wrighty

I love the top players’ argument that if they were to take a pay cut it’d mean less tax revenue to fund the NHS. Makes sense - their pay should clearly be doubled in these difficult times so we can afford more ventilators

It’s age related. 50/50 overall, mortality is less for the young, more for the old. And that depends on what you’re on ITU for. The figures relate to the full on respiratory/cardiovascular support. There’s a possibility that being PM he’s been put there for higher level observation.

My first thought was Ray Reardon

There’s never been a time when sports have shut down. In normal circumstances I’m sure you’re right. In these unprecedented times I might be. Wanna bet

But if there’s no sports those that like a flutter will gamble on something else.

Wild oats to be sewn Crumpet? (Perhaps not!) pop your cherry bang-bang

It is symmetrical if you put it on a logarithmic scale.

There's far less covid infection here than in the UK. We may have double the number of identified positive cases per head of population, but that's because we're testing far more. We're up to 100 a day - that'd be about 75000 a day in the UK as an equivalent rate, a figure they can only dream about. They were on 5000 a day only a week or so ago. Not surprising they have fewer positive cases per capita because comparatively speaking they're hardly testing anyone. I think the opposite of what you say is true - people may well want to come here as a safe haven in comparison with, for example, London.

Division by 1000 is a very rough yardstick I use to convert UK to IOM equivalent figures. For more precision I divide by 750 (x4 and divide by 3, or vice versa, and then sort out the zeros) so you're right of course. The CM may have the figure of 6 in his mind because that's what it was a week ago when the UK were doing 5000 a day. Similarly their 4000 bedded super hospital (500 initially) equates to an equivalent of 5 more beds here (2/3 initially )

This is certainly how it all started with Edward Jenner deliberately infecting people with Cowpox as he'd realised it conferred immunity to Smallpox. Modern vaccines however usually use either inactivated virus (bits of the protein shell for example without the nucleic acid) or live attenuated virus (part of the DNA/RNA knocked out such that it doesn't reproduce but can still cause a trivial infection and generate an immune response) Your plan might work, as long as these young, fit people were kept away from the vulnerable, and you accept that a few of them might get a bad case and die. It probably wouldn't be many, but I doubt the local ethics committee would sanction it. And when Jenner was around he didn't have defence organisations, lawyers and the GMC to deal with.

A Health Economic perspective on COVID-19 Another interesting article. Sorry for spamming the boards with links at the moment but I think this one needs to be read too.

There are too many unknowns around right now - acknowledged experts in the fields of virology, epidemiology, and immunology are coming to wildly different conclusions. We just don't know enough about it. https://unherd.com/2020/04/how-likely-are-you-to-die-of-coronavirus/ The link is to what I think is an excellent article that talks about all of this. A few things we do know: Your risk of death (either FROM Covid-19 or WITH Covid-19) pretty much matches your risk of death from all causes - for example, if you're 85 you have about a 90% chance of surviving to 86, and if you're 85 and get covid-19, you have about a 90% chance of surviving it. The infection rate (total number of people who are or have been infected with novel coronavirus) is higher than the case prevalence as determined by those who present, with or without symptoms and get tested positive. How much higher - no-one knows for sure. Estimates seem to vary from 2x to 20x Social distancing, hand washing, self-isolation etc are effective in reducing R0 and will slow the progression of the disease

It probably does to make it a relatively low level ‘field hospital’ to be used as either a cohort ward or step-down facility. My main concern in terms of resources would be staffing rather than infrastructure.

No I can’t because I don’t know, and I’m not sure a decision has yet been made. And before the usual suspects jump in and accuse the DHSC of incompetence/indecision, you all have to realise that the question of expanding the bed base of the hospitals is extremely complex. I was at a meeting of senior clinicians this afternoon where this very question was discussed. There were multiple opinions and different perspectives expressed, all with pros and cons. Rest assured however, the tight nature of the timescale is well understood, and I expect a decision on this aspect of the Covid strategy imminently.

The 6 ventilators referred to relate to the 6 beds in ITU. There are several other ventilators (as in the machines that blow air in) available in the hospital that are used for giving anaesthetics - 1 in each anaesthetic room and 1 in each theatre, so that's another 12. Sorry, can't help you on the number of ventilators purchased for swine flu, but I think all in we have enough ventilators. The problem is where to put them if they're re-purposed as intensive care machines (solved) and who's going to look after patients who are on them (training happening to up-skill theatre staff, planning to be able to have a less than 1:1 ratio of specialist nurse:ventilated bed). I know there are many on here who believe that everything about Noble's/The DHSC/Its managment is incompetent, but we're not. There's a very impressive amount of preparatory work going on right now so that we are able to deal with the coming epidemic. If everyone keeps up the key public health measures (hand washing, stay home, social distancing, proper self-isolation if you have to) we might just get through this and come out the other side in a lot better shape than the adjacent isle.