The Preacherman

Agree staff rather beds and equipment is the bigger problem. The Nightingale Hospitals were called out as a fraud on that basis. However, that shouldn't stop us setting up field hospitals if necessary.

Or it would show the ability of mass testing to produce a casedemic. The next few weeks in Belgium should settle that argument. What the situation in Belgium does expose is how ineffectual measures such as distancing, hospitality curfews and masks are in stopping the spread of a respiratory virus.

Not only that log scales are good for mapping rate of change not so good with absolute numbers. Only Czech Republic is currently exceeding numbers from first wave and they didn't really have a first wave.

The panic in Upsalla is over as the spike seems to have diminished and I've not seen anything to say the Swedish government has stopped publishing data. Norway seems ripe to be hit hard by a second wave as they had relatively few deaths first time round. Now introducing restrictions comparable to England tier 1. https://www.thelocal.no/20201026/norways-health-authority-calls-for-new-national-covid-19-restrictions-as-oslo-tightens-measures Norway tightens restrictions to prevent virus resurgence as Oslo adds measures

News from Belguim is concerning but growth is still nothing like March/April Amid covid-19 surge in Belgium, doctors and nurses asked to keep working after testing positive https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/belgium-covid-hospitals-schools/2020/10/23/85358010-14a9-11eb-a258-614acf2b906d_story.html BRUSSELS — Well into Europe's second wave of the coronavirus, so many Belgians are sick or quarantining that there aren't enough police on the streets, teachers in classrooms or medical staff in hospitals. In some hospitals, doctors and nurses who have tested positive but don’t have symptoms are being asked to keep working, because so many others are out sick with covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. School principals are marshaling secretaries and parent volunteers to replace falling ranks of teachers. “We have runaway numbers in terms of contamination and a major issue is the risk of the collapse of the hospital system of our country,” the minister-president of Brussels, Rudi Vervoort, said Saturday as he announced a host of new restrictions. Unlike in the spring, there are enough masks and gowns to go around. But months of preparation haven’t been able to avert a shortage of people. And a decision by the national government to remove a mask mandate and loosen restrictions on social contacts this month contributed to an acceleration of the virus before being largely reversed in hard-hit areas since Friday.

Belgium seems to have massively ramped up testing and in the process the number of positives has gone up! Seems they were allowing tests and demand you didn't have to symptoms only contact to get a test. Belgium scales back coronavirus testing strategy as labs face crunch The country’s health minister has warned of a ‘tsunami’ of new cases. https://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-scales-back-coronavirus-testing-strategy-as-labs-face-crunch/

The pressure on Johnson from his own backbenchers is increasing. Many of them are in constituencies that have suffered with 3 months plus of local lockdown. Over 50 Tory MPs in northern England press PM for roadmap out of lockdown Joint letter from group expresses fears that election pledge to ‘level-up’ is being abandoned https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/26/over-50-tory-mps-in-northern-england-press-pm-for-roadmap-out-of-lockdown

Protests also happening in Barcelona

Anti-lockdown protests happening across Italy this evening.

Well we were meant to have a pandemic plan that was deemed to be world beating by WHO. Unfortunately our f**kwit government didn't apply the contents of the plan, although no one knows what is in this plan.

This so called second wave has been very regional and a logical conclusion is that it has hit areas that failed to reach herd immunity in March.

And even more good news from Sweden.

The NHS is so fragile that it is constantly at risk of being overwhelmed. We avoid it being overwhelmed in April by emptying geriatric wards seeding covid infections in care homes, and by scaring people to stay at home and die at home. Plus some smart thinking by ICU medics to increase the number of ICU beds. At the moment the problems are regional North of England and Northern Ireland and the sign are promising although things are stretched the hospitals seem to be coping.

More good news from Sweden.

Makes perfect sense to me but clearly not to the statistically challenged in charge. As has been said so many time the best measure is excess deaths. At the moment they are in line with previous years.

Surely our police should be catching real criminals rather than enforcing random rules about people assembling in parks?

One constant theme in the UK has been a measure isn't working. Rather than ask why it isn't working and how could it be made to work, the nation governments have doubled down and reinforce measures with fines and tighter rules.

Why is the Greater Nottingham area now being moved to tier 3? It was a bizarre omission originally as the case rates where the highest in the country but there has been a very dramatic fall since then.

I think the biggest problem is a national system. Where it has perceived to have been effective (Germany) local public health officials are in control of the testing and tracing.

Things are too far gone for track and trace to work. (1) disease is widely spread, (2) there are many mild or asymptomatic cases, (3) there is pre-symptomatic transmission, (4) we cannot identify the first index case in a given population, or how that person got infected

You can't find the report as it hasn't been published. The authors claim leading journals won't accept. The elephant in the room is aerosol transmission. Both surgical masks and fabric do very little to prevent aerosol transmission and may even provide a vector for aerosol transmission by nebulising virus that has landed on the mask's surface.

Several times I have said we should look to Sweden for the answer. Support should be offered to those that wish to shield but shielding would be voluntary.

I'm not pretending the virus doesn't exist we are right to exercise caution. However, pretending we can carry on like this indefinitely is a massive issue. How do we manage the unemployment that lockdown is causing?

None of this is normal. When this is over we will appreciate how badly we're been served by the people in government who are meant to protect us.

You are defending the government's health care response to the epidemic. The hospitalisation rates were only so high because we had no community health care support and we told people to stay at home to protect the NHS.