Quote from: Oldmanmatt on April 28, 2020, 11:49:11 amI feel like the national press, should simply refuse to use the hospital death category now and cease downplaying the toll.Agree Matt. Well actually I think in the first instance the government should. "Maximum transparency"?But if they won't then at least the press should. The likelihood of that is slim however given the capture of the majority of the press (and BBC news) by the conservative party.
I feel like the national press, should simply refuse to use the hospital death category now and cease downplaying the toll.
Q: Testing in care homes was inadequate. PPE was inadequate. This seems to have taken you be surprise. Will you apologise for leaving people unprotected?Hancock says he does not think that is reasonable as a question.He says his department was aware of the problems in care homes right from the start.He recalls a conversation in January about care homes. They knew the virus was particularly dangerous for care homes.It is something we have focused on right from the start.
Funnily enough Pete I just had a very quick look at that. From a very quick scan it looks like France do include their care home deaths. Or at least have done since early April. I know there are some France-based folk on UKB so they would know more? I don't think Spain or Italy do. The LSE are studying it Europ-wide and estimate that approx. 50% of total deaths will be in care homes. Just doing some further reading....
Do people on here not think that's a crucial piece of information to know before saying how we compare?I'd not be saying how we compare until I knew, well... how we compare.
It is absolutely ridiculous. You need the shoe-leather epidemiology, you need people on phones. Apps are simply supports for contact tracing.... You need people on old-fashioned things like telephones or going door to door and they need to be local teams because they need to understand the local communitiesThe whole system should be run by directors of public health and environmental health officers based in local authorities, with the resources they need, because they understand their community, she said. That was how it used to be, before the multiple restructuring culminating in the Health and Social Care Act 2012, which led to the decimation of public health disease control and its centralisation and fragmentation, she added.We don’t know where the block is, but there is a huge block and huge resistance to doing this locally. This is partly because they’ve ripped out so much capacity and they’ve also ripped out the real-time data locally. “We are never going to get on top of this if we don’t put back the local capacity
The UK “gave up very early”, said Anthony Costello, a professor of global health and sustainable development at University College London and a former WHO director. By 12 March, there had been 10 deaths and 590 confirmed cases, and about 3,500 contacts had been traced. But most of the cases were in London and the West Midlands. Continued testing, tracking and tracing could have kept the virus out of other regions and reduced deaths, he said.“If we hadn’t stopped it on 12 March, our epidemic would have been much less. They effectively allowed it to spread,” he said.
I thought a "damascene conversion" was a well known concept? Not my audience I guess!
mrjonathonr, what you are describing about reasons why "test-trace-isolate" was abandoned are more reasons why the "trace" part of that failed rather than reasons why the "test" part failed (correct me if I'm wrong). It seems though that the same mindset though screwed up every part of what was needed. The "test" side of things is looked at in https://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-coronavirus-testing . My guess is that the 100k tests will get done on Thursday. However I guess they will largely just be a random smattering of key workers and care-home residents rather than part of a "test-trace-isolate" strategy such as advocated by the "test-test-test" WHO advice for snuffing out outbreaks.
Interesting, thanks Stone. So in summary, the current "ramping up" in tests is most likely window dressing to an underlying herd immunity / do nothing strategy?
... is the answer a fresh start?Nationalisation and a proper Department of Health and Social Care?
Quote from: Nigel on April 29, 2020, 10:37:31 amInteresting, thanks Stone. So in summary, the current "ramping up" in tests is most likely window dressing to an underlying herd immunity / do nothing strategy?That has seemed consistent with govt decision making to me.Stone- yes a dearth of infrastructure to trace, but impacting testing capacity too I imagine. Testing has not matched declared aspirations. Rather than trumpeting 100k tests a day, I wonder how figures will stack up against 700k a week?
Isn’t Germany’s health care via social insurance and 2/3 of the facilities are private? I’m no fan of privatisation - but the ideology here in the UK IMHO has been to spend as little as politically possible - and that’s maybe what’s at the root of all of that. whether that is expressed via privatisation policies/measures.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/revealed-the-inside-story-of-uk-covid-19-coronavirus-crisisSummary: Johnson is too weak to take decisions.
Quote from: andy popp on April 29, 2020, 06:49:35 pmhttps://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/revealed-the-inside-story-of-uk-covid-19-coronavirus-crisisSummary: Johnson is too weak to take decisions.Thats a chilling read for me. Well part chilling and part anger inducing ... What a mess.
