Coronavirus (COVID-19)

There's plenty of food, change your recipe if you can, try different shops and avoid big queues in supermarkets. There will probably some issues for people with different types of food interference. 

Farmers will need to be on night patrol soon before all the cabbages, carrots, potatoes and sheep start to go missing,
the chickens must be already in lock down as there are no eggs to be found in the shops ...    


Have all the eggs been poached? 

I went to the dentist yesterday for toothache which he managed to resolve. Because it was so quiet I managed to have a longish (15 minute) chat with him.

He's in his mid-late forties and essentially his view was that it should be allowed to wash over us as quickly as possible. He thought the stuff about the curve was "BS" and likewise thought China was suppressing the numbers.

It made me think more about that curve. If we're likely to go over the capacity line then isn't the important thing not so much keeping us from overshooting it by as little as possible but rather keeping the time period during which we overshoot as small as possible. If we spend a very long time above that capacity line, it will really take its toll - not just directly but in terms of things we're starting to see already such as food shortages etc. If its a wham bam "thank you" mam we can start to move on. Yes, in terms of raw maths you'd be looking at integrating under the curve above that line and minimizing the total area but there are other factors and time is quite an important one.

I'm trying to comprehend the implications of a "short sharp shock", which is what you're exploring (correct me if I'm wrong?).

Initial thoughts are effectively no NHS or social care for 6 months or so, because the infection rates are sky high.  Exposure to the vast majority of the population because we can forget about testing, tracing etc.  More than a million dead would be an incredibly conservative figure given that critical care would be inaccessible. Anarchy on the streets because law enforcement/armed forces won't be immune and a complete break down of society. What am I missing?

Sorry but can't agree with that. For one thing, if we completely saturate the medical services then most likely that will also increase significantly the number of medical staff who contract and die. That will induce a long term reduction in capacity. Secondly, the most important thing that reducing rate of cases does is buy us time. Buy us time to do several things: one, move to a much more stringent "track and trace" strategy a la South Korea; two, more time to investigate the effect of retrovirals and other treatments; three, understand in greater depth how this bastard does what it does. Treatments which can limit the impact of the disease would be a game changer. Ability to do masses more testing would be a game changer for the ability to do "track and trace". 

I am still shocked at how unprepared the UK seems to be, given the additional time we had to prepare versus the likes of China and SK.

EDIT: And by the way, it would also be tantamount to eugenics given the specificity of its impacts. How this can be justified as opposed to trying to fight it with what we have at our disposal I don't understand.