Miffymog

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Normally I walk around town then sit down at a library to read or use the computers. Now they are shut, my walks are twice as long and I'm already feeling better for it.

The location of 10 new field hospitals are being considered. 10s of thousands of ventilators are on track to be produced. The lock down is allowing for the preparation for when the virus spreads.

Finally got round to it ... using the most inaccurate maths there is by assuming an exponential growth to infections continuing unabated as shown in the graph here https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/index.html it will take about 60 days for the UK to reach 50,000,000 infections, roughly 80% of population the errors here are vast, but it finally gives me some hold on to a possible trajectory of the virus ...

Full services are returning to the London Undergound in order to improve spacing between people – better than just banning people from using it. Johnson may have been pushed towards a full lock down sooner than he really wanted. But if this does have a positive reduction in infection rates, it might be no bad thing as it will allow the numerous responses that are slowly kicking in to take hold. Factories being re-tooled to produce ventilators. Field hospitals put up (as Ride has mentioned) More testing kits to be produced More production of hand sanitiser Better distribution of facemasks and safety kits. Loads of nurses and Dr coming back in to service. Even more student nurses and student Dr being stream line in to work. There does feel to be a genuinely successful response which is now being put into motion – which each country has had to do in their own way.

I'm not a fan of large crowds - there are now no large crowds anywhere. My daily walk around the town is now much more relaxed, despite being slightly eerie. #Lookingforthepositives !!!

(OFF TOPIC - the kids were all sedated for the hours long underwater journey with two divers transporting them ... all survived ... incredible)

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Right - currently in the uk there are 5000 cases with 250 deaths. The growth rate is exponential, so I'm finally going get round to doing a little bit of maths to see how long it will take to get to 50,000,000 cases - a degree of herd immunity in the uk This will come to a fatality rate of 2,500,000 - GULP!!! utterly crazy figures The only mitigating factor here is the amount of those who have it but do not get tested .... if there is a factor of 10 here ... Then you reduce the fatalities to the 'standard' (!!!) 250,000 hmmmm

Well - things are worse in the UK than the stats currently portray. Last week all Covid-19 patients were being sent off to another hospital from the one I work at. This week that hospital is now full. Last week we had one ward as a temporary stay in area before they were sent off to that other hospital. This week we are now up to three wards and in one of them one of the Dr's there caught it and is now on a ventilator himself. Slowly all the wards are being transformed to Covid-19 ones, wing by wing ...

Looking at the current case rates in other European countries, ( https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html ) I actually feel the government is taking the right steps at about the right time. London is way ahead of the rest of the country and so it's slightly frustrating that the whole country is being treated like London, but I guess regional instructions just would not be as effect / easy to manage. Keep us informed how it goes - and if so can you guess where you got it from? Maybe - but what luck have you got with the drunk girl on the dance floor if she's sitting at home watching TV???

Kicking off in the UK. NOW - all pubs, clubs and restaurants must close. All those unable to work due to this - will get their salary paid for by the government. First hospital in London having to turn away patients from critical care units. No complete lock down of towns and cities yet. Domino effect of hospitals failing to cope on the way ... No much talk yet of field hospitals and extra capacity being made / freed up so far

Hmmm - I'm happy to go with it being a higher mortality rate than generally accepted. But the only way to really judge the voracity of that paper is to get really deep into all the data by yourself try looking at it from as many different angles as possible by varying the ways the calculations are performed. If there are numerous ways of performing the calculation of mortality rate - and the vast majority all suggest the currently accepted method is low - then I'm with you. But if there are a number of ways of working out a mortality rate - and they've happened to have chosen the one that puts it at it's highest, then there could be some subconscious bias in the approach. But there is definitely a lot of 'hidden' information in all the data that could prove to be very informative - especially on government policy.

hmmm - if this is the case - the the virus is shinning a light on the state of both social and health aspects of different societies.

There will be an awful lot to learn from all this. Current total mortality rate in UK is roughly 11,000 per month. Will this total be significantly increased ... or will there just be a relatively large portion of this due to Covid 19?

And here is the issue - even 100 cases a day would require isolation of years. EDIT TO PREVIOUS POST After doing some more reading of current trends - I came to realise what GSmaster has just posted. The rate of spread is still very, very fast even with isolation.

I hear what you're saying, but can we keep hiding from it? Aims of long term isolation Keep burden off the health system. Give time for antiviral treatments to improve. Long, long term - vaccine. We're being told in the UK that in 3 months the peak will be over, but the problem I have is... Are we aiming to remove it with isolation so that it 'dies' out with out further spreading? Unlikely to achieve this long term. Or do we want to allow a significant number to develop their own immunity? Which means we have to allow some natural transmission. The question is basically - just how long are we going to go into isolation? Isolation has been stepped up in the UK seriously - however, in my region we have 4 cases out of a 100,000 people. We can't completely isolate it out of existence - so at the current rate of transmission, we will have to wait for months if not years for a significant number of people to catch it ... how long is isolation feasible ... ? I just don't know.

Lots of good points going back and forth here that I’m enjoying reading. At the beginning the authorities were trying to take control of the situation, but now the situation has taken control by itself. You can hear in their voices (this included Boris Johnson and Donald Trump) how they are actually worried / scared about what direction this situation will take, even if their words don’t always match this sentiment. Lucky for me, this has not yet had any direct impact on my life, other than the town is much quieter and the museums are closed. But not the local library – hurrah! I have to admit, I’m much rather just catch it now and get it over and done with as I’m now as prepared as I’m going to get. Last night I thought I might have it as started getting a persistent dry cough, only to realise that it was simply a consequence of my turning on my electric heater. Herd immunity / over burdened health services – will all be played out over the next few weeks / months. We will see what happens.

The British government's approach was initially to just let every one get it (all be it, not all at the same time). This would then, hopefully, reduce the issues around secondary wave pandemics. But the outcry at letting hundreds of thousands die has meant there's been a slight increase in response. The rules about quarantine are still relatively lax, with schools being allowed to continue. The idea being that we might be able to hobble on until the Easter Holidays and then take it from there. School kids at home mean care workers have to take time off to look after them. The initial sound bites of 'herd immunity' have been changed to 'flatten the peak' so that health care system can cope. It's hitting London sooner than me who lives up North, the difference is meant to be at least 2 weeks. The problem here is that national advice does not well apply to everyone. I actually clean at the local hospital - we're being prepared for it by having face masks safety tested, but it's yet to kick off here.

Good article about why it's hit Italy so hard. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8100291/Why-people-dying-coronavirus-Italy.html Here's a summary... WHY IS CORONAVIRUS SO BAD IN ITALY? By Ben Spencer and Mario Ledwith for the Daily Mail HOW BAD IS CORONAVIRUS IN ITALY? Italy is the worst-hit country other than China, with 366 deaths and 7,375 confirmed cases of the virus [subs: please update figures later]. The country has imposed the most restrictive measures since World War Two, with 16million people now needing permission to travel. HOW DID IT GET SO BAD? On January 22 stringent protocols were introduced which said anyone should be swabbed coronavirus if they have alarming symptoms. But apparently these were lifted on January 27 to only include people who had travelled to China. Critics say this is down to Italy’s false sense of security because it believed it had put up robust border defences against the virus. The country had stopped all direct flights from China - the only EU country to do so. It had also introduced temperature-screening at airports – despite its highly questionable effectiveness. While politicians in other countries - including Britain - conceded from the start that it was ‘inevitable’ coronavirus would arrive, and started to put protocols in place to cope with it, Italy had focused on putting up barriers in a bid to stop it entering the country. WHAT HAPPENED NEXT? By the time Italian politicians realised the virus had arrived in their country, it was too late to control it. The first case was a 38-year-old Italian man who had never been to China - known as ‘paziente uno’ or ‘patient one’. He arrived at a hospital in Codogno near Milan on February 18 but was not initially tested for coronavirus. Before he even got to hospital, he had infected his pregnant wife, a friend he went running with, and three elderly people in a bar he frequented. In hospital he saw doctors four times before he was tested for the virus. He was eventually tested and diagnosed on 20 February – but even then there was a three-hour delay before he was put in isolation. By then he had infected several staff members and patients. SO WHO INFECTED PATIENT ONE? Doctors are still to find out how he was infected. The implication is that the virus had been circulating in the community for weeks before ‘patient one’ was even infected. WHAT DID THAT MEAN FOR ITALY? Other countries adopted an early strategy of ‘containing’ the virus - by identifying symptomatic people arriving from China and other affected countries, isolating them if they had symptoms, treating them in secure units if they tested positive, and tracking down anyone they had been in contact with. This ‘track and trace’ strategy – which has been effectively used around the world to control the Sars, Ebola and Mers virus outbreaks in recent years - is essential to stop imported cases from becoming ‘endemic’ within a country. In Britain that phase of the coronavirus strategy is just coming to an end in Britain as the virus is now being transmitted within the community. But in Italy the virus had escaped before they knew it was even in the country. WHAT OTHER MISTAKES HAVE BEEN MADE? Critics say once the decision was made to ‘lock down’ the virus, the implementation of protocols across the nation was left up to regional governments - and the way it was handled was patchy at best. For example in San Marco in Lamis, in the Apulia region in south-east Italy, the body of a 74-year-old man who died was released by health authorities before he was tested for coronavirus. It later transpired he had already infected his wife and daughter, who met dozens of relatives and friends at his funeral. Seventy of them are now in quarantine. The episode has been described as ‘a catastrophic mistake’. BUT WHY IS THE DEATH TOLL SO HIGH? The rising number of deaths may in part be explained by Italy’s elderly population. Around 23 per cent of Italians are aged over 65, making it the second oldest country in the world after Japan. Initial data suggests the elderly and those with underlying health conditions are more likely to die if they contract the virus. Public health officials in Italy have been keen to stress that the average age of fatalities there is 81, with the vast majority aged over 65 and already ill. HAS IT CREATED A POLITICAL ROW IN ITALY? Tensions have threatened to boil over concerning how Lombardy, Italy’s richest region, reacted to the outbreak. In the early days of the outbreak, authorities there carried out widespread testing, even on those who displayed no symptoms. The approach was described as ‘exaggerated’ by Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, who said the measures ‘would end up dramatising the emergency’. Government officials suggested that the positive results for those with no symptoms could cause panic. The blame game then saw officials in Lombardy hit back at Mr Conte for his refusal to adopt a proposal in February calling for the mandatory quarantine of students returning from China. Attilio Fontana, president of the region, said: ‘They told us it was a racist behaviour.’ WILL ITALY’S LATEST RESPONSE WORK? On paper, the Italian Government’s draconian decision to place 16 million in quarantine, could curtail the rampant spread of the virus. But it remains entirely unclear if the measures are adequate given the virus is now in every region of the country. The rules, which affect a quarter of Italy’s population, are too wide in scope to be strictly enforced by the authorities, leaving people to police themselves. Though failure to comply with the measures can result in a small fine or three-months in jail, the measures are still being seen as advisory.

Three days nothing. Three days body aches, high temperature, farts you can't trust. Three days washed out. DONE. edit - 5000 dead this season in the UK due to normal flu / 3 due to nCov19

This is presents me with the perfect opportunity to mention one of my favourite threads...

To paraphrase Douglas Harding's Headless Way. Take you finger and point at the wall opposite you, describe to yourself the qualities of what it is pointing at. Then point the same finger towards you (your eyes). Describe the nature of what it is pointing at

Ha ha, it’s that time again (curiously enough – 3:30pm on a Tuesday afternoon) when I’ve had a couple of drinks and find myself ready to spill my thoughts on to the page / internet forum. This is a great thread and I’m loving reading it. Sorry Freeform but, due to my past experiences I’m tending towards Dwai’s point of view rather than yours... although I really appreciate the back and forwards between the two of you and it’s giving me lots of food for thought which I really enjoy using to evaluate my own point of view. So – when a Daoist says that enlightenment is just the first step / opens the door on the path, this is fairly similar to a Buddhist point of view. And from a rational point of view, but from some one who has clearly never experienced anything like this, it all makes sense. I’m quite happy to accept that a first taste of enlightenment is felt on the cushion, and that experiencing this in a waking / normal state is a ‘higher’ / further state. But!!! if you experience this state and find yourself enjoying this / addicted to this state - I just can’t understand how you can call this enlightenment if there is clearly some trace of ego left that is getting addicted to this state. In this Daoist path, it might mean you have opened up all your channels and have lost all animosity - which is clearly really good – and is a nice stepping stone towards the goal of becoming one with the Tao, but how can this be enlightenment. There are numerous stages / levels in Buddhist enlightenment, and that they may well over lap with many of the Daoist ones. However, I’ve got to come back to my belief of what a spiritual path is - and it begins and ends with virtue and a spiritual practice should just add to this.

After a couple of drinks I tend to feel more comfortable to chime in and contribute to these threads that are outside of my own experience, so here I am saying – wow – this is a truly brilliant thread. Thank you ever so much to those who are contributing to it. It takes both time and energy, which is limited to us all, to do so. So I really appreciate those here who are giving them up for the benefit of us others so that we get to read these posts. I like to take an experiential approach to life and so the only existence available is that which is immediately in front of us. For me this does rule out rebirth I’m afraid from both a pragmatic and moral point of view. I am also unable to conceive of a spiritual existence outside of this reality. Once you lose your physical body, what do you interact with and how? Other spiritual bodies in realms outside of this earth … hmmm ok … but how does that existence relate to this one. If it does or can relate to this earth, then what kind of interaction does it have with it? If it does not, well I’m happy for this metaphysical existence to live separately in my imagination. So from a philosophical point of view, I quickly condense to a Buddhist egoless point of view as the goal of the spiritual path. But – this is a Daoist forum and I am most definitely learning huge amounts about the Daoist approach to spirituality and it is truly fascinating!!!