Coronavirus - potential Black Swan?

[winkie]

1 hour ago, Peter Hun said:

Of course, the government doesn't have complete control of itself, even after 10 years of f***ing about in power.

I suppose they can always use the excuse that the are utterly useless and have no idea how to run the country.

What we have is low regulation and small government.....government now rely on others outside government to assist them, they pay them well for the services.....they have others to help rule on their behalf, they are not utterly useless they do what they can with the tools they are afforded.....things do happen all be it not as fast as would like....agree time is of the essence in this particular circumstance......other things often can take years. 

[Confusion of VIs]

2 hours ago, longgone said:

The only one disowned is you from the EU PERMANENTLY. mahwaaaaa   

No, Irish family so entitled to a passport. Daughter currently studying in Munich has already got hers. Second kid thinking of joining her next year.

Not sure why you care about having an EU passport. 

[kzb]

2 hours ago, Peter Hun said:

Not according to the experts, this is a corona virus, other corona virus give immunity for 3months.  It might be longer in this case as the virus hangs about for much longer. But I wouldn't bet on it. Although my wife and I are betting on it - hoping the antibody test will be positive and can work in a COVID ward with less risk.

The very article under discussion said 9 months not 3 months.

[Clarky Cat]

38 minutes ago, Andy T said:

Just discussing this in the office, turns out a few of us had  something mid January, flu like with a bad dry chesty cough- one guy said he was taken to A&E with breathing difficulties but told he was ok to go home.  I had a bad dry cough, non productive, violent at times, and I was waking a few times in the night gasping for breath in a panic - felt as If there was a blockage in my airways but I could never cough anything up - not experienced anything like it before.

Who knows. If they ever get around to mass antibody testing, it could reveal some very interesting results.

It's incredibly unlikely that was covid-19 - there'd only been a hundred or so cases in China at that point. If 5 of you in the office had it,  we'd have had 2500 cases linked back to your office by mid Feb and 1.3 million by mid-March assuming uncontained spread and no lockdown measures.

Plenty of other respiratory viruses circulate over the winter

[Peter Hun]

1 hour ago, winkie said:

So many at the moment who over the last three months have had flu type symptoms that included a dry cough and temperature, some with sore throat......even losing sense of taste or smell.......all these people do not know if they have had it or if it was just another annual virus we all get from time to time.....sooner we can test to find out who has had it and who has not the better.

Thats the £500 billion  question

[longgone]

7 minutes ago, Confusion of VIs said:

No, Irish family so entitled to a passport. Daughter currently studying in Munich has already got hers. Second kid thinking of joining her next year.

Not sure why you care about having an EU passport. 

so what`s you argument then about leaving the EU since you did not either ?, god man present events should tell you life is too short. 

it must be financially driven then i guess, worse than a thick brexiter then morally. 

i don`t care about having one, but its nice to know i have the ability to live somewhere if need be, too many nepotistic non jobbers running the place anyway like fly's round a dog turd here. 

[Peter Hun]

7 minutes ago, Clarky Cat said:

It's incredibly unlikely that was covid-19 - there'd only been a hundred or so cases in China at that point. If 5 of you in the office had it,  we'd have had 2500 cases linked back to your office by mid Feb and 1.3 million by mid-March assuming uncontained spread and no lockdown measures.

Plenty of other respiratory viruses circulate over the winter

I had a very nasty virus in December, not flu as a I was vaccinated. Fever, bad cough etc. 

Many other people have complained of pneumonia. 

Don't think any of it is COVID related.

[kzb]

2 hours ago, slawek said:

This opinion is shared by the official government modelling. They predict 0.5m deaths but they don't take into an account additional deaths due to NHS being overwhelmed 20 times.   

I suspect the 0.5m deaths comes from a simple calculation:

1% CFR x 80% infection rate x 67m population= approx. 0.5m

This doesn't take into account that people will take voluntary avoidance measures, so the infection rate will be a lot lower than 80%.  On the other hand the 1% CFR is likely optimistic when healthcare is overstretched.

 

[kzb]

Just now, Peter Hun said:

I had a very nasty virus in December, not flu as a I was vaccinated. Fever, bad cough etc. 

Many other people have complained of pneumonia. 

Don't think any of it is COVID related.

Peter, did you say you had CV symptoms the other week?  If so  how are you doing now?

[ticket2ride]

15 minutes ago, Clarky Cat said:

It's incredibly unlikely that was covid-19 - there'd only been a hundred or so cases in China at that point. If 5 of you in the office had it,  we'd have had 2500 cases linked back to your office by mid Feb and 1.3 million by mid-March assuming uncontained spread and no lockdown measures.

Plenty of other respiratory viruses circulate over the winter

Those "I had a cough in December I think I had it" FB chain posts are ridiculous. Just trying to collate databases of the dumb.

[GeordieAndy]

"US Labor Market Is In Free-Fall" - 10 Million Americans Have Filed For Unemployment In Past 2 Weeks

"We’ve lost 46 jobs for every confirmed case of COVID-19 in the US..."

Quote

 

After last week's unprecedented 3.3 million surge in initial jobless claims, this week's is even more unprecedented-er, adding a stunning 6.648 million (just 100k away from our estimate of 6.5million) for a two-week sum of 10 million new Americans claiming unemployment benefits...

https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/shocking-9-million-americans-have-now-filed-unemployment-benefits-lockdowns-began

 

This will take years to turn around ?

Edited April 2, 2020 by GeordieAndy

[Confusion of VIs]

2 hours ago, onlooker said:

I think you might find their ultimate target is not the Tory Govt, but the socialist centralized NHS which has caused the testing problems:

https://order-order.com/2020/04/02/embrace-private-sector-ramp-coronavirus-testing/

Penny pinching has caused both the ventilator shortage and testing problem.

•  To put it into context the US officials are now saying, I paraphrase - think things are bad here look at the UK    “I don’t know if you heard the reports this morning, there’s 8,000 ventilators in the UK. If you translate that to the United States, that would like the United States having less than 40,000 ventilators.  “We have five times that amount.”

We manage to spend about a third less than other advanced economies on health care by sweating the assets. The NHS runs at near capacity all of the time, this looks very efficient in normal times but the price to be paid is an inability to respond when demand suddenly rises.  This was exacerbated by government reluctance to spend early to deal with the emerging threat, resulting us in missing out on purchasing 1,000s of ventilators and large quantities of test reagents that were commercially available as late as February. 

Another of the fallouts from this crisis will be the realisation that if we want a first world health service we will need to provide the NHS with another £50bn a year of funding.  

 

[Billy Ray Valentine]

3 hours ago, longgone said:

i make money sitting at home.  i don`t need to go anywhere. i don`t need the NHS services not stepped inside a hospital for 20 years. 

Don`t you feel guilty when poor doctors and nurses have died when self righteous non jobbers get paid to sit at home on their righteous high horse when useful people have died for nothing. Be useful man do a real job. 

Get out there man make yourself useful, stop moaning about the referendum you lost and step up to the plate and be a man ! offer your services for you county.  It`s different for me I am split between the UK and my other Legal home the EU its different for you, you should be giving 100% to the Uk remainers or brexiters are all the same now.   Take charge 

What is it you do?

[winkie]

The shocking part of all this is to see how fragile the economy really is.....how very many have little savings and live from hand to mouth.....no cash flow......is everything we have been led to believe been an illusion?

 

[MancTom]

15 minutes ago, Peter Hun said:

I had a very nasty virus in December, not flu as a I was vaccinated. Fever, bad cough etc. 

Many other people have complained of pneumonia. 

Don't think any of it is COVID related.

"not flu as a I was vaccinated"

why not? The vaccine only reduces your probability of getting flu, and is based on a  best guess of what strain circulate far in advance.

[dances with sheeple]

3 minutes ago, winkie said:

The shocking part of all this is to see how fragile the economy really is.....how very many have little savings and live from hand to mouth.....no cash flow......is everything we have been led to believe been an illusion?

 

Of course it is an illusion, the bankers were the one`s benefiting most of the time, hopefully people will wake up now to the fact that they need a savings cushion and that high house prices/rents do not benefit ordinary people in any way. Anyway, how are people on here feeling now that the much anticipated/talked about "event" is upon us - Scared? Vindicated? Happy? Sad? (Taleb BTW, in a good and interesting rant on Bloomberg the other day says this is definitely not the Black Swan, 9/11 was he says, but a "White Swan" that governments and corporations should have seen coming and been better prepared for)

[Social Justice League]

People don't have any savings because that isn't what our financial system encourages.  We have a debt based system which means that the public need to constanty borrow funny money from bent banks to keep the show on the road.

In times of drama, our financial system is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, as we are finding out.

Truely pathetic that this is the best we've got in 2020.

[Billy Ray Valentine]

2 hours ago, slawek said:

This opinion is shared by the official government modelling. They predict 0.5m deaths but they don't take into an account additional deaths due to NHS being overwhelmed 20 times.   

I think most people overlook this crucial point. The toll that will be taken on staff will itself become exponential, the more that get sick and have to self-isolate, receive treatment or die, not to mention the fatigue and mental duress which will set in, will make a massive difference to overall mortality rates due to declining quality of treatment.

[Peter Hun]

7 minutes ago, kzb said:

Peter, did you say you had CV symptoms the other week?  If so  how are you doing now?

 Her test was negative. There is a 15% false negative probability, but three of her colleagues and the patient all had similar symptoms in the same time frame (5 days to symptoms) and same recovery period. All tested positive.

Wife had it pretty bad (stabbing pains, cough, feeling rough. No fever ), mine was extremely mild (sore throat, tight chest, mild cough, headache, wozzyness). Maybe my recent BCG has something to do with mild symptoms. Anyway, waiting for the antibody test to provide some clarity.

[Confusion of VIs]

12 minutes ago, longgone said:

so what`s you argument then about leaving the EU since you did not either ?, god man present events should tell you life is too short. 

it must be financially driven then i guess, worse than a thick brexiter then morally. 

i don`t care about having one, but its nice to know i have the ability to live somewhere if need be, too many nepotistic non jobbers running the place anyway like fly's round a dog turd here. 

I don't have an argument for leaving the EU. I think it's a dumb thing to do that will only benefit a tiny proportion of the country.  I don't like to see my country doing dumb things but that's about as far as my direct Brexit concerns go. Financially it won't make any difference to me as I work in an industry, Fintech, which already operates globally and have just started what will probably be my last 3yr contract there.  

Indirectly it has given us a government full of what must be either spineless yes men or dumb enough to think Brexit was a good idea; who being inherently weak/dumb have now completely mismanaged our initial response to the pandemic.  

[Bruce Banner]

2 minutes ago, Confusion of VIs said:

I don't have an argument for leaving the EU. I think it's a dumb thing to do that will only benefit a tiny proportion of the country.  I don't like to see my country doing dumb things but that's about as far as my direct Brexit concerns go. Financially it won't make any difference to me as I work in an industry, Fintech, which already operates globally and have just started what will probably be my last 3yr contract there.  

Indirectly it has given us a government full of what must be either spineless yes men or dumb enough to think Brexit was a good idea; who being inherently weak/dumb have now completely mismanaged our initial response to the pandemic.  

Yes, what a shower, hand picked for Brexit and pretty much useless for anything else. 

[Andy T]

6 minutes ago, Social Justice League said:

People don't have any savings because that isn't what our financial system encourages.  We have a debt based system which means that the public need to constanty borrow funny money from bent banks to keep the show on the road.

In times of drama, our financial system is about as much use as a chocolate teapot, as we are finding out.

Truely pathetic that this is the best we've got in 2020.

'People don't have any savings' because that's the choice they make. They don't have to overdo the debt just because they are encouraged to.

Some people save at low rates because frankly it's better than having nothing at all, and other savers move their cash around different products to make the most of better short term  rates and bonuses available.

[Alistair Campbell]

2 minutes ago, Bruce Banner said:

Yes, what a shower, hand picked for Brexit and pretty much useless for anything else. 

You never wrote a truer sentence BB.  We thought the last lot was useless but this lot have a PhD in uselessness.

[Alistair Campbell]

Have I been asleep . Has Labour not been screaming from the rooftops about the injustice of frontline NHS staff doing without basic kit to do their jobs?   Would you expect firemen to fight fires without BA equipment.

 

Where has Labour gone?

[Andy T]

47 minutes ago, Clarky Cat said:

It's incredibly unlikely that was covid-19 - there'd only been a hundred or so cases in China at that point. If 5 of you in the office had it,  we'd have had 2500 cases linked back to your office by mid Feb and 1.3 million by mid-March assuming uncontained spread and no lockdown measures.

Plenty of other respiratory viruses circulate over the winter

Looked back in my diary and I was actually ill 9th Feb. not mid Jan - but yes I see your point, could of been any existing virus.