So, Sweden may well have been right.....

[Howardh]

We were told the NHS wasn't "overwhelmed" but hidden away are all the cancelled appointments, surgeries and so on, plus people very ill not attending A+E. Probably never have a number how many died as aresult, or are now critical, as I doubt it can be proven. had everyone turned up thenmaybe the NHS WOULD have been overwhelmed?

 

[talldave]

So just go back to normal, and if the hospitals are overwhelmed, we just crack on?

It's one approach. I'm quite thankful it's not one we are taking though.

Are you going to completely isolate care homes? No staff in or out?

How about hospitals?

Even the much-lauded Sweden didn't go for a strategy of just letting nature take its course.

There are care homes that took the necessary precautions and had zero deaths. Staff go in and out, life goes on, with proper PPE usage.

 

[DB]

And as for protecting the vulnurable, that didn't work out too well, did it?

No, they didn't do a very good job of that.

But that's no justification for over-the-top measures applied to the whole population now.

 

[DB]

We were told the NHS wasn't "overwhelmed" but hidden away are all the cancelled appointments, surgeries and so on, plus people very ill not attending A+E. Probably never have a number how many died as aresult, or are now critical, as I doubt it can be proven. had everyone turned up thenmaybe the NHS WOULD have been overwhelmed?

Gievn that the Nightingale hospitals received little or no use, the NHS could proabably have carried on as normal and still coped.

 

[Justin Smith]

Well that's not the world I live in.

In mine, SAGE told the government that the NHS would be likely to be overwhelmed without a lockdown. The lockdown ensued. The NHS wasn't overwhelmed.

Of course the extra capacity came at the expense of the NHS doing much else - yet a lot of people seem to be blaming the lockdown itself for deferred treatments etc.

There is a big difference between thinking we can eradicate this in a short timescale and thinking that the right thing to do is just let infections rocket again.

Infections won't rocket again, have you seen all the graphs ? Go on

Worldometers

, reorder the list of countries to "deaths per 1M population" (that column should the default first column, not the tenth ....), look at the shape of the deaths graphs (7 day moving average on). Every single country with a death rate of over 1 in 2000 (deep exposure to the virus) has the same pretty well constant drop in deaths. And as the death rate per country goes up the trend is even more consistent, Belgium, with the highest deaths per million population is the most stark, as one would expect.
New York is even more stark, and worrying. The US could have a big problem with Covid for three reasons :
1 - No nationalised health service (or insurance equivalent)
2 - A strong freedom ethic.
3 - A lot of obese people.

 

[AdamWW]

Infections won't rocket again, have you seen all the graphs ? Go on , reorder the list of countries to "deaths per 1M population" (that column should the default first column, not the tenth ....), look at the shape of the deaths graphs (7 day

As I've said above, I don't think focussing entirely on death rates is the right way to look at it.

In the UK I see a country which still has a lot of restrictions and yet infections per day still seem to be constant.

We will see.

If they continue to drop and you're right I will be very happy.

 

[AdamWW]

Gievn that the Nightingale hospitals received little or no use, the NHS could proabably have carried on as normal and still coped.

I still don't know where the staff would have come from. Building more hospitals is relatively easy. Staffing them less so.

China were able to move staff to Wuhan from elsewhere in their huge country.

 

[Howardh]

Our death rate - including Covid cases, I believe is actually below normal recently. haven't got the tables to hand, but if anyone knows that this is true please confirm!

 

[DB]

I still don't know where the staff would have come from. Building more hospitals is relatively easy. Staffing them less so.

China were able to move staff to Wuhan from elsewhere in their huge country.

True to an extent - but theese hospitals had at least a workable staffing level anyway, so it would have taken a major spike to have overwhelmed it

 

[Howardh]

I still don't know where the staff would have come from. Building more hospitals is relatively easy. Staffing them less so.

China were able to move staff to Wuhan from elsewhere in their huge country.

Indeed. And these hospitals weren't "built" just stuff sourced and shipped in - which admittedly is a job in itself. Godness knows where they would have found the staff.

 

[AdamWW]

Our death rate - including Covid cases, I believe is actually below normal recently. haven't got the tables to hand, but if anyone knows that this is true please confirm!

Yes I think they may have done down a little below the average for the last few years.

At any point excess deaths will usually be below or above the average, of course.

I think there is little doubt that at the moment the number of people dying of Covid-19 is insufficient to justify the current restrictions on our lives.

But that's not what they are there for.

 

[AdamWW]

Indeed. And these hospitals weren't "built" just stuff sourced and shipped in - which admittedly is a job in itself. Godness knows where they would have found the staff.

My guess is from anywhere and everywhere if it had come to it - anyone who could be pressed into service after extremely minimal training.

It might not have been pretty.

 

[DB]

Our death rate - including Covid cases, I believe is actually below normal recently. haven't got the tables to hand, but if anyone knows that this is true please confirm!

Yes: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...glandandwalesprovisional/weekending10july2020

In Week 28, the number of deaths registered was 6.1% below the five-year average (560 deaths fewer), this is the fourth consecutive week that deaths have been below the five-year average

 

[Howardh]

My guess is from anywhere and everywhere if it had come to it - anyone who could be pressed into service after extremely minimal training.

It might not have been pretty.

Tim Martin of Weatherspoons wanted his staff to work in Tesco. I'm sure after a couple of hours training they could have been in a Nightingale instead....

 

[Howardh]

Yes: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...glandandwalesprovisional/weekending10july2020

Thanks, I suppose many still isolating are protecting themselves from non-covid virus's (eg flu) that could ultimately kill them. And with fewer being on the roads until recently that may be a factor.

 

[Domh245]

Another factor to consider is 'harvesting' - those who have already died as a result of COVID will have had to die at some point.

 

[sjpowermac]

Diamond Princess - cruise ship with 3771 people on it, and 2666 passengers (av age 69 ! ), the virus was free to infect for over two weeks (20 Jan to 4 Feb) yet only 17% contracted the virus and only 14 died. If old Neal had been right it should have been between 100 and 150 deaths. And he was driving government policy and being interviewed on the radio every day (whilst not making trysts)......

You keep going back to the cruise ship: do you think the people onboard were partying hard, or perhaps taking at least some precautions to avoid contact?

 

[Bletchleyite]

You keep going back to the cruise ship: do you think the people onboard were partying hard, or perhaps taking at least some precautions to avoid contact?

I doubt they were taking any precautions prior to the outbreak being discovered, it was not well known about back then.

 

[yorkie]

Well that's not the world I live in.

In mine, SAGE told the government that the NHS would be likely to be overwhelmed without a lockdown. The lockdown ensued. The NHS wasn't overwhelmed.

This thread is repeating the same arguments as done in previous threads. This claim was debunked on this forum before. I will see if I can link to the thread, to save us the hassle of saying the same things again

Here we go, found it: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...nged-our-attitude-to-risk.206012/post-4649217

 

[sjpowermac]

I doubt they were taking any precautions prior to the outbreak being discovered, it was not well known about back then.

It seems the final figure the OP keeps quoting were influenced by taking some action:

Chowell also looked at how effective the stringent containment measures introduced on the Diamond Princess were in reducing the virus’s spread. From 5 February, passengers on the ship were confined to their cabins for two weeks or more.

He and Kenji Mizumoto, an epidemiologist at Kyoto University in Japan, report in Infectious Disease Modelling3 that the day the quarantine was introduced, one person could go on to infect more than 7 others. The infection rate was probably quite high because people were living in close quarters and touching surfaces contaminated with the virus, says Chowell.

But after people were confined to their rooms, the average number of others to whom one infected person passed the virus dropped below one.

So R dropped from 7 to 1 by implementing a lockdown...

What the cruise-ship outbreaks reveal about COVID-19

Close confines help the virus to spread, but closed environments are also an ideal place to study how the new coronavirus behaves.

www.nature.com

 

[HSTEd]

I still don't know where the staff would have come from. Building more hospitals is relatively easy. Staffing them less so.

Staffing is not a cliff where you have one too few nurses on a ward and everyone dies.
Quality of care would degrade on coronavirus wards, but you can drop a lot before care quality collapses.

 

[sjpowermac]

As for my comments on France and Spain, they are now seeing more daily cases than the UK! This is because they did a harsh lockdown of the sort that is designed to suppress and potentially eliminate a virus (except this one cannot be eliminated); in other words France and Spain did a short term measure and it is impossible to say at this stage that this is in any way more effective than Sweden's longer term approach. All the evidence so far suggests the opposite is true, but let's wait a few months and see.

People were/are strongly encouraged to work from home and, based on the evidence I saw in the UK in the week before the actual lockdown, many businesses in the UK were doing a similar thing, with trains becoming increasingly lightly loaded as the week went on. Many businesses who had not yet told people to work from home already had plans to do so from the Monday anyway.

If we'd followed Sweden's path, and acted at the right time, with sustainable measures, we would have been better off in the long run, I am sure.

My observations of the railway the two weeks prior to lockdown mirror yours: the commuter trains were empty. Circumstantial evidence, of course, but my local observations of pubs and restaurants was that they emptied too. Even without a lockdown, many people had decided to stay home: just as it seems many in Sweden did, at least during April.

Given the number of deaths we had in the U.K. during April, I wonder what the number of deaths would have been without a lockdown and the likely impact this would have had on economic activity?

You could argue that people should be more rational about risks and that the media have whipped up fear about the virus. That said, whilst you can mandate that people go to work/school you can’t mandate that they go out to shops/pubs/restaurants.

I’m well aware of the damage that lockdown has done to the economy, education and the mental health of many. On a personal level, I was hugely relieved as the lockdown started to be lifted.

I’m not arguing for or against the lockdown, it’s just I don’t think the arguments are quite as clear cut as you and a number of others appear to think. I’m not convinced that Sweden is the shining example it is being portrayed as: tales of life carrying on there as normal seem somewhat wide of the mark.

 

[Jonny]

Well, let's do a comparison of Spain vs Sweden: Spain took pretty much the opposite approach to Sweden, had about the strictest lockdown anywhere and has had stricter mandatory mask rules for some weeks now. They are having a significant increase in cases (see https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/ ), to the extent that people coming from Spain to the UK are now expected to self-isolate for 14 days, e.g.:

Coronavirus: 'No apologies' for Spain travel rule change

The foreign secretary defends the government's "swift decision" but Labour calls it "shambolic".

www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus: 'No apologies' for Spain travel rule change

The foreign secretary has defended the "swift decision" to require travellers arriving in the UK from Spain to quarantine for 14 days.

Dominic Raab said he knows it will cause disruption for holidaymakers but the government "can't make apologies".
(article continues)

So, lockdowns are of questionable effectiveness at best. Sweden may have been right to merely (greatly) restrict gatherings. On the other hand, we had a panic-demic that is still not settling down and the media are still stirring it up.

 

[bramling]

This graph is very significant :

View attachment 81270

Remember, Sweden has had no significant lockdown (BBC News link).

It certainly make me even more sure we (and most of the world) have gone down the wrong path...... I have always thought this lockdown and social distancing (they're two sides of the same coin really) was the wrong course to take, I wanted support and isolation for vulnerable groups and everyone else carry on as normal. That was primarily because I was concerned at the effect on society and the economy but in actual fact, as more and more evidence comes to light, I am unconvinced the lockdown has had any significant effect on the death rate, certainly if additional deaths caused by the very same lockdown (e.g. cancer patients whose diagnosis and treatment has been devastated by the lockdown strategy) are factored in.

The UK equivalent of the above graph (not much better really, and at a HUGE cost.....) :

View attachment 81271

Not saying you're not correct, however it's difficult to make comparisons with Sweden because of the difference in population size & density. Sweden has had social distancing, and on top of that their death rate as a proportion of population size is disfavourable compared to neighbouring countries - though again that figure is also hard to use for comparison purposes as Sweden has had similar issues with care homes.

 

[sjpowermac]

So, lockdowns are of questionable effectiveness at best. Sweden may have been right to merely (greatly) restrict gatherings. On the other hand, we had a panic-demic that is still not settling down and the media are still stirring it up.

So are you saying that in Sweden people didn’t start working from home and social distancing? I think you are mistaken...

It will certainly be interesting to see how things work out in the medium and long term.

 

[bramling]

Gievn that the Nightingale hospitals received little or no use, the NHS could proabably have carried on as normal and still coped.

The problem with the Nightingale hospitals is they still needed to be staffed. Had they been fully filled with Covid patience, where would the staff have come from?

Presumably there might have been some value in concentrating Covid patients in these hospitals in order to help keep normal hospitals free from Covid though?

 

[Yew]

Other than, say, New Zealand?

How many times do we have to go through this? a) NZ did not have as widespread transmission as here in the UK, an b) as soon as they open their borders (or even if they don't but allow trade) they're at massive risk of it all happening again. Without herd immunity, it's just a massive pile of straw, inside a barn that's on fire.

 

[Yew]

So are you saying that in Sweden people didn’t start working from home and social distancing? I think you are mistaken...

It will certainly be interesting to see how things work out in the medium and long term.

Voulantary changes != mandatory restrictions

 

[sjpowermac]

Voulantary changes != mandatory restrictions

Was social distancing in the U.K. really mandatory?

My question to you is this: what do you think the effect on economic activity would have been of letting the virus rip through the population?

Doubtless some people would have carried on as normal, I’m not so sure that would have been the case though for many.

 

[HSTEd]

Presumably there might have been some value in concentrating Covid patients in these hospitals in order to help keep normal hospitals free from Covid though?

If you have coronavirus speciality hospitals, it allows you to use staff that have tested positive but are not too physically unwell to work.
Understaffing doesn't immediately mean everyone dies after all, there is a gradual degradation in care quality to some critical level where it falls off a cliff

My question to you is this: what do you think the effect on economic activity would have been of letting the virus rip through the population?

Doubtless some people would have carried on as normal, I’m not so sure that would have been the case though for many.

If linked to a Government information campaign noting that noone under 40 had anything at all to worry about, and even under 65 the risk was tiny unless in a very small number of categories, the effect would have been drastically smaller than what we got.