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The difference is resources and culture. We have a small police force which is unarmed. There is no paramilitary element to it like in France etc. We have approx 212 police officers per 100,000 people. France has 326, Spain 361, Italy 453.

Boris may be finding the workload challenging I think. But if those rumours are true, then I think it is not a good sign of what is to come. Being a PM is a full time job with little freedom. Boris already new that, so he has no excuses now. He wanted the job. He needs to get on with it.

That's not quite the true picture TE44. Life saving treatment is not being denied for any condition. What has changed though is that because people are not engaging in sports or getting drunk and fighting etc, that A&E is much quieter. Also, people are not filling A&E with minor conditions because they can not get to, or do not have a GP. Where there is a problem is in those who should call an ambulance or should go to hospital, not doing so out of fear or because they are downplaying the seriousness of their medical need vs the risk of catching the virus. Hence the public statement about that, encouraging people to still seek medical help for other serious or potentially serious conditions. The operations and treatments that have been cancelled are those considered to not be life threatening if they are delayed. Spartacus is right. All lock down measures were designed to stop health resources being overwhelmed - to manage a manageable peak. Easing those measures will continue to be a balance of hospital capacity. And that is probably a sensible balance to seek given that this is a global pandemic and the ability to eradicate the virus completely may never come. But with that comes a collective responsibility, to do our part to protect the vulnerable. Something I have warned about repeatedly is mutations. There is evidence already of this virus mutating, Most of the mutations are slight and seem to render the virus less deadly. But there is one coming out of Mexico that is more deadly. And that is what has to be monitored in subsequent waves.

20,000 people are still catching the virus every day. Let's talk again about the infection rate in four weeks time. We never locked down fully. Easing before that infection rate gets right down is going to be a mistake. 'Staying alert' to something invisible, both during its incubation period and in asymtomatic people is meaningless waffle. Government wanted to change the messaging for one reason only, to look as though we are moving towards a new phase. It is a psychological trick, but one that may backfire if people stop making only essential journeys, social distancing, and isolating where necessary. To be fair, that was already beginning to happen (with the arrival of summer weather), so it is a difficult thing to manage in a country that has no means to enforce it. But that is why we also now have the second highest (declared) death rate in the world.

This is where we get into the realm of antigenic shift vs drift. And also, the immune system ability to produce antibodies decreases with age. At the same time, the abundance of certain receptors that viruses need to infect cells increases. Pseudoviruses have no ability to replicate, even if they infect a living cell, but at the same time, viral load is the consideration for immucompromised people. Why? Because the risk of a pseudovirus mutating is real also once it enters a living organism. Influenza A has mutation 'shifts' regularly. That means small changes in the antigenic makeup of the surface antigens. It needs no other virus or viral strain to do this. And migratory birds are monitored all year round to produce the vaccine. It is a well practised process. 'Drift' however is what leads to pandemics, needs an intermediate host usually, and involves a mutation between two strains of the same virus or two completely different viruses to create a novel (new) virus. This is much rarer for obvious reasons.

I used the word chemist because I hoped it would be an easier concept to grasp (given that it is a core subject at school level) ;) Completely agree with this; 'Anyway I blame Brexit and soft nationalism for tosh like yours. Degrading experts and encouraging the masses not to further their education. I keenly await your response!' With pandemics though, you can not hide from the science and dependence on experts. This is why populist leaders and their hardcore fans are floundering. The public have been reminded of the importance of experts and data. Populism however depends on wilfull ignorance and propaganda. Textbooks are still very much a part of education at all levels. Why? Because they provide the grounding from which to understand the language of research papers. Textbooks are also updated regularly.

There would be no point in vaccinating everyone from seasonal flu because it mutates frequently. That's why we only vaccinate vulnerable groups that may benefit from it in that season. But as you also point out, that vaccine has varying rates of success from season to season, mainly because it is created for a predicted mutation of the flu virus. Sometimes what arrives is not really what was expected. Overall though, I would argue that flu vaccines do a good job of keeping annual death rates at lower levels. The caveat though is that we could still see a flu pandemic if a particularly virulent strain appeared.

Try comparing Sweden to like for like nations and it tells a different story. Compared to Finland and Norway, Sweden is not doing so well.

I would use the app but for that to be of use needs enough people using it who keep their phones on. So I can see shortfalls in relying on that alone to contain a new rise in infection rates. We are going to need a range of approaches to reduce the risks imo. Testing and social distancing are still probably the best tools in the box.

All of us would die from a whole range of bacterial and viral infections if we had sufficiently compromised immune systems. The point here though is that it is a NEW virus. One of the first things to be measured when a new virus emerges, is mode of transmission and rate of infection. If spread is fast enough and people are becoming seriously ill in significant numbers, you assume the worst until you know what you are dealing with. Some things can be understood relatively quickly, like transmission, symptoms, mortality. Other things take much longer to measure, learn and understand. It really doesn't matter that many of those who have died had underlying conditions. All that means is that they were living with an existing but manageable condition, which became unmanageable once this new virus entered their body and started infecting cells. To suggest that COVID is not really the cause of death here is a denial of the facts. Even healthy people who recover at home have a rough time of it, and a significant percentage of them need ICU care to recover. There is no other virus or cause of death killing people in these numbers at the moment. On top of that, today we became the country with the worst death toll in Europe. Lock down has prevented that figure being higher than it already is.

To answer your question Robbie there are two things to consider. It is not unusual for labs to research pathogens from animal species. Many labs around the world do that. And three years ago, a programme began to try and decode every pathogen hosted by every animal species. The idea being that if the genome sequence for every zoonotic virus that exists is recorded, it will enhance the ability to develop vaccines and prevent future pandemics. Bats are the most pathogenic species on the planet, which puts them high on the list for research. They carry at least 60 different zoonotic viruses alone, but do not get ill from them. And bats are found everywhere, not just in China. It does not surprise me that viral research in Wuhan is focused on bats, especially after the first SARS outbreak in 2003. The Wuhan laboratory has published a lot of useful research around immunology. One of the key areas for virology and immunology is in finding a way to prevent cytokine storms. This is where the body overproduces antibodies to fend off a virus, causing the body to attack its own organs. Bats immune systems do not do this. The labs doing that kind of research are level 4 labs. So the second point to consider is the risk. If any country is going to do this kind of research, it needs to employ the highest level of biotech safety. If there is a lapse in that protocol, then yes, it is perfectly possible for a virus to accidentally leave a lab, either in its original form, or in a mutated form. And as the link that TE44 posts above shows, it can simply be a wrongly labelled sample. A level 3 intermediate sample, finds its way into a level 2 batch of pseudovirus samples. There were a couple of incidents of lab workers catching SARS in a lab, one in Beijing in 2004 and one in Singapore. However, in relation to COVID, the science does not point to either a lab creation or mutation. There are ways of seeing that if that were the case. What does not help though is that China has a track record of secrecy and covering up previous SARS outbreaks. So it is not hard to see why suspicion is easily roused. My own view is that I think it very unlikely that anything escaped from a level 4 lab (even in China). Covid is not a direct infection from a bat. It needed an intermediate animal host to mutate. But we may never know for sure what that intermediate host is, nor where exactly the first transmission to human took place (patient zero) unfortunately.

TE44 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Blah blah, Thanks I appreciate your explaining, > but I do have concerns myself as although > psuedovirus developing > falls into a biolevel 2 for safety, there are stll > safety issues. Link to > HIV psuedovirus link. Yes there are risks involved. But this is why pseudovirus copies are used and not the actual virus itself. The incident referenced in your link should never happen and I am sure procedures were tightened up at that lab as a result. No-one understands the risks more than those who work at a lab.

Point taken TE44, but it is hard to have respect for a person who posts science they don't understand as evidence for a conspiracy theory they want to believe, and then carries on pretending like they understand the science they have posted when called out. For those of us who do understand the science, it has been a very frustrating month debunking these conspiracy theories. Even the American Intelligence Agency have clearly stated the virus did not come out of a Chinese lab, after Trump claimed to have seen evidence it did. The link that Robbie posted, cites the results of research into the mutation of SARS CoV from its original host in Bats. In 2007 (the year of that research), China was working towards a vaccine for the first SARS outbreak in 2002/3. There is nothing unusual about this research or the processes it uses. Pseudoviruses for example, are engineered copies of the virus being studied, with the ability to replicate itself removed. In other words, it renders the virus safe to work on in a lab. Without the ability to replicate itself, even if it gets into a living cell, a virus is benign. The purpose of this study was to look at the protein impacts on ACE2 receptors. So why does Robbie use this article then? Because it is a Chinese lab report that mentions HIV (as a separate study) and talks about creating pseudoviruses etc. Therefore it must mean that the Chinese created a virus by 'splicing' SARS and HIV together. It does not seem to matter to him that the report doesn't actually say that. And even more poignant question would be to ask him who passed that link onto him?

Oh dear Robbie. Stop embarrassing yourself. You haven't a clue what you posted is about have you? And by the way, your claim was splicing SARS with HIV - nothing says that either does it? The paragraph you are posting is talking about creating DNA pathways to test the protein process of the SARS virus. Using Chimera in this way, is one of many stages in developing vaccines.

Robbie Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > It amuses me when I see pathetic keyboard warriors > that can't resist an insult or something > derogatory in most of their comments. It amuses me when I see links to scientific articles that the conspiracy theorist poster doesn't understand. Still waiting for you to point where that article suggests the splicing of two viruses Robbie. Don't take too long now ;)

Lots of evidence of that and more out there Plough Man ;) https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/selling-nhs-profit-full-list-4646154 https://www.thenational.scot/news/18255016.revealed-links-tory-mps-private-healthcare/

I agree Malumbu. There are a lot of unknowns but we were already an economy in decline anyway. We seem to think we can stay on top forever (an arrogance delivered by an Empirical past of course) but the rest of the World has been catching up for some time. I still think that if we can get away from that mentality, we can create a more vibrant and meritocratic economy. And maybe one good thing to come out of this pandemic will be a necessary shift away from plutocracy.

In a nutshell, yes Edcam. It is the alt right rabbit hole.

jimlad48 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I've spoken to enough doctors I know socially and > professionally to hear that many feel the threat > is not as bad as some people make it out to be. > Its hitting people who are either on their way out > anyway, or its hitting people who are made worse > by very poor lifestyle choices. Really? because I don't know a single one underestimates the issues with pandemics. > I'm sorry, I know its a nasty illness, but lets be > clear, its mainly hitting people who are already > at risk of infection anyway due to underlying > conditions. Have you not also noticed that a high percentage of people who contract the virus need ICU care to recover? And that adults of ANY age can end up in that position? What would you say if 18% of the entire population needed ICU care in just 12 weeks and many of them died because they could not get that care? Because that is the point you are missing here. > Haven't you noticed how many of the > death figures contain thewords 'all but X had > underlying health conditions' -thats the thing, it > was a factor, it was not the sole factor. No you are completely wrong here. It is the virus that leads to the onset of the conditions that cause death in their compromised immune systems and biology. It is a premature death caused by the virus in other words. It is the reason why we vaccinate against flu. Flu is another virus that causes premature death in this way. > I genuinely think we're overreacting here and my > worry is the medium term ability to pay for an NHS > to cope for future outbreaks is at risk. The > sooner we relax the restrictions the better, and > get on with our lives. We borrowed far more money to get through the second world war. And every country in the world is in the same position. The thing with economics is that it is a human construct. Resources and a work force do not disappear suddenly. The world will adjust its economic modelling, especially if the virus mutates and brings a second wave. And therein is the real risk. If the virus were allowed to spread freely, apart from the tens of millions it would kill, the risk of mutation into a more virulent and deadly wave becomes increased. This is what happened with Spanish Flu. You might argue now that the elderly are expendable, so who cares if millions of them die, but what will you say if a mutation starts killing other age groups in significant percentages? We are already heading for a society with differing levels of fear. Imagine what would happen in that latter scenario. A short term economic hit to get public health in a manageable position will cost far less in the longer term considering the alternative. The truth is that we just do not know enough about this virus yet to risk that. We don't even know if getting the virus delivers immunity, because it takes months and years to genuinely measure that. SARS CoV 1 seems to suggest any immunity is short term and weak. So the only way to beat this may well be with a vaccine in the same way seasonal flu is controlled. And this is also why that Oxford vaccine has been developed using Adenovirus and not the SARS CoV 2 virus. The Adenovirus produces a stronger antibody response that may work to combat Covid - that is the thinking there.

diable rouge Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > David Icke recently had his Facebook account > closed due to the dangerous conspiracy theories > and disinformation he was peddling. > Perhaps Admin would like to review some of the > recent posts on here under the guise of > 'information'?... Agreed. Robbie is clearly now using the forum to peddle conspiracy theories.

Robbie wrote. 'As for evidence that the Wuhan lab spliced Coronavirus with HIV, here you go: [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] ' I do love it when people post links to credible scientific anaylsis, that do not support the point they are making. This is because you Robbie, do not understand the science in the link you are posting do you? Tell us all just where that link shows any virus was spliced - go on Einstein! Let's see how much you understand about the science of virology.

snowy Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Have you just quoted Qanon conspiracy theories? Yes he did. it has been obvious from his opening post where he is coming from. Hence the ridiculous claims around the intelligence of President Trump and conflating the use of residual amounts of disinfecting compounds in some vaccines with defending Trumps clear request that his medical advisors look into the effectiveness of injecting disinfectant into the body. Do not dive into the rabbit hole folks. He thins he is clever, playing the game of only being mildly interested in that stuff.

But you are wrong Jimlad. Pandemics left to spread freely also destroy economies, because so many people get ill, they contract very quickly. This is not Influenza (for which we have vaccines btw). This has a higher infection and death rate. We have already surpassed the annual death rate caused by the flu virus in just six weeks. The annual average for flu related deaths is around the 12,000 range and that is across 12 months. Covid is not simply a nasty bug. It is a very infectious SARS virus. It IS the cause of death because it attacks the ACE2 receptors in human cells which is what allows pneumonia to take hold, or for cytokine storms to cause organ failure. I take it you are not a doctor Jimlad, or medically trained. If you were, you would not be trying to compare this virus to flu in the way your post seems to seek to do.

Trump apologists are often as poorly educated as he is - that is the problem.

Disinfectant is a chemical compound. You are confusing a verb with a noun. Trump clearly used the noun. The definition of the noun 'disinfectant' according to the Oxford Dictionary; 'a substance that kills bacteria, used for cleaning. a strong smell of disinfectant.' The definition of the verb 'to disinfect' according to the Oxford Dictionary; 'to clean something using a substance that kills bacteria.' It is quite clear what Trump meant. Even his own medical advisors in the room were cringing. That is on camera for all to see. Playing games with semantics doesn't change that. The USA still hasn't reached her peak. The handful of countries with more deaths per million are ahead of her on their curves. The USA, like Spain, Italy and the UK, would have seen less deaths if they had responded sooner. Trump seems to be the only leader unable to acknowledge this. That's all there is to it.