UncleEbenezer wrote:XFool wrote:I am no supporter of this government (obviously!) but believe they are being guided by the science etc. That's good enough for me for now. As usual all the armchair pundits, plus some of the media, believe they know better. Nothing new there.
I think I'd want to know more about the government's advisors before being so sanguine. The tendency to appoint yes-men who will do their masters' bidding seems to get ever more flagrant. The Liar was a master of it, and now Stuttley seems to be taking it to a new level: an obvious recent case was the change of chancellor; other obvious cases include the sacking of Claire O'Neill, and of course the Big One - the Stalinist purge of the party's moderates back in the autumn.
I think in this case we simply have to trust that our government is doing all it possibly can to reduce the scale of this epidemic - and I do trust the scientists when they say they are aiming to save as many lives as possible.
It's becoming very clear to me that this outbreak is going to be a lot worse than what is currently being stated in public, and understandably, a responsible government needs to gradually let the truth emerge in a controlled way to avoid pointless panic.
I hope I'm being overly pessimistic, but I've done some basic modelling and on the current publicly stated plan to manage a summer peak in 2020 lasting around 16 weeks, it looks very bad no matter how much you tweak the assumptions (even if you assume that 100% of over 60s could be prevented from getting the virus). Basically my modelling predicts the vast majority of people who will need intensive care in hospital won't be able to get it, and so the number of deaths will be much higher than what's currently in the public domain.
I won't show my modelling assumptions, mainly because I don't want to show anything that might be convincing enough to be shared more widely, because the general public just isn't yet ready for it. But most people on this site are pretty rational and logical so wanted to put this out there.
My modelling assumes the government is aiming to flatten the peak over 16 weeks in summer, which is what they stated in public on Thursday.
However,there is possible good news.
If you assume the real plan for the UK is to flatten the peak over 52 weeks, then my model results suddenly look a whole lot better. If I was running the show, within the next 7-10 days I'd be putting the UK into complete lockdown, similar to what most other countries have already done, and I'd do it for at least 6 months initially (yes, months, not weeks). By starting with mild measures (as our government has done), encouraging people to decide for themselves to cancel events, wash hands more etc, letting people get used to this regime and appreciating for themselves the seriousness of it all, and only then moving to lockdown, there may well be a much better chance of sustained compliance among the UK population which will slow the spread of the coronavirus to allow us to mitigate the worst effects. There's even an outside chance, we may even be able to prevent it spreading at all if enough people are really serious about complying with the measures. Slowing/stopping the spread in this way would also increase the probability of a vaccine being available for a significant proportion of the population.
Good quote I heard about this - " Last time there was a national emergency, we asked our people to go to war. For this national emergency, we're asking them to stay at home".
Our scientists (and government) may have got their approach absolutely right. Let's hope so.