I genuinely don't understand the thought process of anyone who says it's no worse than the flu. I say that, not to be argumentative, but as a simple statement of fact.
We have seasonal flu every winter. Do events get cancelled? Is sport - all sport - put on hold? Do people get ordered to stay at home? Do schools close? Does the Army get called out? Do supermarkets implement rationing? Do retired medical staff get called up? Do the global financial markets crash to an unprecedented degree? Do airlines axe between 50% and 90% of their schedules?
All around the world, just about every event you can name has been cancelled. Life has been turned upside down for billions of people.
Here is a tiny tiny subset of what's been cancelled or closed: GCSEs and A-levels, nurseries, schools, universities, Eurovision, Glastonbury, BAFTAs, elective surgeries, English Heritage properties, National Trust properties, museums, art galleries, cinemas, concerts, plays, music festivals, Stonehenge Spring Equinox, many flights, Brighton Festival, Duxford Air Show, Grand National, Hay Literature Festival, Princess Beatrice’s wedding, football, rugby, PGA Championship, tennis majors, parkruns, Suffolk Show, many ferry crossings, Pride Edinburgh, literary festivals, Brexit talks, exhibitions & trade shows, mosque prayers, church services, graduation ceremonies, U3A events, Boat Race, E3 game show, Playboy Magazine, Cannes Film Festival, filming of many films and TV series, EastEnders, F1 races, etc.
So how can you sit there with a straight face and say "it's just the flu"? That's to deny every single piece of evidence in front of you.
Either everyone in the world is in on a giant conspiracy, and managing to hide it - or you're not taking the situation seriously enough.
Boris Johnson has done a poor job of handling the crisis. But he has done an even worse job of scaring people about it. We should all be petrified. Because then we'd be behaving as the situation demanded. Nobody would be down the pub. Nobody would be at a concert. Nobody would still be meeting their friends. And we'd have a chance to slow the virus's progress.
There's a horrible reason why Italy's death rate is so high, even though its health system is better equipped than ours (twice as many doctors per capital, and twice as many critical beds): their health system is full. Literally full. Most of the cases of the virus will be reasonably mild. But maybe 10% will be bad. And a few % of the bad ones will need hospital treatment. But what happens when there are no beds left, no ventilators, and no medical staff to look after them? Suddenly, every bad case becomes critical. And the death rate shoots up. Not only that, but the pattern of victims changes. It's not just the very elderly any more. There will be some badly affected in every age group. None of them will be able to get the necessary care.
It is also unhelpful to labour under the notion that China still has a huge number of cases it's hiding. Nothing in its behaviour backs that up. Again, the simplest explanation for something for which there is no evidence whatsoever isn't "it's a conspiracy". No, the simplest explanation is "what I am seeing is reality".
Will some governments in some countries be hiding some things? Inevitably. Does that mean that the default mode of all governments in all countries is to hide everything? How do you even get out of bed with that level of paranoia?
If you want to understand why normal life has stopped everywhere in the world, you have to look at the shape of the graphs, not just the raw numbers.
(the above came from
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ which also has detailed figures by country)
That's not the shape you want to see!
Italy went into a strict lockdown over a week ago, just as their number of cases and death rate skyrocketed. Why? Because the virus takes two weeks to fully manifest. So you lock everything down on day 1 but you have a gigantic pool of latent cases that you've neither detected nor seen the consequences of yet.
If the course of the virus in Italy follows that of South Korea and China and other countries that took drastic, decisive action, then in about another week the numbers should bend down and down. And eventually, if everyone obeys curfew, they won't have any new cases.
Here in the UK, we're not reacting in anywhere near as drastic a fashion. Our mortality curve is now worse than Italy's was at the same point. And even though Boris Johnson's closed the schools and "strongly advised" people not to go to pubs, clubs etc. he hasn't imposed a strict lockdown. So our curve won't be bending down like Italy's and the others any time in the foreseeable future.
At the moment, we're just feeling the first couple of raindrops of the storm to come.
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Helmuts:
AcornBot:
AcornBot:
