[petejh]

I hadn't suggested 20,000 per day.I suggested we're on a track to reach approx 20,000 total at the peak.

I'm not talking about when he was briefing that social distancing measures would reduce deaths to less than 20,000.

I'm talking about before then - there was a briefing I watched in which Chris Witty used the figure of 20,000 deaths, it was the first time I'd heard the figure mentioned, and it was used in the context of 'by the peak'. I recall he said something like 'by June' or words to that effect. This has been lost. I'd be interested to see if anyone dredges through the archives and finds it.


edit, saw you deleted the per day part of your post.

[Stu Littlefair]

I’m doing my own little data science project at home to stop me doing real work.

I have a very basic model of where I expect things to go, and keep an eye on how it compares to the daily progression.

It’s not good enough to make predictions as to where we would end up, but it is a good model to capture the range of uncertainty.

Today’s news is everything Matt says; awful, grim sad. And expected.

The good news is that it’s still consistent with a path that would end with 20,000 deaths. The bad news is that is now at the very lower end of possible outcomes.

[gme]

Holland - Economy tiking along nicely, little disruption to the constrution industry, far fewer rules and regulations, no lockdown.

How is there curve flattening more than ours and daily new cases dropping. I still cant help but think we are doing something wrong here.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherlands/

[spidermonkey09]

Have you watched that Sky News thing Matt linked gme? It suggests that the Netherlands and Germany are heading in basically the same direction as all the other European countries.

[tomtom]

Have you watched that Sky News thing Matt linked gme? It suggests that the Netherlands and Germany are heading in basically the same direction as all the other European countries.

NL and Belgium all heading the same way as us. My jury is still out on Germany.

It is remarkable how similar they all actually are.

And Grim.

[gme]

I have seen it however it does not show that in the stats i linked to.

They appear to have it more under control than we do without the level of controls and that is the opionion of people in holland as well not just the evidence on the charts.

[petejh]

Have you watched that Sky News thing Matt linked gme? It suggests that the Netherlands and Germany are heading in basically the same direction as all the other European countries.

NL and Belgium all heading the same way as us. My jury is still out on Germany.

It is remarkable how similar they all actually are.

And Grim.

I don't find it remarkable how similar the growth rates are - it's a virus that infects all humans the same. Unless you remove humans from the virus then the percentage of population infected will be similar everywhere.
Although I'm interested to see if small genetic differences in survival associated with HPA and other genes emerge out of the bigger picture.

What I find remarkable is regions who've managed to lower the infection growth rate.
China, S.Korea, Singapore, Norway, Taiwan and Japan. It's interesting to see if they reach the same total figure - over a longer period of time - than they would have reached anyway with less stringent measures. Be those measures of testing and quarantining, or total isolation, or whatever the hell's going on in Japan who aren't doing either testing or isolation.

Gav I think it's correct to say(?) Netherlands are just heading for the same destination on the path as everybody else, just a little further back.

[mrjonathanr]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/01/public-inquiry-coronavirus-mass-testing-pandemic

Anthony Costello writing about how important testing would be, if we were to do it effectively.

[JamieG]

This doesn't make it look like the Netherlands are doing much better than any other European country. Not worse, but not much better either.

[Oldmanmatt]

This doesn't make it look like the Netherlands are doing much better than any other European country. Not worse, but not much better either.

They are very similar.

Netherlands are just behind.

See Pete’s post.

I think the East Asian experiences in the past few years, of those Pandemics that hardly touched us, have given them better coping strategies and infrastructure.

TT, they might have flattened their curve sufficiently to hit Vaccine/treatment protocols that will keep their total deaths very low in comparison to the West.

We have dropped the ball.

We thought we’d see it coming much earlier. We thought these things were “tropical”, even “3rd world” problems or the  stuff of Hollywood.

Hardly feeling the recent outbreaks, left us feeling remote and overconfident.

[petejh]

With the 'didn't see it coming / dropping the ball' argument, you have to ask the question:
Would it have been palatable to the population to be locked-down 3 or 4 weeks earlier than we did? I'd say no. We would have been locking down the UK with tens of deaths. I know it would have been 'right' given the exponential nature. But most people wouldn't have been convinced and I think it's sad but true to say that it wouldn't have worked, wouldn't have been politically palatable. You need either a population who grasp the maths, or a population of compliant drones.

Some people I know still don't really grasp the exponential growth now - they look at where we are now (sometimes comparing to others); without looking back at where we came from and in what time period, and plotting that forwards to where we're going in what time period.

[tomtom]

Good governance is making the right decision even if it is unpopular....

I agree with OMM that we should have done what we did 3-4 weeks before - but even a week or two earlier would have helped surely?? Whe we had the voluntary distancing - there was so much ambiguity that most of life went on as usual.

Maybe that week or two would t matter in the end and the die was set - we’ll find out.

Those dying in hospital now were most likely infected 3-4 weeks ago before any measures were introduced...

[Oldmanmatt]

I think we could have locked down sooner, but it’s more the infrastructure and “mental preparedness”, I’m tilting at.

I bet every supermarket in Korea, the security check your temperature on the way in.

I bet most of SE Asia, have a good stock of masks and gloves in their homes.

I’ll bet people started to distance themselves, informally, the moment the first reports came out of China.
(Except your standard religious nut jobs).

They’re used to this. They take it seriously.

Stuff like this, too:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/coronavirus-nhs-ventilators-treatment-testing-cases-update-a9440471.html

[gme]

This doesn't make it look like the Netherlands are doing much better than any other European country. Not worse, but not much better either.

[gme]

This doesn't make it look like the Netherlands are doing much better than any other European country. Not worse, but not much better either.

Only marginally better admittedly but with far less restrictions than here.
Meetings still allowed. You can still have guests to your house up to a max of three.
You maybe right that it will get worse than here but it appears to just be following the same path but without as much intervention that will leave the economy in a much better position.

[Stu Littlefair]

Gav - I’m not sure you see the point people are making. The people who are dying now, got infected around 3 weeks ago. 3 weeks ago the UK had a similar regime to the Dutch.

If the UK and the Dutch continued with their current regimes it would be 2 weeks before you’d expect any difference to start showing up.

It “following the same path” is exactly what it should do.

[Stu Littlefair]

Or maybe it’s clearer out like this. If the UK hadn’t gone into lockdown just over a week ago, we’d still be seeing exactly the same number of fatalities as we are now.

The two paths will hopefully diverge significantly in a fortnight.

[Duma]

Netherlands has twice the death rate per million

It's got half the cases, and half the deaths we do, but quarter of our population. How is that doing better??

130 odd new deaths today in the Netherlands is about the same per population as 500 odd here.

Plus the positive effects of our lockdown won't be felt for a few days yet.

[petejh]

Agree with both of you OMM/TT in principle. But I think it's fruitless to compare with what we aren't and couldn't have been.

For example, if loads of us who live in rural areas had little tractors with a snowplough blade that we could fit in November like they do in alpine and northern Scandinavian regions, then we wouldn't have all the blocked country roads that we (don't) get every winter... I.e. we don't suffer from heavy snow in winter enough to make the countermeasures seem worthwhile.

If we'd had a pandemic like those countries did, or a political system like China does, or xyz, then we could have done things differently. Offwidth will probably disagree but he's coming from a mindset of fault-finding anything this government does, almost on principle. I'm not saying fault-finding isn't useful, I think fault-finding is essential to improve the scope of future responses to a next crisis. Sure aspire to better standards. But I don't see any use in fault-finding by comparing to standards that were unrealistic at the time. Seems a bit 'historical revisionism'.

[Stu Littlefair]

Do you think people in the UK would  buy into a Chinese style isolation system?

Basically contact tracing on steroids. If you have symptoms, you (and your immediate contacts) get taken to a makeshift holding area (hotel, Uni dorms etc) to await testing.

Anyone who tests positive goes straight to an isolation hospital. If you test negative you can go home.

The advantage is it allows you to focus testing where it’s needed. But it needs massive buy in from the public - there’s a huge disincentive to pretend you don’t have symptoms.

I’m actually quite optimistic that the current regime is just enough, but if it isn’t the above is probably the best way to avoid total clampdown...

[mrjonathanr]

There was massive disquiet when testing was scaled back on March 12; that’s not fault finding, that’s looking with horror and wondering what on earth was going on.

[petejh]

Do you think people in the UK would  buy into a Chinese style isolation system?

Basically contact tracing on steroids. If you have symptoms, you (and your immediate contacts) get taken to a makeshift holding area (hotel, Uni dorms etc) to await testing.

Anyone who tests positive goes straight to an isolation hospital. If you test negative you can go home.

The advantage is it allows you to focus testing where it’s needed. But it needs massive buy in from the public - there’s a huge disincentive to pretend you don’t have symptoms.

I’m actually quite optimistic that the current regime is just enough, but if it isn’t the above is probably the best way to avoid total clampdown...

I suspect the Chinese back up that system with the threat of...? Something a bit worse than a UK government would.So compliance will be high. Big stick.

People in the UK get uppity if they can't walk fido along Curbar.


mrjonathanr: I'm definitely not sticking my flag in any position here. Maybe you're right. But there are already a few different things being discussed here: testing, locking down earlier, locking down harder, health surveillance in shops, stocks of PPE, etc. etc.
We're almost bound to have fucked up on most of those given the last time this happened on this scale was 1918. It would be miraculous if we nailed it.

[Duma]

With the 'didn't see it coming / dropping the ball' argument, you have to ask the question:
Would it have been palatable to the population to be locked-down 3 or 4 weeks earlier than we did? I'd say no.

And I'd agree, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that? It would however, have been doable to impose a lockdown a week to 5 days earlier, and I think it would have got traction - that would certainly have saved a lot of lives, but it's hindsight, and I don't think the gov have been that bad with the timings.

The lack of test and trace, on the other hand is a fucking scandal and once this is over there should be some consequential questions asked of those responsible.

Why are people insisting on comparisons to China - it's clearly not a good fit. S Korea is much better in size and liberties - they have the huge advantage of experience of SARS and MERS (Covid is basically SARS2 as I understand?), but we should have been looking to them from the start

[Oldmanmatt]

Agree with both of you OMM/TT in principle. But I think it's fruitless to compare with what we aren't and couldn't have been.

For example, if loads of us who live in rural areas had little tractors with a snowplough blade that we could fit in November like they do in alpine and northern Scandinavian regions, then we wouldn't have all the blocked country roads that we (don't) get every winter... I.e. we don't suffer from heavy snow in winter enough to make the countermeasures seem worthwhile.

If we'd had a pandemic like those countries did, or a political system like China does, or xyz, then we could have done things differently. Offwidth will probably disagree but he's coming from a mindset of fault-finding anything this government does, almost on principle. I'm not saying fault-finding isn't useful, I think fault-finding is essential to improve the scope of future responses to a next crisis. Sure aspire to better standards. But I don't see any use in fault-finding by comparing to standards that were unrealistic at the time. Seems a bit 'historical revisionism'.

I didn’t say “we should be the same”.

I’m attempting to highlight some of the reasons we are not, now, in the same position.

We dropped the ball, because the WHO amongst others (even the Chinese) were shouting their warnings in January.

In the UK, in particular, we didn’t move until we were pushed. We had warning. We had Italy, virtually on our doorstep.
We have known, for decades, that this was more likely than not.

It’s not really fair to try and say “we had no choice because we’re not an authoritarian regime like China, so none of this can be helped”; because, what we are doing now, will probably help.

Neither Korea, nor Japan are “authoritarian regimes” either.

I’m pretty hopeful we’ve done enough.

Not “everything we could” and I think the a Government certainly missed opportunities to act faster, with regard to equipment purchase etc.
Christ, from about two days after I arrived in Glasgow, in early Feb, I was half convinced I would be stuck there with all flights grounded and no public transport to get home and that was just from reading the papers.
How much better was the Government’s intelligence and advice?

There will be some tough questions for them to answer, later.

The fact that many influential people are already asking them, despite the gravity of what’s happening, seems a fair indication of how bad that aspect will get.

[petejh]

It’s not really fair to try and say “we had no choice because we’re not an authoritarian regime like China, so none of this can be helped”;

Pretty sure I'm not saying that.


I agree there'll be no shortage of questions and answers.