Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Off Topic Good luck everyone

I hope I'm wrong, or at least very premature, but a bumpy ride over the next few months looming for some.

Good luck everyone; and enjoy the music.

-Ian

Indeed Ian.

As I've posted elsewhere, the science is clear: social distancing with IMMEDIATE effect is critical if we are not to overwhelm our emergency services. This is not for the healthy amongst us who will catch COVID-19 and shrug it off; it's for the many thousands of elderly, weak, and vulnerable who will die because we exceed respirator and critical care capacity in the short and medium terms. I wish I was exaggerating.

Long read
Short read

Make no mistake: this is seriously inconvenient. I'm stopping going to my climbing gym, which I really don't want to do. But collectively we ALL have to do this kind of thing.

Don't bury your head in the sand.

Oh, and wash your hands. Lots.

Some useful and trustworthy sources of information:

The WHO Corona virus Sit Rep

The Lancet on mitigation measures

and

The Johns Hopkins University dashboard - click on the map to get an up-to-date status

+1

The company I work for has now suspended all travel, cancelled all events and asked everyone to work from home. I don't think social distancing is about avoiding the virus (unfortunately), but spreading the load on the health services, so that more people survive that would otherwise not get priority treatment.

My wife and I have just had (five week old) twins and think we need to delay family visitors along with friends, which is something we didn't want to do. However, without social distancing, many more people will die as no health service in the world can cope with this kind of scenario.

At the same time, we need to keep the economy going and I suspect this side of things is going to need much more support from central governments to prevent many businesses (especially retailers) from going to the wall.

I love a sci-fi film & I've seen a few over the years where extreme measures have been taken to try to contain some malignant threat or other. "Totally unrealistic" you think as you watch it, yet here we are, everything in dear Italy (where we lived for 6.5 years) is closed except food shops. This viral threat is quite without parallel in our lifetimes; I suppose you'd have to go back to WWII to see measures anything like as extreme being imposed on entire populations. I suspect that even a decade ago these measures simply wouldn't have been taken and the virus would be everywhere almost immediately.

It's bad enough in a modern Western country but just wait until it gets into Egypt / Somalia / Bangladesh / Afghanistan etc with little or no healthcare system & the numbers will start to look very different. With even a 1% mortality rate, if 80% of the global population gets it, 1% of that is a lot of people.

With our lifestyles (not working, cycling / trekking as hobbies) we're effectively self-isolating anyway; apart from food shops the only outsider we see regularly is our French (language) teacher who call in once or twice a week. Perhaps we should put her on hold...?

You have to go back to the 18th century to see as big a daily drop in UK share prices; yesterday was worse than Black Monday, worse then the 2008 financial crisis....as Ian said, a very bumpy ride.

Unfortunately, I think this could turn out to be very bumpy, both health-wise and financially for several sectors (how many businesses can survive being closed for extended periods of time?).

On the question of visitors, I'm seriously thinking of delaying getting a new cleaner and the help we had planned to get us through the difficult period with the twins. The former is probably not too much of a danger to our health, but the latter probably would be.

The linked Long Read above is a really good summary. Some of the graphs tell the story well - mortality rates overall are low (with notable exceptions), better to be in the green than the purple - so as Joel advocates - social distancing is key.

To me it is a question of when one gets it, not if - but my expectation is that my immediate family will all survive.

Not sure how well I will survive when my young kids' school is instructed to close and they are home from school!!

I'd previously read VK's Long Read & agree that it's a terrific piece.

The economic knock on effect will kill more than the virus itself.

I genuinely think we will end up with unemployment levels at a rate we have simply never experienced before.

The knock on effects of that can not be underestimated.

The virus is bad, trying to stop it a must, but will be far more damaging.

The great British art of understatement.

The links were a good read. Thanks for those.

Interesting article, I wonder how we will reflect on the worlds responses?

CV-19 Country Update

Interested to see how it is spreading around the world and the stats (admittedly from data that may not be 100% accurate). Glad that they highlight the survivor numbers - otherwise a morbid fascination.

Be well!