Wuhan coronavirus

Yeah, I believe there is no containing it now. It is simply too late. With the longish incubation period, asymptomatic spreaders and it being extremely contagious there is just no hope.

There was hope of course, when people were asking for international flights to be closed down early on. But these people were ignored and now it is too late.

I knew about this since December time, and immediately became concerned about it because of the information coming out of China and the reaction from the authorities.

Since then, it has been an uphill struggle to try to help people I care about take it seriously. I am now at my wits end of people being really stupid about it.

Now look at the headlines

NHS level 4 emergency
Coronavirus Action Plan
More and more cases
Severe shortages of PPE for NHS staff
Shortages of medicines
Supply chains interrupted

Soon we will see a serious level of panic buying.

This is incredible. And scary. And as you see the evolution of this thread, predictable if you are paying attention.

And the really crazy thing about this (for me anyway) is that I'm not too fussed about the virus itself. I'll take my chances with that and being not that old and reasonably fit and healthy I think the worst I'd get is thrown in bed feeling ill and miserable for a week. I can deal with that. My main fear is if the majority of the country panics. Then its downhill from there.

A quite significant portion of cases need help with breathing difficulties. As soon as resources run out, e.g. no ventilators, beds, oxygen equipment, THAT ENTIRE PORTION TURNS TO DEATHS. So where it might have been 1 or 2% with medical care dying, suddenly that jumps to 10-20%

There are many cases of fit and healthy people succumbing to this.

When a politician or some idiot on the radio says 'The NHS is well prepared to deal with this' is it at all believable?

No.

Radslug wrote:

At least your government admits COVI19 is a problem, even if they lie about their preparedness. Ours is silencing their own scientists & telling people there's no problem because really, it's just the flu but less dangerous.

Meanwhile we still don't have accurate test kits b/c we insisted on rolling our own and they didn't work so good. So they took down the stats for number tested. The number infected is lagging, too, and state medical authorities are complaining that our CDC is not disseminating the statistics, testing & treatment data they need to handle it at a local level.

Yeah the CDC screwed up really badly with the tests. I watched a video with CDC representative a while back at least saying that this was very serious, so they weren't trying the same level of downplaying like...
the WHO - who have been a joke. Their press conferences were just question dodging.
The press who attended failed to ask any sort of decent questions until things became blatantly serious.

Oh here we go. Some proper panic buying in the UK
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8068943/Panic-buying-Brits-strip-supermarket-shelves-pasta-rice-water.html