I saw that and I must say you look exactly as I imagined you would.
Brexit, for once some facts.
- Thread starter flecc
- Start date
Oh, I see. I had no idea that you had access to the passenger inventory which, according to you, shows that all passengers actually lived exclusively in Wuhan and had not traveled from elsewhere for their international flight.
It’s either the above or else you are talking your usual misinformed and incorrect shite.
Yet we in London, Heathrow's city, continue to outperform the rest of the country in respect of Covid-19, probably because of such as this, as I've already posted.
To protect the NHS the politicians wanted us to keep the infection rate low by isolating, but that was always impossible in our crowded city of London. Therefore it was a stupid and pointless policy, proving if ever it needed proof that one size never fits all.
So as I've been posting for weeks we broke all their silly rules and did our own thing here in London, ignoring politicians and police to suit our very different circumstances. That's been very effective, since we quickly had the highest infection rate by far and the highest consequences of course.
In other words, we got the first phase of the pandemic over quickly and may not even have a second phase. Those of us who were most likely to get infected got infected, the vulnerable who were likely to die anyway, did die.
So for a while now we are leading the country with very low rates and our NHS never got overwhelmed despite our cavalier attitudes. Indeed our hospitals have had to appeal for patients with other conditions to return for treatment to give them something to do, even A & Es being empty. The NHS struggled to find ANY patients for our 4000 bed Nightingale emergency hospital which has been a horribly expensive and ill advised white elephant.
I honestly wonder if it had been better to have never had any lockdown, carried on going to work and schools as usual, taken what would have been only a slightly bigger hit and saved the economy rather than the NHS.
That would have avoided the very long period of economic suffering we are now facing, which itself will result in a higher sickness and death rate of its own.
.
Last edited:
Well you can’t argue with the numbers, London is currently doing well. I would not have believed this possible and my instinct would have been that London would be overwhelmed with cases and many unnecessary deaths.
Sadly the above is leading me towards Boris Johnson having been thinking along the right lines with herd immunity.
Perhaps to a small degree, but we are way short of true herd immunity needing 80% of us to have caught it.
I prefer to think that getting it over quickly by letting vulnerability dictate was the right approach, just as we've always done with 'flu epidemics for the bulk of the population, only innoculating some of the elderly.
We have become an increasingly neurotic and panicky society over several decades, following America as always, seeing disasters and bogeymen everywhere, inventing numerous illnesses and conditions unknown in my youth. Apparently we now suffer from Allergies, Aspergers, PTSD, ADHD, ME and any other combination of initials we can dream up to fit a random perception.
Worse still is that we as a society have lost the skills of how to accept the inevitability of death rationally, having been lulled into a false belief that medicine can always have an answer, even daring to think that life could be indefinite.
And in this Coronavirus subject I recognise all the hysteria and panic that's been induced by the excess of publicity from a media always hungry for anything new to get us to obsess about.
.
We need to tread carefully here, this is getting perilously close to giving Boris Johnson credit for something. I’m sure any benefits are purely coincidental and have not been planned or thought out.
I've agreed with the rest of your post but disagree with this.
You and Danidl would have been more right if we'd acted immediately as South Korea did.
We didn't, we left it far too late so we now have to take the hit as we've been doing in London, until a vaccine arrives.
We've already done immeasurable harm to our very vulnerable economy, so further lockdown, and repetitive lockdown cycles would cripple us so badly that with Brexit thrown in, we could end up in a third world economy not worth living in.
The shortened lifespans and deaths from increased illnesses then could dwarf anything Covid-29 might do at present.
Anyway, London is conducting the experiment of living with Covid-19 now with considerable success, so you won't have to wait long for the outcome to know what's best in our current circumstance.
.
Benefits are benefits, they are nothing to do with Johnson's policies. As I've consistently posted, we in London have largely been ignoring his policies.
They've been impossible to follow in our circumstance of 10.2 million people in a very small area and often living in confined space in close proximity to each other at all times.
So we've lived with what we have, breaking the rules for the best individual outcomes.
.
There are many unknown factors.
Like whether a proportion of the population is effectively immune (for whatever reasons). And how many would have mild to very mild cases.
If nothing had been done, the death rate would, I strongly suspect, have gone so high as to be unmanageable. But whether that means more deaths, in the end, it much less certain.
Either many people have had it and are now immune, or social distancing has worked, or for a reason I don’t fully understand, the virus isn’t spreading as rapidly as it did in February and March. Lockdown is now over, it’s no use pretending otherwise, so now we shall see which of the above is correct. I’m not sure what the indicator will be, possibly not death rate as many of our most vulnerable people have been weeded out, so maybe the new indicator will be positive tests results.
I keep going round one loop - if an infectious dose is 100 units of viral particles, and let us accept the gross over-simplification, what happens to someone who receives 50 units? Or 25 units? Or less? Maybe repeatedly?
Obviously, they don't get the same level of antibodies that someone who gets covid-19 produces. But does something happen that might give better resilience, if not frank immunity?
Reading is not your strength then. I said came from ..not lived in
Oyster no one knows. It is possible that they never actually get infected, so don't invoke the proper immune response , In theory the lowest threshold viral load should be a single particle , but probability plays a huge roll. There are cases being reported of persons having apparently developed antibodies ,and presumably were mildly infected, and in some cases even tested positive , who later get the full blown heavy dose. Now whether these are defective or false positives cannot be ruled out.
From what I have read, warmer weather does seem to decrease the spread. This should not be that surprising as the same thing happens with normal flu. The main reason appears to be that people spend more time in-doors and less time outside in the colder months, and viruses are much more transferable inside than outside.
I do wonder too, if sunlight has an effect on the virus on say a surface such as a cash machine. In February and March if someone with the virus uses a cash machine the sunlight will not be very strong and perhaps has very little effect on lessening the potency of the virus. That might be different in May, perhaps a few minutes of being exposed to the suns rays now might mean the virus is degraded by a large percentage. I have no idea if this is correct or not, but it would be good to see if any experiments have been done using sunlight on the virus.
London does seem to be doing very well and I am not sure why but I imagine the answer will be multi faceted. For one thing doesn't London have on average a very young population compared to many other parts of the Country?
Quite - no-one knows.
And I could go on and on with speculation about "What happens if ...?" Some answers will be appearing soon, others might take many years.
Why all the wondering, all the conjecture?
London is doing well, why doesn't matter. Why not just accept it and do as we've been doing here, relax and remember que sera sera.
We as a country missed the boat to deal with Covid-19 long ago, it will pass in time just like every other problem does.
I see the authorities and police are making pests of themselves again today because commuter trains passenger numbers here are up by 90%. Of course they are, bloody fools. Didn't they just tell people to go back to work? How the **** did they think they were going to get to work, get a lift on Santa's sleigh? Their fatuous suggestion was cycle or walk, aren't they aware that many of our commuters travel 20 to 40 miles or more to work and for some extending into hundreds of miles every day?
.
Last edited:
Not particularly, the difference in average age to the rest of the country is 3.8 years. (35.5 years to 40.3 years)
It would need at least a decade of difference to even shift much onto the Covid-19 vulnerable regions of old age and poor health.
And anyway, our living conditions and air quality are among the worst anywhere in the UK, easily offsetting any small age gain.
I get the message from Oyster, Barry and yourself, you don't like it that London is doing so well, such is London's unpopularity elsewhere in the country, so you look for reasons why it could just have happened anyway.
The truth is blindingly obvious to us here. The official lockdown policies that most of you have been following were often impossible to follow here, so we did our own thing and it's paid off.
We got the first phase over quickly while your lockdown has spread yours over time "to save the NHS" as the politicians said and wanted. Maybe that was right for you, but it wasn't for us in our very different situation.
.
we don't know this for a couple of weeks.
the ONS will publish the percentage of infected population.
Once this information is available, we can calculate more or less exactly when this crisis is over (or not as the case may be).