The BBC is fine apart from the output of its News department which, for the most part, seems keen to regurgitate Dom’s titbits rather than interrogate the government over what it actually does.
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What’s the estimated infection rate amongst those not tested? A factor of ten seems to be getting applied, which then drops the rate to 1 percent or there about.
Shit, that sucks, hope it works itself out
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Any update from the plumbing thesp this evening? Was hoping we’d see a well burnished soliloquy on YouTube by now
Dunno Bob. We know that all dead folk from Covid-19 are confirmed valid data (closed cases). We also know that all tested and infected are confirmed valid data (opened cases). At the end of the outbreak Opened Cases must equal Closed Cases (that is, the infected survive or are deceased). How you would estimate infection rates in the untested population is another matter whatsoever and is only likely to be crude at best at this early stage and crude and noisy at worst. As you never actually sample from the untested populace it is unlikely that the accuracy of any estimate would improve as time passes and more testing occurs. The only reliable information you ever have is on the opened and closed cases.
What makes you think this is an “or” situation young man 
?
Test and isolate obviously.
Today is officially day 1 of our isolation period. My son is still coughing but is also now blowing his nose, otherwise fine. He may just have a cold but there is currently no way he would be tested. It’s going to be a long 14 days.
Yes. I was looking at some info about seasonal flu a little while back and this is a very long-running and intractable problem for the people who prepare the annual report on that. They are driven to some very crude indicators of how many might have had the disease but never bothered the NHS. Among these is checking with Google to see how many people have searched for ‘flu’.
VB
Whatever happened to sampling a statistically-meaningful percentage of the population? Are we really this underfunded now? I guess so…
When do you do the sampling? How do you decide who to sample? For instance, if you exclude sampling those who have been tested you might induce a bias as your sampling is not truly random. How do you determine whether an untested individual had Covid-19 (is there a test that can detect whether you have survived an infection or is it self reporting).etc etc etc…
In short, it is feckin’ tricky.
You do have to wonder where the borrowings that have bumped the UK’s national debt to £2Tn have gone.
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I’m not sure we ever have for seasonal flu, have we ? We’d have to produce a test specific for the current virus and/or antibodies and then take a physical sample from the right spread of people, including primary schoolers, scallies, undocumented migrants etc etc. It wouldn’t be cheap.
VB
True, given the same scenario i would expect UK mortality to be higher, all other things being equal; for the sole reason that we are testing less. However, I think in Italy the area affected the most(Lombardy) had a high rate of elderly in the population and I am sure there are lots of other variables. It will be years before the stats make any sense.
(Olan too)
I assume there’s a model for gauging when common diseases like seasonal influenza have passed their modal infection phase - antibodies can be tested for from that point - those will have their own “half life” which defines the period-end point for gathering data. Yep, expensive, and not especially easy - but not unimaginably so in either case. If we haven’t done it that’s extraordinary, if we have, well, the data’s out there…
Hmm… wonder what Porton Down really were up to…? 
In reality, there’s often data out there, but gathered under many different regimes with no agreement on how comparators can be reconciled. Dynamic and complex (borderline ~chaotic~…) natural systems can be a bugger to model meaningfully, to be sure…
I wonder, when we come out the other side of this, if the government will finally realise a properly resourced NHS is actually a valuable asset?
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People will just eat the bastards when the food runs out around Easter - they are very gammony after all.
Failing that - most of this current lot of cunts might have succumbed to the virus and the next lot will have learned a valuable lesson.
If you see a homeless person on the streets in the masham area (north Yorkshire) I now have 6 chalets finished and 5 more in the next 2 weeks..they will be safe and warm....masham post office have my details and how to get to my farm
— Rob Clarke (@rob_baggies) March 18, 2020
Another worthy dude
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I get your point and I agree with it, but it isn’t that simple.
You can’t run an NHS that could seamlessly cope with something like CV19. No country could or would. It would bankrupt the UK (or any other country tbh) and there would be tens of thousands of unoccupied beds in the summer. Then what do you do with the staff that have nothing to do? Lay them off? (screams heard from here) Put them on zero hours contracts? (more screams)
Yes, we could (and should) have an NHS with more headroom than exists today, but never in a million years an NHS that could be prepared for the current situation.
I’m glad I don’t have to make those decisions.
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