I managed to buy mince and sausages from Aldi this morning, was well chuffed. Then being a dick didn't realise I had no bread till 8pm so went Morrisons and the shelves were well empty. Bought beer instead. St Peter's Gatekeeper Golden Ale. It's canny. Just finished the third, might as well open the fourth. Would really like a sausage sarnie to go with it like. Have to admit it's a bit strange seeing shelves completely emptied when we haven't had a zombie apocalpse or nuclear war type event. All the essential infrastructure of the country is still running but crazy folk seem hell bent on filling their spare rooms, garages and sheds with pasta, bog roll and seemingly other completely random panic buys. There wasn't even any air fresheners left in Morrison's tonight. Not that I ever buy any like but I'm canny certain that the folk who emptied the shelves of it today don't normally buy any either. And how much bread is it possible to freeze? Bet there's some propper preppers buying up chest freezers and storing Morrison seeded loafs just so I can't have a sausage sarnie the inconsiderate stockpiling hopefully sterile bunch of twats. This rant was brought to you by the lacking an essential ingredient for a sausage sandwich first world problem whingers party representative and in no way expresses the view of your average camel.
I've stolen this from over the road, a lad on there (Comeback Kenwyne) gives a great summary of what we're facing. Worth the read, fascinating but scary as well. But, a few points, that I can't believe still need to be made on the whole "but flu kills more" yet again. 1) Flu is the most successful killer in the history of human civilisation. If flu came on the market today and we had no herd immunity to it - like Coronavirus - we'd be totally and utterly ****ed, as we are now. 2) But we do have herd immunity to flu. Enough people have had it, the vulnerable are vaccined and therefore it doesn't rip through communities at pace. It kills, slowly and steadily, as it spreads through populations that are largely immune. It mutates regularly, but the immune system response needed is always similar. This is where we want to get Cornovirus too. If we had a vaccine, we could protect the vulnerable and let it rip through the able, but we don't. In ten years time this Coronavirus will be like flu. It actually is a bit more lethal, but it'll be like flu then. Once we've all had it. 3) The problem with pandemics is nobody has immunity. What that means is that unchecked they can pretty much infect us all immediately. If we let this happen we'd be piling the bodies up on the streets, their wouldn't be enough graves to bury them. The last pandemic like this we had was Spanish Flu - killed more British people than the entire second world war. 50 million worldwide. If we don't act in the way we are doing now, that is what will happen with Coronvirus. One year of utter carnage. It wont' come back like that, because we'll then be largely immune. But infected everyone at the same time is a recipe for carnage. 4) China has stopped this by shutting down its economy. We are about to do the same. This will work. But what then? We have no exit strategy. It will come back unless people are immune. Only two ways to immunity: get it and survive, or vaccine (which is basically the same principle). Herd immunity has not been debunked - it's where we need to get too. The most painless way would be if there were a vaccine tomorrow, but there isn't likely to be one until end of the year at the earliest. However, the Government's idea that they could manage this enough to get to herd immunity in the medium-term, whilst managing and mitigating a death rate that the NHS could conceivably cope with - that has been debunked. We haven't caved because of political pressure, we've caved because the data was showing we were on track to let 200,000 people die before the end of the summer. That's more than in any single year of the Second World War. In four months. That's just Coronvirus numbers too - given how awful the NHS would be when faced with that, you can load more than a few thousand onto that due to the fact they won't be able to treat anyone for cancer, heart attacks, whatever for likely that period too. And loads of doctors and nurses will probably die in there as well, being exposed to high levels of the virus. Faced with that, what else could we do but pull back and tank the economy. But we know too that living like this for the year to eighteen months to create vaccine is not just intolerable, it will also kill people. We know that social isolation kills people. We know that economic collapse kills people. Austerity reduced our life expectancy and the austerity of recent times is absolute child's play compared to what our economy would look like if we have to live like this for eighteen months. The Government will keep trying to pump money into the economy, but the fact is there is no market, no supply and demand in such conditions, other than the very basic things that we'll need to live at home - media, food, medicine. You're talking about an economy with supermarkets and **** all else. That isn't capitalism, nothing like it - you can't have a capitalist economy without a market. So we'll be effectively be in a socialist situation, where everyone is under house arrest. Not even Stalin quite went that far. Well, not often anyway. At the moment, we - and everyone - is basically suppressing the disease and hoping something ****ing turns up in the research. Otherwise, its police state socialism or more deaths than we've ever seen in our history: take yer ****ing pick. The one straw in the wind is the Koreans and, perhaps, the Japanese. They seem to have got a different response, whereby their testing infrastructure is so advanced and rapid, that they haven't had to fully shut down their economy. We need to be looking at them. So, all in all, not good. I'm probably over-egging the police state bit - they'll be able to let us out for calme periods, certainly the non-vulnerable ones.The virus will have lulls before coming back. They may be able to boost NHS capacity so much, that when we have to go back in after a lull, it's not as severe as the next 10 weeks. But really, we are just playing for time and have no strategy.
Looks like some light at the end of a tunnel no new cases reported in China There's started in December so that's 3 months Don't think our crisis will be as bad as theirs so maybe April 4 might be the start of the footy season
Our crisis is going to be worse than what they've seen so far. In 2 weeks we'll be closer to how Italy is now. China have an authoritarian government and a submissive people, they completely locked down an entire province and enforced it by spying on its people. But China haven't solved the problem. They just locked down everyone in an area that had it. So they have over 1 billion people still completely vulnerable to the virus. I suspect they will have repeated cluster outbreaks until a vaccination is available.
Particularly with the weather looking so good Plus the cheif medical officer said it was ok for people to gan in the park for exercise He was on the one show last night
Just been to my local morrisons to buy bread and sausages and heaven forbid I got both items. Sausage sarnies for me tonight.
Sorry Jerry, I have to disagree and I actually don't think majority of the UK is taking this seriously enough. It may not as high as 20k deaths (I hope) but they're beginning to see a trend in 30 to 50 year old's now. China knocked up hospitals like we knocked up Spitfires in WWII and we simply don't have the infrastructure to do that. When hospitals become full, where will people go from there? When we run out of resources in hospitals, what will we do? China turned around a supply vessel headed for America full of masks and other equipment a few weeks ago so they could keep them for themselves. How many 70 plus year old people have you seen out and about the past week since Boris advised them all to stay home? I'll bet it's not zero, because were an ignorant nation who think we know better...
I've no idea what the final numbers will be, but it would be daft to make guesses without a knowledge of how these things work. Why do you bet the numbers will be low? How are we going to stop it?
I agree with most of your points, but the China situation is a bit different just because of their political system, the vastness of the country and the location where the outbreak happened. We can't lock the whole country down and police it with the army and by monitoring our citizens through technology. I suspect it would have been vastly worse in China, if it had taken place in Shanghai or Guangzhong. It's also not as if the situation in China is over yet. Most of their population is still vulnerable to another outbreak. Culture is a bigger factor here in my opinion. The USA will have worse numbers than anyone by the end of this I suspect.