There are too many unknowns.
I cling to the hope that a good proportion of the population are getting COVID-19 but do not suffer much at all and are therefore part of the herd immunity.
BUT we do not know if that is the case yet or ever.
Home testing antibody kits might be pointless IF we can learn from other countries' experience/results instead.
The UK has the luxury of not being the first to experience this - lets hope we learn from other countries.
As for mental health. My partner has been getting quite stressed about her return to work. She had been on holiday for the last half of March to use up her leftover annual leave. She was due to go back on 1/4/20 but went sick. She was due to be on holiday again 6-21/4/20 to babysit the grand-daughter. That is in Cardiff (150+miles away) so no longer feasible and the parents are working from home anyway. The leave has been cancelled anyway because her employer has cancelled it. She is a cook in a private hospital and it seems to be busier than it ever was - I think they are taking on NHS work at capacity. She has diabetes and high blood pressure but not very serious levels of either. She has been having headaches (bordering on migraine) recently but a relaxant drug seems to have cut that down. My point is that she is suffering from NOT isolating !.
My own stress has been dealing with her and the knowledge that healthier people than her are dying. I do not tell her that I know that and she does not understand enough English to be burdened. She is from Laos so most people just view her as a tanned slit eyed Chinese person - result is that by February she was noticing people moving away from her on the bus. She has not been further than Paris for fifteen years so I pointed out to her that she is lucky as she won't be catching it from them !. She traveled to work by public transport so that was my greatest COVID-19 risk personally. Now that my factory has finally closed (only till 14/4/20) I am driving her to and from work. I have TOLD my boss that when we go back to work I will continue giving her lifts and also my closest colleague as that will be two risks out of the way.
As for suicide. That is a very real issue. Because it has always been swept under the carpet it is not appreciated how many suffer enough to believe
MISTAKENLY that they are doing us a favour by taking their own life. I myself was confronted with (unsuccessfully) resuscitating a 24 year old male back in 2014. It still affects me but I do not suffer too much as I insist on boring people with it !. The thin end of the wedge is minor mental health issues that then get deeper over time. So self isolation does not help. The young man in question had already become quite isolated. I was working at breaking that down but, with hindsight, I was not successful/quick enough.
So don't underestimate mental illness but also don't underestimate the direct and indirect effects of COVID-19.
To get the balance right between spread and over-isolation is going to be difficult as we don't yet understand the spread.
What I actually believe (hope !) is that, as the rise in hospital admissions plateaus, then restrictions will be relaxed a little then progressively. I just hope the plateau does happen and is at a level low enough for the NHS to cope !. Then the number of admissions will be monitored. Note I am not talking about number of deaths - just how well the NHS is protected to keep it functioning.
The prime consideration is going to be civil unrest, as many have said. We all know what happened as a result of a single drug dealer, who was allegedly armed, getting shot dead by police in Tottenham. The scars of missing buildings still exist in Croydon - the other side of London. The kind of people who did that are far more likely to riot when their belly is empty rather than over some mistaken belief that allows them to loot shops for luxuries. I personally saw it as I ended up physically in the middle of it. A jewelers shop was attacked and I saw people leaving Icelend with bottles of spirits predominantly not food. I will be very disappointed if the authorities are caught napping this time.
Question - on furlough leave. How do I get it ?. We are now closed 4/4-13/4 inclusive - tat all. We have been told to use our annual leave. My belief is that losing 20% of my pay now is better than losing 100% later in the form of unpaid leave. I am sick of the place so happy to be at home rather than us cleaning door handles, switches, kitchens and toilets for 8 man(person) hours daily. I get to interact with as many people as possible on my site !.
I had quoted a load of posts but it is too complicated.
The following appeared while i wrote war and peace up thread !.
Indeed, but the estimate of the proportion of cases that require hospitalisation is based on data from China, S Korea and the other countries that have carried out mass testing. And even in the unlikely event it is out by an order of magnitude, that would still mean that no more than 3% of the UK popoulation can have contracted COVID-19 to date. So at least 20 times more people would need to be infected to reach the 60% where herd immunity might be expected to slow the transmission rate, meaning 20 times more hospital admissions for the NHS to cope with.
Prof Neil Ferguson was on the R4 Today programme this morning and indicated that the government's exit strategy from lockdown is now mass testing combined with contact tracing and quarantine measures, as has successfully slowed the outbreaks in China, S Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore. This completes the slow motion policy U-turn from the herd immunity strategy that Prof Ferguson and the government's SAGE committee were advocating only a few weeks ago.
Prof Ferguson said his modelling now indicated that the full lockdown will have to remain in place until at least the end of May before some gradual easing might be considered. It seems to me that this is consistent with the timescale for manufacture and commissioning of additional ventilators, and training of new staff, to enable the new field hospitals to handle an increased flow of critically ill patients.
Information from China might well be miss-information as they are less open. The proof is the media leads us to believe that local Chinese authorities were suppressing the facts at the beginning of the outbreak. We have to see what information comes from other countries - South Korea seems to have dealt with it well but its maybe too late for that now. The devil in me hopes that China has bigged this up to ensure the rest of the world suffers economically as much as they must have. So we might be less harshly hit than expected Just a rash few ideas there.
There is at least one fatal flaw in Prof Ferguson's modelling, and that is that our economy cannot withstand a lengthy lock-down. It might be the ideal situation in laboratory conditions, or in a data model, but the reality is that our economy is largely service sector based, and that locking it down for as long as that will have additional consequences. In a few short weeks, millions of people might be running out of money, with no clear indication as to when they might get paid again.
It does highlight how many of us work in non-essential roles. Most of our income comes from luxuries. My grandparents never ate out - "waste of money". I can recall a time when it was not normal to eat out takeaway or otherwise. Nowadays many people get meals delivered. This means they cannot cook - I know families where the cooker is unused - only a microwave needed for reheating.
A point out of the above is that cooked food deliveries must not stop !. it is possibly better isolation than visits to the food shops.
