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Chinese "Devil Virus" - anyone worried?

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Mamma Mia said:
I'm actually not sure what you're responding to. Maybe I missed where people said she would achieve the same results if she was in charge of a different country.

Based on what I see in this thread, the more pertinent question would be: if she was in Boris position, do you think the outcomes would be better or worse?
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Well she is clearly more decisive and empathetic. Would her style of leadership and decision making translate well to the UK ? I doubt it would be worse ! However that doesn't mean she would be successful either because the issues faced here are very different and a magnitude larger.

TBH as I said I don't believe there is one set of protocol that we can point to and say 'these should have been followed'. Even in hindsight we can't be sure as we won't know what the effects of taking a different approach would have been in any particular country. All leaders have made multiple mistakes and the number that have more ticks in the plus column are few and far between and likely have been working with a different set of parameters.
 
We knew about this disease towards the end of last year..

We just took a passive approach to it.. dismissed it.. Imho Alarm bells should have been ringing back in December., to prepare the country for it.. Did they?? no.. far from it... they failed miserably..

It could be worse though we could be USA under the guidance of Trump.. Though at least they are doing more testing..

As for New Zealand. Yes smaller density population. However cases where minimal before the implemented lockdown, that's where we went wrong, we should have done the same. That would have allowed better capacity to trace the virus.

No instead we kept the airport's open, kept transport running, even during lockdown, held mass sporting events.. It just beggers belief... PPE we didn't even attempt to stock up on it until we where in lockdown.

Care homes taken off the radar, no support until it was too late.. far far too late..

Boris comes out the other week trying to hail our reaction in the UK as a success, Success for fucking who ?? Really ??!! Who are you trying to kid ????

These number of deaths and casualties we have now could have been easily avoided if we had been more proactive in terms of our response when this all first came about.
 
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Japan has a population of 126 million, so almost twice that of the UK with 624 deaths compared to our 31,855 ( Govt figure we all know the real figure is likely twice that ) so they must have been doing something right we should have followed.

The biggest criticism I have of the government, and I have a few, is the lack of control at the airports. We are an island nation. How fucking hard would it have been to screen at airports. If it took you an extra hour / 2 hours to get through, so what? It would have helped potentially save thousands of lives. Its criminal negligence as far as I am concerned.
 
Dave G said:
Japan has a population of 126 million, so almost twice that of the UK with 624 deaths compared to our 31,855 ( Govt figure we all know the real figure is likely twice that ) so they must have been doing something right we should have followed.

The biggest criticism I have of the government, and I have a few, is the lack of control at the airports. We are an island nation. How fucking hard would it have been to screen at airports. If it took you an extra hour / 2 hours to get through, so what? It would have helped potentially save thousands of lives. Its criminal negligence as far as I am concerned.
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100%

Screening at airports if they must have had to stay open back in December, mandatory 14 days quarantine if you have entered the country from an infected country or when Europe first cases came into the scene..
 
Thankfully we're going back to work soon. Thousands of people in a factory, all touching the same car, equipment, stock etc what could go wrong?

They've closed the fridges and vending machines though, so everything will be A-ok.
 
Canteens and break areas closed off as well.

But fuck our food and break times. Us pesky serfs need to get back to work.
 
Frogfish said:
Well she is clearly more decisive and empathetic. Would her style of leadership and decision making translate well to the UK ? I doubt it would be worse ! However that doesn't mean she would be successful either because the issues faced here are very different and a magnitude larger.

TBH as I said I don't believe there is one set of protocol that we can point to and say 'these should have been followed'. Even in hindsight we can't be sure as we won't know what the effects of taking a different approach would have been in any particular country. All leaders have made multiple mistakes and the number that have more ticks in the plus column are few and far between and likely have been working with a different set of parameters.
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I don't agree at all.

The Chinese approach was right. Lock everything down, eradicate as much as possible, look for clusters and deal with them when you reopen. It's broadly the same as NZ. One is a massive country with loads of borders, one is a small one with none. It works universally.

The UK has done the opposite and is the worst case on the planet.
 
Dave G said:
Japan has a population of 126 million, so almost twice that of the UK with 624 deaths compared to our 31,855 ( Govt figure we all know the real figure is likely twice that ) so they must have been doing something right we should have followed.

The biggest criticism I have of the government, and I have a few, is the lack of control at the airports. We are an island nation. How fucking hard would it have been to screen at airports. If it took you an extra hour / 2 hours to get through, so what? It would have helped potentially save thousands of lives. Its criminal negligence as far as I am concerned.
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Actually if you use the heat screening apparatus used in China - no time at all because you just walk between them (like security gates at a store entrance). Shows the body heat in 3-4 places (no not the crutch).

However due to asymptomatics, the lag time before infection becomes obvious and people taking medication to lower their temperatures, I'm not sure it would have helped much.
 
Woland said:
I don't agree at all.

The Chinese approach was right. Lock everything down, eradicate as much as possible, look for clusters and deal with them when you reopen. It's broadly the same as NZ. One is a massive country with loads of borders, one is a small one with none. It works universally.

The UK has done the opposite and is the worst case on the planet.
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I'm very aware of what was done in China - and what wasn't. China was not 'locked down' per se - or what I should say is it wasn't a full quarantine situation (so akin to that in the UK? Maybe even more freedom - initially nobody was checking where you were driving to for example).

We could still go out (not cities close to the epicentre of course, those were tightly controlled) - though most people stayed at home - it's just that virtually everything was closed bar a few essential shops. Metro & buses all still ran.

Even the restrictions didn't happen until after about a billion people had floated around the country. Remember the outbreak happened right at the beginning of mankind's largest migration (Chinese New Year) and the virus had been in the wild for at least a month before that. In fact the CNY probably helped a lot with the restrictions - people already on vacation were just told not to travel back to work. And the Chinese (Asians in general) are far more 'obedient' than Westerners.

They didn't even stop people coming in / leaving at that time (we flew out at the end of February), the heat checks clearly didn't work either (which is why they banned foreigners entering and everyone - the hundreds of thousands of returning Chinese - had to go into quarantine).

They must have done something right though to prevent a massive outbreak in other cities. I believe the people themselves were a large part of the solution in their adherence to protocol.

The reality is though that no direct comparison can be made between China and NZ because there is a massive disparity between lifestyles and culture (not to mention isolation). It's no 'one size fits all'.

I agree with your protocol for clusters of course.
 
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Government advises face coverings where it’s not possible social distance, well no one saw that coming.
 
6TimesaRed said:
.....As for New Zealand. Yes smaller density population. However cases where minimal before the implemented lockdown, that's where we went wrong, we should have done the same. That would have allowed better capacity to trace the virus.
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People seem to have the wrong notion regarding the alacrity with which NZ responded to the virus.

Depending on which lab you are listening to the virus was in the wild from late Nov. to mid-Dec. The WHO issued it's advisory on 12th January.

Although they banned travellers coming directly from China on 27th January they didn't stop them arriving from other hotspots. This ban didn't apply to NZ residents or university students from China.

The NZ lockdown didn't go into effect until 23rd March (Level 3) and then 25th March (Level 4) so almost a full 2 months after the ban on travellers from China. The NZ Alert system (1-4) was started on 21st March.

10th April : compulsory quarantine for returning Kiwis.

Their first case was a month earlier and by the time they shut their airports and locked down they were reporting around 50 - 80 cases a day (equivalent to 700 - 1,000+ a day in the UK).

Just setting the timeline straight.
 
Woland said:
I don't agree at all.

The Chinese approach was right. Lock everything down, eradicate as much as possible, look for clusters and deal with them when you reopen. It's broadly the same as NZ. One is a massive country with loads of borders, one is a small one with none. It works universally.

The UK has done the opposite and is the worst case on the planet.
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It will bring you some comfort to know when none of this was happening, and everyone was washing their hands, still going to school, using alcohol gels, and coughing into their shoulders, they were all rapturously applauding Boris. Getting angry now, after it's too late, is a bit pointless. Unless you intend to take up arms and assassinate members of parliament, then trying to blame people now isn't going to bring 50,000 people back from the dead. Fuck the general public. Perhaps they deserve to lose all their jobs and die.
 
Frogfish said:
People seem to have the wrong notion regarding the alacrity with which NZ responded to the virus.

Depending on which lab you are listening to the virus was in the wild from late Nov. to mid-Dec. The WHO issued it's advisory on 12th January.

Although they banned travellers coming directly from China on 27th January they didn't stop them arriving from other hotspots. This ban didn't apply to NZ residents or university students from China.

The NZ lockdown didn't go into effect until 23rd March (Level 3) and then 25th March (Level 4) so almost a full 2 months after the ban on travellers from China. The NZ Alert system (1-4) was started on 21st March.

10th April : compulsory quarantine for returning Kiwis.

Their first case was a month earlier and by the time they shut their airports and locked down they were reporting around 50 - 80 cases a day (equivalent to 700 - 1,000+ a day in the UK).

Just setting the timeline straight.
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Their population right is the equivalent of Scotland ?

Remind me what is the death toll of Scotland compared to New Zealand ?
 
6TimesaRed said:
Their population right is the equivalent of Scotland ?

Remind me what is the death toll of Scotland compared to New Zealand ?
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But again, that's not taking into account that New Zealand is much larger than Scotland, is an isolated island in a region of the world that hasn't seen as much of the virus, has a much better climate that is better suited to withstanding the disease, plus probably loads of other factors that make it incomparable.
 
6TimesaRed said:
Their population right is the equivalent of Scotland ?

Remind me what is the death toll of Scotland compared to New Zealand ?
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FFS you have to have more intelligence than that. Please tell me that was just the first thing that came to mind and you didn't actually give some real thought to that reply?
 
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I went to the post office today. People in there were all talking about 'Isn't it nice that everything is going back to normal now'. The traffic on the road behind mine was almost at normal levels at this evening rush hour.

A lad I went to school with told me he's been told he has to go back into work as of tomorrow, despite him being a kitchen manufacturer working in a room with lots of other people, meaning they're constantly within 2m of each other cos the machinery cannot be moved. His employer actually told him "Stop being so selfish, the company needs you & we've lost enough money thanks to this flu shit already"

The Government are literally putting profits above lives, no matter how you dress this shit up.
 
FoxForceFive said:
I went to the post office today. People in there were all talking about 'Isn't it nice that everything is going back to normal now'. The traffic on the road behind mine was almost at normal levels at this evening rush hour.

A lad I went to school with told me he's been told he has to go back into work as of tomorrow, despite him being a kitchen manufacturer working in a room with lots of other people, meaning they're constantly within 2m of each other cos the machinery cannot be moved. His employer actually told him "Stop being so selfish, the company needs you & we've lost enough money thanks to this flu shit already"

The Government are literally putting profits above lives, no matter how you dress this shit up.
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Sometimes I actually think I had a life before this one, and I did some horrible, heinous shit. Then I died. And now I'm in hell. Because this place is fucked, and backwards, and it's getting worse. What's more evil and unjust than the good people suffering and being controlled with little sign of hope, while the perpetrators actually profit?

Then I remember hell isn't real, but this place can get pretty close to it.
 
British Bulldog Spirit, as it where.. Still spinning that yarn..

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Frogfish said:
Japan were strangely late to the party in locking down trips from China (which provides a huge percentage of Japan's visitor numbers). But they wear masks anyway if they have a fever/cold/flu to protect others so mask-wearing never an issue. Maybe @juniormember can update us ?
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No idea if the reported figures are true, but yeah masks have been common so most people wear them (massive shortage of them though).
There were supposedly 15 new cases in Tokyo and 1 in Osaka yesterday. I can’t believe there are so few to be honest.
 
Frogfish said:
You mean like Singapore that's now seeing their highest daily increases by far ? And whose own PM said that contact tracing only works when countries, populations and infections are small ?

Contact tracing undoubtedly is a tool in the box but it's not a panacea by a long way. Probably only really useful in the early days of the outbreak (or when it's way way past it's peak). Italy and South Korea both gave up on it after the infections became too numerous (it's extremely labour intensive - which is why it doesn't work for large outbreaks or high population/density countries), lockdowns worked far better.

It's likely a great tool for when infections fall to manageable numbers though.
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Singapore's numbers are very high is because they have more test per million population than the rest of South East Asia. Out of almost 24k (mostly foreign labourers living in dormitories) cases, only 21 died. If the rest of ASEAN use the same method of testing, most will be at least 5 to 10 times the reported cases. For me Singapore is doing the right thing.
 
juniormember said:
No idea if the reported figures are true, but yeah masks have been common so most people wear them (massive shortage of them though).
There were supposedly 15 new cases in Tokyo and 1 in Osaka yesterday. I can’t believe there are so few to be honest.
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Very strange considering Japan's massive exposure to the Chinese tourism industry. Maybe I started it all back in December 😱
 
Y1 said:
Singapore's numbers are very high is because they have more test per million population than the rest of South East Asia. Out of almost 24k (mostly foreign labourers living in dormitories) cases, only 21 died. If the rest of ASEAN use the same method of testing, most will be at least 5 to 10 times the reported cases. For me Singapore is doing the right thing.
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They are but they have had very high testing numbers all along. So the huge rise in new cases is not because of new testing inflating the figures but due to new infections. It's all those freezing cold shopping malls and office blocks !

I wasn't comparing Sing. to other SEA / Asian nations (e.g. Indonesia / Philippines) because they are obviously not as well organised ... as it's really not possible to be when your populations are spread over thousands of islands and not one small one the size of Anglesey !
 
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