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Its good news alright.

Question now is - what can be relaxed without causing that to shoot up?


I'm not sure how we monitor it closely enough to avoid being 2 weeks behind the curve if we relax the wrong thing.

Best I can think of is concentrating whatever spare testing resource there is on (representative) sample communities around the country. Test (regardless of symptoms) extensively in those communities every 2 days or something like that so if it does start to creep up, you can more quickly react rather than when people first start arriving into hospital - by which point it could be far too late.

What creditable excuse could she use?

We take our scientific advice from London, not the pope of Rome or dublin.

etc
etc
etc

Don't forget - it doesn't have to be rational - as long as it appeals to wee Jamie et al.

So none of the stuff is going to help until a vaccine is found? So back to my earlier point, can we not just close the island down and what  we have contain it let it die off and get on with our lives again?

Its what I wanted done in Feb.

Unfortunately, there is an additional problem beyond the obvious.

Here you have to deal with Arlene Foster - she'll not accept that as it would be diverging from the rest of the UK. Big Ian had no problems being pragmatic when foot & mouth came along, but Foster is a different breed of intransigent (& stupid).

So the bed occupancy in hospitals in the north are now confirmed at 70/30
70% empty
30% occupied
And many say we are not on top of this

... and what percentage of that 70% come with breathing assistance?

But yeah, from talking to a couple of folks working in the ICUs, numbers in intensive care are dropping - but they are worried about the 2nd wave. A second wave that will be made extremely bad by idiots calling for an immediate return to normalcy.

Radiogaagaa there is a times article about who saying about Sweden and lockdown but it's behind a paywall. I don't know the full ins and outs as I can't see all of it though I expect there is context. I suspect they are saying what Sweden are doing is ideal for the next phase of lockdown as opposed to it being what you should do up front. I am not sure though but I am not fully convinced they are lauding Sweden's approach.(could be wrong as I can't see the whole article)

I can't see how they would be lauding Sweden's approach when it compares extremely poorly to its immediate neighbours, hence wanted the article to read it.

Of course, Smurfy just ran off when asked (twice) to back up his statement.

Any thoughts on WHO saying Sweden have done a great job?

You have still to supply a citation for this.

[But for a civil action to stand a chance then they would need evidence that if government / care home owners had operated differently, then these people would have lived longer.]

The government won't be sued.

The absolutely unnecessary public enquiry into care homes during this time, will determine nobody to blame.

Nobody will win.

I'm envisaging a civil action outside a public enquiry - which as you say - are just a monumental waste of money.

We've seen enough of them here over the years to know they are a washout.

But for a civil action to stand a chance then they would need evidence that if government / care home owners had operated differently, then these people would have lived longer.

Such evidence would have to be modelled against the spread of the virus in the country / region ie comparing NZ's care home approach would make no sense, as the spread was more tightly contained across the country.

I just can't see how anyone will be able to pull together the evidence to make that case.

And if I'm being honest, it's no bad thing. Sometimes there isn't actually anyone to blame. It's just life.

Ah, but that's where your missing the key point - the government reduced the classification on COVID-19 so it wouldn't have to supply PPE to the same level. 100+ dead healthcare workers later would indicate that reducing protection was very much a grave mistake.

The government won't be sued.

The absolutely unnecessary public enquiry into care homes during this time, will determine nobody to blame.

Nobody will win.

I'm envisaging a civil action outside a public enquiry - which as you say - are just a monumental waste of money.

We've seen enough of them here over the years to know they are a washout.

[Are care home owners getting away with alot here in terms of not providing their staff with PPE?]

Are care home owners getting away with alot here in terms of not providing their staff with PPE?

In years to come you might see some kind of legal action going their way alright, I could see them being a very easy target when the dust settles.

In which case the government are even more culpable to being sued.

They deliberately forced through a designation change for COVID-19 so that they could get away with less stringent PPE requirements.

100+ dead healthcare workers and counting... I'd say they are wide open to a massive compensation claim from all families affected. Hancock offers £60k? Might wanna stick two zeroes on the end of that.

The WHO have now applauded Sweden's no lockdown strategy
Schools return will rise the r rate from 0.6 to 0.7
Am I missing something here

Dunno if your missing something, but I'm definitely missing two citations.

I'd like to see the meeting minutes from all the SAGE meetings.

If the govt were "following scientific advice", surely they'd have nothing to fear from publishing those minutes.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/30/uk/britain-coronavirus-missteps-boris-johnson-analysis-gbr-intl/index.html

Good read. Very good read.

Where are the BBC?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus/garden-centres-and-churches-could-soon-reopen-in-northern-ireland-as-part-of-gradual-exit-from-coronavirus-lockdown-39169090.html

Garden centre Unionism.

Flower Pot Loyal.

Can anyone answering me this - we went into lockdown at the end of March, say 30 days ago, and the virus has 14 day risk period - should we not be seeing much lower figures than we are in terms of new cases?  I'm getting increasingly pessimistic that this virus is very stubborn and has still plenty of fight left in it.  Where are these new cases coming from if we are spending most of our time in the house?

Very much so.

Lockdown as it stands at the moment is not working as well as we would hope. How new cases are occurring is something that needs to be ascertained ASAP.

Are shops the common factor?

Seafoid, just curious about the calculation that it takes 30 days to reach 406 as the number infected at R=2.5. That implies that the 2.5 people infected by each carrier are infected over a five day period. Is that the standard methodology for estimating the numbers infected for a given R?

It'll depend on the contagious period of the disease.

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/7/20-0282_article

R0 might have been nearly 6 in the early stages!

Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 is the causative agent of the 2019 novel coronavirus disease pandemic. Initial estimates of the early dynamics of the outbreak in Wuhan, China, suggested a doubling time of the number of infected persons of 6–7 days and a basic reproductive number (R0) of 2.2–2.7. We collected extensive individual case reports across China and estimated key epidemiologic parameters, including the incubation period. We then designed 2 mathematical modeling approaches to infer the outbreak dynamics in Wuhan by using high-resolution domestic travel and infection data. Results show that the doubling time early in the epidemic in Wuhan was 2.3–3.3 days. Assuming a serial interval of 6–9 days, we calculated a median R0 value of 5.7 (95% CI 3.8–8.9). We further show that active surveillance, contact tracing, quarantine, and early strong social distancing efforts are needed to stop transmission of the virus.