Whilst we focus closely on the UK lock down end

[Suff]

Brazil has totally lost control of covid. Just 500 short of 50k cases today. More than any country has recorded before.

At the same time India is on the slippery descent into uncontrolled cases.

World daily cases hit over 165k for a single day today.

The UK is in the exit stage from the first infections and is doing well. But on the world stage the virus is just getting going.

I suspect that a vaccene, even with a 25% success rate, may be deployed regardless of issues.

[Workingman]

I suspect that a vaccine, even with a 25% success rate, may be deployed regardless of issues.

Yes, I suspect that is why AstraZeneca are ramping up production of one version.

My son works in the same Oxford lab as the girl who had the very first jab of the potential vaccine trial back in April. It's a double blind trial so nobody knows who got the vaccine and who got a placebo. They are regularly tested and though the results are kept secret from the volunteers they are all doing well.

Recruitment has now been done for another 10,260 volunteers in phase 2 for the age ranges 5-12, 56-69 and over 70 and that suggests that there could be some positive news come August(ish). They would not start without some level of confidence.

When phase 3 starts it will be a much larger group of over 18s and they will get either the new vaccine or a licensed vaccine, I think for meningitis, and if that goes well then who knows?

On top of that is the news that an old and cheap drug, dexamethasone, cuts the death rate for those on ventilators by a third and those on oxygen by a fifth.

[cromwell]

Brazil has the favelas which are slums, and India has slums too. Proper ones.
So if the virus gets into the slums there is very little that the Brazilian and Indian governments will be able to do. In teeming, crowded cities with areas of poor housing and hygene it is just going to rip through them.

[Suff]

Isn't it sad that the pharma and medical research only really get going when hundreds of thousands are dying. We are stuck in a mode where we cannot make progress in case a single person suffers, yet millions are dying every year for a want of cures which move at a glacial pace.

For some it must be very frustrating.

[Suff]

When I pulled my son out of Argentina he mentioned that to me Crommers.

However in Argentina, when a child is born, it is taken away and vaccinated before being given back.

State health in Argentina is not good but most children are born in hospitals and therefore get bcg and have done since the 50's.

In Brazil this is not the same case. Because
of Bolsonaro, there is probably a big move to ensure that every case is recorded. Useful to remember that antibody trials in London produced a 15% hit which means that cases were under-reported by about a factor of 10.

If we did a 100% antibody test in the UK, our death to cases rate would probably fall close to flu. Of course if we did that, then pretty serious questions would have to be answered about killing the economy. So don't look for it any time soon.

[Workingman]

Of course if we did that, then pretty serious questions would have to be answered about killing the economy. So don't look for it any time soon.

So, let's see. Newly published research shows that had we gone down the road of herd immunity and not gone for lockdown the death toll in the UK would be 450k+. What a boost to the economy that would have been, eh?

Nearly half a million dead in just three months and we would not have killed the economy?

The paper is in Nature and a precis of the results and figures is in The Pulse.

I am no big fan of the mess the gang of incompetents have made, but things could have been a whole lot worse had the 'herders' got their way in the beginning.

[Suff]

Oh I see this stuff all the time. I also see the soul searching in Sweden about if they had only locked down instead of going for herd immunity.

So what are the numbers?

Sweden is 7 times smaller than the UK. So seven times Swedish figures? 400k cases and 35k deaths.

Actual UK figures? 300k cases and 43k deaths.

Clueless, the lot of them. We were never getting half a million dead because the fatality rate is just not that high and the only way we will ever know the true fatality rate is to test everyone. Virus tests for those with symptoms and antibody tests for those without.

Now when those "what if" blatherers start lobbying for that, then you know they are telling the truth.

Let.us do a simulation shall we. The %antibody tests in London extrapolate to 1.5m who have had the virus. If we take the 43k deaths for the whole of the UK as a % of that infection rate, we get a death rate of 2.8%.

A more realistic figure for the whole country is around 7 million infected. That returns a death rate of 0.6% or double influenza with several flu vaccene's.

If we then take the entire population of the UK at 70m and apply a 0.6% rate, it would come to 420,000.

Except.

The death rate in the under 50's is less than 1,000 and every single one of them had an underlying health problem, diagnosed or not.

The whole point about herd immunity was to shelter the vulnerable and let the rest get on with it. The 50m not in the danger area could have carried on, the other 20m would have had to be protected, but that is a far cry from what is being done today.

So I keep my skepticism and ignore the "what if" navel gazing.

[Workingman]

Suff, all the figures you give, the "Actual UK figures? 300k cases and 43k deaths", "The death rate in the under 50's is less than 1,000" the simulations and the extrapolations are with and because of the (badly implemented) lockdown. Without it the 450k+ dead is very real, as a whole team of well qualified virologists, epidemiologists and number crunchers have shown, but they're "experts" so must be ignored. They looked at the impacts of various strategies in 11 countries, so had plenty of data to work with, but they might as well have read tea-leaves as far as some people are concerned.

Don't forget that Bunter and his puppet master are in charge in the UK. The government did not create the virus but they sure as hell totally own the handling of it, and that has been abysmal.

If the economy has been wrecked it is all down to Bunter and his cabinet of incompetent sycophants: nobody else. Those who voted him in as leader of the Cons', his apologists, and those who gave him an 80 seat majority should thrash themselves with birches five times a day, every day.

[Suff]

Actually the "experts" are all guessing because they have not tested everyone in the UK for either the virus or antibodies.

There has never been a pandemic in the modern world like this, they have no evidence for their "projections" and, like the supposition that the virus can reinfect, with nearly 5 million recovered and No viable evidence to prove that position, it is just a guess.

But those experts are not responsible for all the other lives touched by the lock down so it's all right to trot out the worst case guess isn't it.

Sweden is the outlier. They ignored the "experts" and didn't lock down but are, on detected to deaths, better than the UK.

When the experts can produce clear test results, multiple studies and something better than a guess for a global pandemic, then I'll say they have something more than a guess.

[Workingman]

The experts analysed data from 11 countries and their results are only "guesswork" whereas your numbers are concrete and 100% perfect because .... they fit your tanking of the economy narrative.

My contention is simple.

Whatever was done would have hurt the economy, as has happened everywhere.

What I now see are plenty of armchair experts banging on about the tanking economy. What I singularly fail to see, apart from gut feelings, are any solutions from these same experts on how to un-tank the economy AND bring the daily number of cases down AND bring the daily number of deaths down. It has to be three from three, two out of three is no good at all.

Those last two are stubbornly at about the same level as when the lockdown started and then it went UP and UP. And when I say 'bring the numbers down' I don't mean by a few tens, I mean down to the level just before lockdown.

Sweden, New Zealand and Easter Island are irrelevant. They are: 1. Not the UK and 2. Do not have Bunter and Demonic in charge.

Worldometers figures for cases to tests suggest that about 2.4 million in the UK have or have had Covid, but empirical evidence suggests twice as many ~ 5 million. We need ten times as many for herd immunity and unless the death rate falls exponentially during that time we are still looking at 150 - 200k deaths.

There is no sugar coated way to put this. We are already screwed.