DC2

I applaud your idea, but yes you might be aiming too high. And I can’t see many speedway fans being able to afford a Morgan. A mouth organ maybe. Or a mobility scooter.

Haha. Why not question our wildlife? How many animals have become extinct from the UK? Think also of how domesticated our animals are. Cats, dogs, chickens, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, goats. All kept as pets or food, none truly running wild with the exception of a few horses. What do we have left as truly wild? Some deer, badgers and small mammals. Many animals, including all of our domesticated ones and water buffalo roam free in Vietnam.

No, it’s not true. We certainly saw wild monkeys there.

Unless you paid by credit card.

Stannah stair lifts?

Spanish flu killed 100 million worldwide. Covid has killed 115,000. That’s perspective. Put in the current flu and pneumonia figures and you’d have a much more up to date perspective that people could relate to. Unfortunately that does not suit the agendas of the government and the media, to control and scare the public.

Yes, we seem to remember only living memory. That’s why politicians and the media keep talking about “unprecedented times” despite pandemics happening before. Has none of them studied the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic?

Liking the sound of that, but speedway is so ad hoc it doesn’t seem to have the expertise to do this.

Surely every human being feels some sorrow when anyone dies, possibly less so about the enemy in times of war. And while it’s right that the politicians should address this in their daily news conferences, I want them to be clear-headed in dealing with the crisis, not grief-stricken.

I actually view the others as feigning empathy.

Two very good posts. In the second post, rather than working out an average of deaths per day over the year I believe the ONS can do it for specific weeks (useful because flu is seasonal) and quite probably specific causes such as contagious or pulmonary illnesses (flu, pneumonia, bronchial, asthma etc). Having said that, a month on month general comparison might be better because Covid is being put on death certificates like confetti, whether or not it was a cause of death, contributory factor or coincidence.

Apparently BWitcher manufactures it from a very small factory in Portugal.

That’s the accepted wisdom, isn’t it. But the daily new cases and daily new deaths graphs for Spain have the same shape for the same days, not the deaths one lagging behind by several weeks. Have a look. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/

2 or 3 men shaking hands? You might have a point if they were all 90 and carrying ventilators. Otherwise, not!

Somehow I don’t think E I Addio has them in mind.

OK, can you give examples of people behaving as if they have a death wish?

“Death wish”? You are perpetuating a myth While people sunbathing in public parks may quite rightly be criticised for not following government guidelines, they are almost certainly not passing on the virus to each other, let alone being guilty of having a “death wish”. Contact is much closer in a supermarket and yet that is not a “death wish”.

Not as arbitrary as keeping the whole population isolated and the economy stalled without a compelling reason.

Of course we could protect the elderly and those with vulnerable medical conditions. The government told 1.5 million vulnerable people they would have to isolate for 12 weeks. That was a month too late and 15 million people too few. Every person over 65 or ill should be under special measures. Regularly tested. No contact with others who have not been tested. Support workers and their families to be restricted in their movements (and not allowed to shop). No deliveries that have not been disinfected. But encouraged to take in exercise, fresh air and sun in their gardens, not locked indoors. The rest of us could then have enjoyed a lighter touch with sensible measures and continued to work.

There is no evidence that it would have killed 250,000. And could we not have protected the vulnerable and elderly sooner and with better measures? We could see from Italy that they were especially at risk. We might have had only 20,000 deaths then.

Yes, 19% is feasible in certain areas, as is more than 50% in care homes, but 95% isn’t anything like possible in the general population.

Months away? I doubt it.

When flu killed 28,500 people in the UK in 2014/15, was there a case for some sort of lockdown the following winter?

Well, that’s quite simple. It’s been admitted that some figures have included deaths where Covid has been suspected rather than confirmed by testing. And it’s clear that where Covid is included as one of two or three “causes” on a death certificate it may not have caused the death. From the BBC: ”Is coronavirus causing the deaths? The death figures being reported daily are hospital cases where a person dies with the coronavirus infection in their body - because it is a notifiable disease cases have to be reported. But what the figures do not tell us is to what extent the virus is causing the death. It could be the major cause, a contributory factor or simply present when they are dying of something else.”

I can accept all of that except “95% of the population could have it”, because 75% of our tests have been negative. Less than 1% infected in Austria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/less-than-1-of-austria-infected-with-coronavirus-new-study-shows