Coronavirus - how is it/has it affected you?

Robster59 said:
Well, that's the Edinburgh Festival Theatre closed and our trip to see Round The Horne tonight off.
Given everything else that's happened it's a minor inconvenience.
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Shame ours hasn't been. 2 of the party unwell (not apparently with Covid-19 symptoms but I doubt the Great British Public will notice the difference if anyone coughs or sneezes), no phone number to contact the booking company but a promise on the website to contact you within 48 hours...
 
Ethan said:
I wanted to take a step back and give my overall perspective. My background is as a medical doctor who is trained in public health and epidemiology, although I have worked in the pharma industry, mostly R&D for the last 20 years or so.

I am on a doctors social media site which has much discussion on Covid. The general tone is grim. Doctors are very, very worried about this and how the NHS will cope. Correction, how badly it will fail to cope. For the vast majority of younger people, Covid will be a brief and only mildly unpleasant irritation. It will pass over in a week or so and leave no residual damage. But for a small minority, increasing with age, some but not all of whom have co-morbidites such as diabetes or heart disease which make it worse, it will be much more severe and require hospitalisation or even intensive care. This is where it gets ugly. The NHS is already under provided for intensive care beds. Successive Govts, mostly Tory but also Labour, have drastically reduced hospital beds and allowed staffing to become ever more parlous. No lessons were learned from SARS or MERS. Little structural pandemic planning exists. So what would be a huge resource crisis becomes an existential one.

Some estimates are that with expected infection rates and critical care cases, the ICU facilities of the NHS will be overwhelmed by several orders of magnitude (10- 50x). I am a middle aged bloke, lets just say that if I wasn't a crap golfer I would be eligible for the Seniors Tour. If I get severe Covid disease, I have no chance of getting an ICU bed. Not even close. I am therefore rubber ducked. Reports from Italy, which has better ICU provision per capita, suggest the cutoff age for ICU at the peak is less than 40, and only then for fit and healthy.

I walked around a supermarket this morning, seeing empty shelves and people picking over what was left. My reaction was that they are missing the plot. People aren't going to be besieged in their homes, their illness will be reasonably short, whatever the outcome. They should be worried about the NHS instead of Tesco supply of pasta and bog roll. We can provide pasta and bog roll for everyone, we just can't supply healthcare.

The herd immunity plan, now being backed away from, is, in my view a massive gamble. We don't know if exposure confers durable immunity, or whether to is possible to get 60% infected, or whether the cost of at least a quarter of a million lives is worth it. Protecting the most vulnerable sounds like a noble gesture, but it only comes at the expense of more people in my age group. If you need 40m cases, and you protect one age group, you necessarily increase the proportion of other age groups that must be infected. And how do we know when we have hit this plausible but unproven threshold if we are not testing? The argument that taking severe measures now will only result in a second wave is possible, but the second wave would be more controllable and severe measures are needed not now to allow the peak to become a catastrophe. The UK Govt says it is taking best scientific advice. It clearly isn't taking it from the WHO or the European organisations, who think the UK is crazy not to step in much more aggressively. All the other major countries are running away from this. The UK seems to be running towards it.

So what have I been doing. I haven't been stockpiling, but I have been updating my will and figuring out who will take our kids if we both get severe disease. Sorry, it all sounds rather grim, but trust me, a lot of doctors are thinking and doing the same.
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We had the discussion with a Wills Adviser a few weeks ago - about getting new wills written. We know what we want but haven't given him the go-ahead. I think we will...especially as Mrs Hogie is a bit more vulnerable being on cancer drugs in post-treatment and in remission...:(
 
Blue in Munich said:
Can I nominate this bloke for a particularly unpleasant dose of the virus;

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-51909045

:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
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Good to see the online platforms are clamping down on this. I bet there's a few people in the UK who have bought shedloads to sell in ebay too but if both Amazon and ebay are clamping restricting/stopping sales of these products.
Sadly there will always be parasites who will want to profit from the misfortune of others.
 
Old Skier said:
Highly unlikely, don't believe all you read.
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Ah you are hopefully right - it wasn't Cobra...

Unfortunately I have to believe what I read and hear on the main News TV and Radio Channels and in the main newspapers.

And so still not sure that I am altogether happy with him being involved in any decision making that might literally be life and death for some of us. Johnson has the key Scientific and Medical advisers he needs - and I don't see why Cummings would be in there. Given his record these last four years I don't trust his involvement in managing the information giving and political optics.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dominic-cummings-coronavirus-big-tech
 
SwingsitlikeHogan said:
We had the discussion with a Wills Adviser a few weeks ago - about getting new wills written. We know what we want but haven't given him the go-ahead. I think we will...especially as Mrs Hogie is a bit more vulnerable being on cancer drugs in post-treatment and in remission...:(
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Isn't there a thing called "Letter of Wishes" which can be drawn up without the legal changing of wills?
 
I've just been told my niece has got it!
She's young and healthy, she should be okay but has just been away for the weekend with her parents.
I guess I won't be seeing my twinny for a while. :(
 
It's been recommended that all driving instructors wipe down all controls and areas of the car that are touched before and after every lesson with antibacterial wipes
Sounds ok in theory but.....
If I have newish student at the wheel I may have to reach over and help or take over the steering several times in a lesson depending on what we're doing
So I then have to wipe down all the controls I've touched..every time.
With a newbie this morning I'd have been spending more time wiping down than teaching...
Gonna be a long few months.....
 
A Japanese man who appeared to have recovered from coronavirus tested positive again less than three weeks after he left a medical facility where he was being treated,
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The ESA has also warned that unpublished data from hospitals in Italy showed that while the majority of critical patients were elderly, one in five was aged under 50 and did not have underlying health conditions.
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Yeek.
 
Slime said:
I've just been told my niece has got it!
She's young and healthy, she should be okay but has just been away for the weekend with her parents.
I guess I won't be seeing my twinny for a while. :(
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Speedy and healthy recovery wishes.
 
SwingsitlikeHogan said:
Can the guys on here who know about precision manufacturing tell me how the heck JCB and RR (or their ilk) are going to be able to build ventilators, seems to me to be just pie-in-the-sky. Great if we could do it - but how? .
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Assembly isn't as difficult as you might think. Components(modular build) are shipped in, and then its just an Airfix model to put together. The issue is testing it afterwards. But backtracking, getting all the extra components to build the extra vents is the first major hurdle. And then its the staff to set them up and then manage the bed space.

The company I retired from manufactured medical equipment, intensive care vents and anaes machines. About 15 years back there was an urgent need. Extra capacity for assembly was outsourced to China and the US.
 
Imurg said:
It's been recommended that all driving instructors wipe down all controls and areas of the car that are touched before and after every lesson with antibacterial wipes
Sounds ok in theory but.....
If I have newish student at the wheel I may have to reach over and help or take over the steering several times in a lesson depending on what we're doing
So I then have to wipe down all the controls I've touched..every time.
With a newbie this morning I'd have been spending more time wiping down than teaching...
Gonna be a long few months.....
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Could you wear surgical gloves?
 
Russ_D said:
Could you wear surgical gloves?
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It did cross my mind but I'd still have to scrub down between lessons..
Plus I'm sat 2 feet away from someone who may have been exposed...unless I suit up with mask, gloves and full body suit I'm in the firing line anyway...
 
Imurg said:
It's been recommended that all driving instructors wipe down all controls and areas of the car that are touched before and after every lesson with antibacterial wipes
Sounds ok in theory but.....
If I have newish student at the wheel I may have to reach over and help or take over the steering several times in a lesson depending on what we're doing
So I then have to wipe down all the controls I've touched..every time.
With a newbie this morning I'd have been spending more time wiping down than teaching...
Gonna be a long few months.....
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Carrier drivers are coming to us all wearing gloves now, frequently latex gloves that are disposable. Are you able to get hold of any of these? Well worth looking into.

Just seen the two posts above, fair point.
 
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