Coronavirus

Quote: lefty goldblatt "Quite a bit like the "grabbing numbers out of thin air" for this virus. Three weeks ago, "experts" predicted a daily exponential rise in deaths. It simply hasn't happened (thankfully). Figures banded about, only go to scare not only our public, but the whole planet.'"

It is happening right now.

The daily count over the past 2 weeks in Italy is
28, 41, 49, 36, 133, 97, 168, 196, 189, 250, 175, 368, 349, 345, 475

Spain:
1, 1, 5, 2, 7, 13, 6, 19, 31, 47, 63, 98, 48, 191, 105

France:
0, 3, 2, 7, 3, 11, 3, 15, 13, 18, 12, 36, 21, 27, 89

UK:
0, 1, 1, 0, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 10, 14, 20, 16, 33

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... try/italy/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... try/spain/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavir ... ry/france/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

When the number of cases requiring critical care reaches a point where the health service is overwhelmed, the mortality rate jumps up because people who otherwise could have survived given the right treatment end up dying too.

The number of cases requiring critical care will be directly proportional to the total number of cases in the population. The faster that grows the faster we reach the tipping point which has overwhelmed Italy.

Once at that point, as the caseload in the population rises the death rate is going to keep spiralling upwards as more and more people need care and can't get it because the ICUs are overfull to capacity.

Exponential growth starts slowly when your baseline numbers are low but as they grow it gets out of control rapidly.

The government is trying to slow the growth to delay or hopefully stop us reaching a point where the health service is overwhelmed but there is little slack in the system and our path is only a couple of weeks behind Italy unless we take serious measures to stop. People carrying on as normal out in pubs and gyms is just going to push us to the Italy path sooner.

I wonder at what point the penny will drop for people who are still trying to make comparisons to being 'just a bad flu season'.

Every country in Western Europe is being forced into these extreme measures. In the UK its Boris Johnson's Brexit government doing it - the same people who hate the BBC, the establishment, experts. They laugh in the face of everyone who warns that Brexit is going to be a disaster and carry on anyway. But they are spooked enough by this to be slamming through emergency measures that they know will be unpopular.

A large chunk of the measures in the emergency powers they are introducing to Parliament next week are basically about facilitating the rapid disposal of bodies because they are worried the funerals and burial system is not going to be able to cope with the surge in demand over the next few months.

They never did this with swine flu, or the other bad flu seasons, because they weren't fearing death counts in the hundreds of thousands and the NHS collapsing. That is a very high risk now unless extreme steps are taken which is why they are acting like a wartime government.