Coronavirus (COVID-19)

[Donathan]

Hit the 3000 pages mark then - good work everyone. Just over halfway to overtaking the word association thread! 
Feel like it is worth saying that even if the average age of a covid death is 82, it is still premature death. If you are lucky enough to make it to 82 in this country you still have an average life expectancy at that point of 5-10 years. It may be a 'good innings' but the idea that it somehow matters less because they've somehow cheated death just to get to that stage is nonsense. 

Surely that’s an “average” 82 year old who’ll live 5-10 years though? Those dying with covid are the more vulnerable 82 year olds

[alta-pete]

2 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Hit the 3000 pages mark then - good work everyone. Just over halfway to overtaking the word association thread! 

Feel like it is worth saying that even if the average age of a covid death is 82, it is still premature death. If you are lucky enough to make it to 82 in this country you still have an average life expectancy at that point of 5-10 years. It may be a 'good innings' but the idea that it somehow matters less because they've somehow cheated death just to get to that stage is nonsense. 

And that is absolutely true. Those that get to 82 (as an arbitrary measure) and then  succumb to Covid were (my guess) healthier than those that didn’t by other causes. 

My beef is the lack of resources - compared with the current Covid measures - denied to our ageing unfit population before all this happened. 

[Marshmallo]

31 minutes ago, Michael W said:

Wonder if anything else happened in those 10 days that may have seen less people mixing and therefore lowered the chance of the virus spreading. 

They were always going to do that. Schools going back now just means they can close other stuff by sliding between tiers if/when numbers go up.

[ICTChris]

This excerpt of the Scottish Government paper should be noted when it comes to restrictions, especially in Lanarkshire and Glasgow. They’re only projections, of course, and I haven’t seen the methodology used to produce them.

But if you’re a minister you can’t really ignore the stark reality of them.

Sorry if I’ve missed this but what does this table refer to?

[Honest_Man#1]

45 minutes ago, Michael W said:

Wonder if anything else happened in those 10 days that may have seen less people mixing and therefore lowered the chance of the virus spreading. 

I’m told nail bars were shut on the sly during that period.

[Donathan]

Sorry if I’ve missed this but what does this table refer to?

ICU capacity vs demand

[Todd_is_God]

29 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Hit the 3000 pages mark then - good work everyone. Just over halfway to overtaking the word association thread! 

Feel like it is worth saying that even if the average age of a covid death is 82, it is still premature death. If you are lucky enough to make it to 82 in this country you still have an average life expectancy at that point of 5-10 years. It may be a 'good innings' but the idea that it somehow matters less because they've somehow cheated death just to get to that stage is nonsense. 

I might be missing something obvious here, but the average life expectancy in Scotland is 77 for men and 81 for women.

How does that then correlate to someone who is 82 having an average life expectancy of another 5-10 years?

[Donathan]

I might be missing something obvious here, but the average life expectancy in Scotland is 77 for men and 81 for women.
How does that then correlate to someone who is 82 having an average life expectancy of another 5-10 years?

Because a certain percentage of folk die much younger.

If we know that Bob has lived to age 82, we’d expect him to live another 5/10 years.

[Thereisalight..]

42 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Hit the 3000 pages mark then - good work everyone. Just over halfway to overtaking the word association thread! 

Feel like it is worth saying that even if the average age of a covid death is 82, it is still premature death. If you are lucky enough to make it to 82 in this country you still have an average life expectancy at that point of 5-10 years. It may be a 'good innings' but the idea that it somehow matters less because they've somehow cheated death just to get to that stage is nonsense. 

It’s a bit of a raw subject for me as I lost my Dad in Feb aged 65. I know that whilst losing anybody close to you is terrible at any time, I’d have felt a bit “better” about it if he’d reached the age of 82 and had a “good innings”. It just seems that people nowadays having premature deaths because of anything other than covid are swept under the carpet as only covid matters now

[alta-pete]

  @ThatBoyRonaldo Well that's definitely true yeah but unfortunately the owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk. I suppose you would like to think that if/when this is all over there will be a greater willingness to make massive governmental efforts to solve social problems, given its been proven people are willing to make big efforts. Something like Rashford's free school meals should by any rational standard be a cinch if it weren't for the politics of it/Tory b*****ds being Tory b*****ds. 
 

Go on, call me stoopit, but remind me who it is that’s been running the health budget  in Scotland for the last 10+ years? 

Edited October 27, 2020 by alta-pete

[alta-pete]

2 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Well exactly - the stuff about the benefit of hindsight applies equally to the SNP. I'll make no bones about being an SNP voter and they have done things like minimum pricing, free prescriptions, hospital upgrades which are all measures aimed at improving the population's health, but like everyone else they've been constrained by things like finite resources, conventional wisdom about people's willingness to endure tax rises, so on so forth. (And yes partly their own innate cautiousness and unwillingness to rock the boat ahead of any prospective independence referendum).

I would hope that the experience of the pandemic would have an effect on the public's willingness to make big national efforts and politicians' willingness to embark on them - but you are kidding yourself if once things 'get back to normal' and a politician proposes e.g massive investment in care for the elderly the first objection isn't going to be 'but this is not affordable at the present time', and a section of the population will be taken in by that. Such are the conditions any progressive political project will have to overcome, and has always had to overcome. 

 

[Bonksy+HisChristianParade]

21 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Even if that's true they weren't going to drop dead tomorrow. The fact they're over average life expectancy doesn't make it a free hit - seems weird to even have to argue it but I think they have the right to expect the government to take reasonable steps to prevent their earlier deaths. Obviously people will differ on what is reasonable but given we are currently at 367 daily deaths across the UK - obviously we don't have access to all the government information but if I'm a politician looking at numbers like that I think I'd be willing to go pretty far to attempt to mitigate them. It doesn't detract from the fact that a lot of the restrictions are either ill-thought-out, communicated poorly or whatever else but at root you have to take pretty drastic action whatever you do. 

I agree with a lot of what you’ve posted but at some point someone’s going to have to decide a number of daily deaths that is acceptable, like we do with every other disease and various other aspects of life such as driving. f**k knows what that number is, but for me it’s definitely above one.

[RH33]

41 minutes ago, Donathan said:

ICU capacity vs demand

It’s not icu capacity, I thought it was too but asked someone who would know. Says no where near 2000 capacity in Scotland.

[Todd_is_God]

27 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

You are indeed missing something obvious and thanks for confirming you are not someone to be taken seriously. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/healthandlifeexpectancies/articles/lifeexpectancycalculator/2019-06-07

Thanks for answering the question. Shame you had to be an absolute cock about it.

Edited October 27, 2020 by Todd_is_God

[SoapMactavish]

44 minutes ago, Donathan said:

ICU capacity vs demand

It’s regular bed capacity (don’t know whether that includes ITU).

 

Where I work ITU capacity is apparently 14 beds and we currently have 13 full. Exciting times ahead

[renton]

8 minutes ago, RH33 said:

It’s not icu capacity, I thought it was too but asked someone who would know. Says no where near 2000 capacity in Scotland.

Yeah, it's regular bed capacity. The ICU capacity is the next table. It looks no better for Lanarkshire under that metric

[Todd_is_God]

31 minutes ago, ThatBoyRonaldo said:

Obviously people will differ on what is reasonable but given we are currently at 367 daily deaths across the UK - obviously we don't have access to all the government information but if I'm a politician looking at numbers like that I think I'd be willing to go pretty far to attempt to mitigate them.

The problem with any figure the UK Gov publishes now is that they need to viewed with caution.

367 deaths within 28 days of a positive test seems like a large number, yes, but without any other information such as date of death, primary cause of death, and total respiratory deaths 2020 vs 2019 it's a number without any context.

The actual number of daily deaths hasn't gotten anywhere near 367 yet, and paints a drastically different picture. Context matters, and it's been lacking since March.

[Michael W]

There is ultimately no way of arriving at a figure that's acceptable. Deaths are however indicative of the amount of people catching the virus and hint at the point we have totally lost control. Deaths follow cases and I think focusing purely on deaths would be a poor approach. Focus on positive cases and take it from there.

This means schools should shut where necessary, the vulnerable protected through reintroduction of shielding etc. These measures will not popular, but I don't see why we should be consigning people's careers and their prospects to the bin when there are measures that can be taken and might also be effective. 

We know the people that suffer badly from Covid against those that don't - target the measures rather than the blanket approach. 5,000 students catching the virus will generally be OK if we can track it and manage it. 5,000 pensioners getting it will cause hospitals problems. 

 

[Todd_is_God]

7 minutes ago, renton said:

Yeah, it's regular bed capacity. The ICU capacity is the next table. It looks no better for Lanarkshire under that metric

As they are based on Imperial College modelling then at least we know we can file them in the bin.

[Thereisalight..]

I think people are forgetting about the Louisa Jordon when they’re panicking about hospitals being overrun. A hospital that wasn’t used during the “first wave” when numbers were sky high in comparison to now