RobertL18C wrote:
Isn’t R 1.3 equivalent to around 2700 after 30 days
After 30 serial intervals, which is the time passed between somebody being infected and the average time to them passing it on to the 1.3 next people. For Covid-19, this is around 4 days.
HIV / AIDS, for example, has a much higher R0 (basically, the number of different people somebody has regular sex with), but a very long serial interval (months to years), which is why it was absolutely essential to suppress it, but we could do so at a more leisurely pace (and of course, wearing condoms is a relatively simple fix)
While I am glad that the general press and hence more and more people in the population now understand and discuss “R”, I find all these headlines saying “R is now value x” a bit ridiculous. First, there is no single R because it depends so much on population density and local behaviour, and secondly, with no reliable metric for the number of infected people, we can only estimate it with a delay of around 1.5-2 weeks, and even then with a quite wide error margin.
Interesting part from an article just published……………
Incidentally, my financial journalist friend has been back in touch today to flag a piece of virtue-signalling nonsense in Bloomberg‘s ‘Evening Briefing’ yesterday. “The financial cost of coronavirus crisis could reach $8.8 trillion, but the higher cost – the one in lives – already stands at 306,000,” it says. As my friend points out, if you divide $8.8 trillion by 306,000 (the total number of Covid deaths so far) you get $24.4 million. So the author of Bloomberg’s ‘Evening Briefing’ believes each of those lives is worth $24.4 million? Quite generous, when you factor in that the median age of those who’ve died of the virus in most countries is about 80, with the vast majority having underlying health conditions. There’s another consideration too, which is the lives that are likely to be lost as a result of the global economic recession that’s heading towards us like a tsunami. As my friend points out:
The loss of $8.8 trillion in global output – of which a large amount must be due to the self-inflicted lockdowns – will inevitably lead to the loss of a great many lives in future, especially in poor countries like India and South Africa.
Do lives lost in the future not matter to Bloomberg’s virtue-signallers?
I promised to post the links. Here is the research from the University of Bristol which shows that if GDP falls by more than 6.4% in developed countries, more people will die from other causes in the long term
If there is a sustained fall in GDP per head, then population-average life expectancy will decrease. Applying the J-value to Covid-19 shows that more life will be lost than will be gained if a disease countermeasure causes GDP per head in a developed country to drop by 6.4% or more for a significant length of time.
In point of fact, UK per capita GDP fell by 6% in the financial crash of 2007 – 2009. This led on to a stalling two years later in the 30-year long growth in the nation’s life expectancy. It has remained stuck since
https://iai.tv/articles/is-a-recession-more-deadly-than-coronavirus-auid-1397
Remember it was published on 7th April so a little out of date but the message does not change.
I don’t think the calculation is right because if nothing was done the deaths would be way higher. The current UK estimate for mortality is around 0.5 to 1%, and it would spread to most of the population within a few months so you are looking at roughly 500k dead just in the UK. And while most of the deaths are old people, there is a large number of people who are not old/frail (these are mostly obese, but that’s a large chunk of the 1st World nowadays) too, plus some as yet unknown / unpublished number of people who have long term organ damage.
Of course there is the argument, often seen on social media, that one should just let 1% of the world die, to save the economy, but I don’t think that stands up either because with 1% dying within a few months the situation on the ground would be such mayhem (imagine say Italy x 10) that most people would be too scared to come to work anyway.
What continues to frustrate me is the lack of info on where and how people are catching it, but I think it is done fo public policy reasons. For example where we are there is almost nothing – from here which is a website which at least 99.9% of the UK doesn’t know about, and definitely 100% of the BBC doesn’t know about 
but the govt would not want people to disregard the rules in all the places where there is nothing happening. So we aren’t told that there was a cluster around some supermarket for example.
Peter wrote:
So we aren’t told that there was a cluster around some supermarket for example.
Even if you were told it would be history at that point, so what’s the use?
Locally, all of our deaths have been very elderly people – some of whom were already on palliative care pathways. Others were quite fit and active for their ages. But all were very old. However if you were to multiply the number of patients we have looked after such that the hospital was overwhelmed, perhaps a third of our deaths would have been previously fit and well 40 and 50-somethings.
The other big unknown is what the long term effects are going to be – there will be a lifelong economic cost of providing for someone who can no longer walk a long distance because of shortness of breath, for example. These costs should also be set against the economic cost of the lockdown, which is difficult as we do not know what they are.
I confess to sitting on the fence – which may be the right attitude. Lockdown is not an all-or-nothing thing. We ought to have the least restrictive lockdown possible, but it is not yet time to go back to normal.
Airborne_Again wrote:
Even if you were told it would be history at that point, so what’s the use?
Because there may be common threads to where clusters occur, which may be useful to know when you make your own decisions.
To use the previous example, if we knew clusters often around supermarkets one could rethink their shopping habits or be extra careful around them.
Interesting reports today about anti-coagulants showing significant promise due to clots in the lungs looking to be a significant factor in deaths from this disease.
I am not sure it is feasible or desirable to see super-local level clusters. That introduces loads of other risks including those affected being targeted. If there was a cluster 3-4 weeks ago, who cares now?
Even if you were told it would be history at that point, so what’s the use?
Education on basic hygiene procedures. Something which is a completely alien concept to most.
It is pretty obvious from the ultra-hard-to-find numbers that in some places there might be 1 in 10k infected so you would be monumentally unlucky to meet one at the local farm shop, but not so unlucky to meet an infected supermarket trolley handle if you visit the local larger town. In a big city, especially the poorer areas, it may be 1 in 100 so you have to be far more careful and your chance of getting it on a bus is high (some studies from China show the bus/train route to be really effective). One could argue most people are way too uneducated to make these judgements and this is what a govt has to work on, but it would be nice for the rest of us (practically everybody on EuroGA is really smart) to have the data.
Just been out to fill up a car and buy a newspaper. 100% gloves for that one, and the paper is in the ozone steriliser now, along with a box of yoghurt coated raisins 
A nice side effect of this crisis is that I can pay up to £60 (I think) with google pay on the phone.
We ought to have the least restrictive lockdown possible, but it is not yet time to go back to normal.
It should be location based but I don’t think the govt wants to get into that, for fairly obvious reasons.
Peter wrote:
Of course there is the argument, often seen on social media, that one should just let 1% of the world die
I’d like to see if these people are as keen if the situation was they were in the 1% who has to die.
People say the Isle of Man TT motorcycle races are dangerous, but the death rate in the TT is usually about 1%.
