching dozens of non-Chinese players & staff routinely spitting throughout matches.
I agree that watching players spitting is pretty bad but not wanting to get into finer details I think the contents of the spit will be different. I am not an expert but it seems likely after listening to the preamble prior to spitting!! I hope so anyway. I also hope kids don’t copy the players but don’t hold out much hope.
One thing that's getting my goat with current "reporting". We are being told that the number of cases today has risen by about 500 to just under 2k. This is reported cases. The number of deaths is 71. The mortality rate is ~1%. Ergo the number of cases is around 70k or about 40 times what is being reported. Even at a 0.5% mortality rate (which would be downright amazing) it would be 35k, or about 20 times more than being reported. At best, this number (2k) is a total waste of time and reflects the abandonment of widescale screening - at worst it gives people a false sense of security of how widespread the virus is becoming. Wish I could put that to BoJo. Get it fixed (apolitically).
The problem is, now that the testing horse has bolted so to speak, the stable door might as well be left to swing in the wind
I honestly don't know whether we had the wherewithal to conduct comprehensive testing to begin with. It could well be that countries which claim to be doing so aren't being entirely honest about it, to save face. Once the two figures (tested and confirmed / suspected cases) start to diverge, there's no way to bring them back together again
The thing that annoys me about the information we are given is why don't they tell us, out of all those reported with the virus how many have now recovered. Surely that would give us all some much needed positive news.
Also, as a matter of interest, at the daily update meetings could a reporter ask how many people currently have the flu virus and how many have died from it since coronavirus arrived here. Would be an interesting figure.
The worrying stat is that of the 136 confirmed cases in the UK that have an outcome, 71 (52%) have died. The government should most definitely do more testing because even though it will mean numbers are likely to be into the 10’s of thousands, the death toll certainly wouldn’t be quite as scary!
It will take somebody with underlying issues much less time to die from this virus, than it will for a healthy person to completely get rid of the virus and be classed as cured.
So as more and more cases begin to close (don't forget this only really kicked off in the UK less than 2 weeks ago), those stats will be much less skewed to the scary side.
The numbers that I have seen put out there are as follows (this is not my field btw but as an asthmatic who now has a temperature, some mild aches and looseness I am following developments closely):
90% of the population will get this eventually. 1% of those that contract it have died to date (on average globally). I guess the less people in intensive care the higher the survival rate, hence why the gov is trying to flatten the curve and spread the demand for oxygen/ventilators/ICU beds. To answer your question, 99% who get it recover. 1% of 90% of our population is a lot of casualties though (594k). I would be more interested in how the government plans to prevent 20k turning into 594k (see below). Or are we being misled. Again, an apolitical question. Is it just by flattening the curve and will it really make such a massive difference?
Without social isolation, the death rate was modelled at 250k in the UK (half my estimate above). With social isolation, they "hope" to limit it to 20k. Seasonal flu kills 8k p.a. On that basis, best case scenario is this is 2.5 times as deadly as the flu. Worst case doesn't bear thinking about. Even if the curve is flattened now, it's not rocket science to realise that it's going to last a lot longer (that's the whole point). On top of that it could mutate and they don't know if it can re-infect, or patients who "recover" are then immune to that virus variation for life. On the flip side, the longer the delay the closer to a vaccine we get.
Even when you know your enemy though, it doesn't mean you will always defeat it. the only tools we have are taking social isolation and quarantine very seriously along with personal hygiene and unselfishness.
Japan claim they have and they have been more effective in quarantining but is it true? According to China they almost don't have a problem anymore?
In some places the death toll is much lower. The chart below should be studied by the leader of every nation on the planet imho. It also makes me wonder how much this kind of info is shared?
The official confirmed cases was 1950 earlier today. The numbers of deaths to confirmed cases puts the death rate at 4% in the link you posted above. This underlines how many undetected cases there are. People who self isolate and recover or people who are asymptomatic don't appear in these stats. I don't believe them for a minute!
Edit - just had a quick Google and found these numbers. They seem much more realistic but still low based on most of the wisdom I have read surrounding this so far.
"A further 14 people who tested positive for the Coronavirus have now died, bringing the total number of confirmed deaths in the UK to 71. The patients were aged between 93 and 45 years old and had underlying health conditions, NHS England said. It comes as Britons have been advised against non-essential travel to anywhere in the world as experts admitted the UK could already have up to 55,000 cases of the coronavirus. "
By continuing to use the site, you agree to our use of cookies and to abide by our Terms and Conditions.
