budgeting for the crisis?

[flaviomatani]

94 quid a week? (correction -it is £71 and subject to self-isolation) That won't pay my rent or stave off bankruptcy but may help if there are other measures. We'll see. My schools still are giving no guidance as to what to expect. It is a complicated issue for instrumental music teachers, not only because we are essentially on zero-hour contracts but also because the bulk of our pay comes from what the parents of the pupils pay the schools for the lessons. We'll see what happens, in the Whatsapp group of the music teachers at one of the schools that has was being discussed today -but nobody knows.

Closure of schools may be inevitable unless that article by Peston on ITV News is right and the gov't is going for 'herd immunity'. Which, with an epidemic that has a 6% mortality rate (not sure this figure is correct, it's what I think I saw on the WHO pages, although the rate for the UK from their figures seems to be 2% at this point) would mean hundreds of thousands of dead. Surely not even the Tories would contemplate that seriously.

I s'pose that, at 67, I'm reaching the point where I'm in the 'quite at risk' category. Age is just a number? I certainly hope this thing hasn't got my number!

Comments

[hairyears]

You quoted 6% mortality...

Let me give you the figure I have, from the WHO mission to China, for patients *outside Wuhan*.


Wuhan's a special case, and I'll discuss it at the end of this.

Firstly: how many people will get the disease, even mild or symptomless (but infectious) cases?

Chinese doctors and the WHO think it's *everyone*, or 95%, if the bug is circulating in the population at all. Anything short of a worldwide six-week 'Wuhan' total-lockdown means that the successful quarantines will be reinfected.

Eighty percent of those infected will have a mild or symptomless case, ranging up to "I feel like awful but I'll still go to work if I can".

Twenty percent will get ill for real, with the kind of 'Serious Flu' that puts you on your back and off work for weeks. Or worse.

Five or six percent will require hospitalisation. Mostly, because they require treatment for secondary infections, but often because the primary infection is that bad.

Three percent will be 'critical': that means intensive care and a ventilator.

Within the critical fraction, one percent will die in China: they have halved the death rate by the use of oxygen perfusion machines, which oxygenate the blood outside the body.

That's the best news: now you get the bad news and the worst.

If you are in a less advanced country, like the United Kingdom, where those machines are so rare that they might as well not exist at all, that death rate will be two percent.

If attempts to slow transmission aren't as effective as China-outside-Wuhan, so that the case rate is above the available intensive-care capacity, all of the critical three percent will die.

If the hospitals are overwhelmed, a fraction of the cases requiring in-patient care will survive: call it three to five percent mortality.

China-outside-Wuhan is a place where the case rate is going down, and staying well within the capacity of the heathcare system; this is achieved by testing, testing and testing.

Every case is identified and tested: their contacts are tracked down and isolated, and their social, familial, and economic circle comes into enhanced-hygeine and social-distancing.

Wherever testing shows that this approach is failing, and the infection rate is rising, increasingly-severe distancing and quarantining regimes are applied *well ahead of the time that large numbers of people are ill*, so that they do not need to take it as far as the Wuhan lockdown.

But they can do that, and they probably will need to in more than one city: but China will never see the 3% death rate again.


Note, also, that the Peoples Republic of China has - for most people, because not all people are considered fully 'people' - taken care not to exceed the capacity of a social care system that protects the twenty percent of seriously-ill people from bankruptcy, destitution, eviction and starvation.

If you ever see the death rate rise above five percent, anywhere, that's exactly what is happening: people are dying of being ill and poor, not of being severely ill.

Am I a fan of Chinese Communism? No. Among other things, I suspect that China-outside-Wuhan means 'China where we denuded the smaller towns and the countryside of medical resources' and "China, where Han means people and non-people don't get counted and don't get resources that people need'.

Ugly, but there you are.

I'll hear whatever criticisms you have of China - and I have some of my own - if I never heard "*Only* the immunocompromised, the asthmatic, the disabled and the elderly will die" as if they weren't human enough to matter.

I have no interest whatsoever in hearing any criticism, at all, from denizens of socially-backward countries where being too poor for treatment is a death sentence - whether for COVID-19, or for the diseases that are curable *for all* in an advanced society.

So... What's my point here?

Find me a country that's doing as much testing *and pre-emptive isolation* as China, and that'll be a country with the 2% death rate, and a rolling 5% of the workforce of the workforce off sick while the pandemic runs its course.

Find me a country that isn't testing at all, and is waiting for the hospitals to collapse before imposing 'Wuhan' lockdowns, and you're probably showing me a humanitarian disaster.

The numbers where you are, wherever you are, are somewhere between those two extremes.

[flaviomatani]

As always, an intelligent, reasoned and well researched exposition. I do feel that you were not just speaking to little flavio in his corner of DW but to a wider audience and we do need to hear reasoned, intelligent discussion of this.

Lookng at my people in Venezuela that look at this as the revenge of the gods against the empire/the first world and fearing for them. Nobody there seems to be giving a jot about this situation and it will catch up with them, as it is catching up with us here and with the countries surrounding Vz.

[hairyears]

Thank you: I am indeed speaking to a wider audience - you are more widely known than I, and your social network extends into places that mine has barely heard of.

Nevertheless, it is mostly for you: you are taking the trouble to look for better information, and better sources.

This *matters*, and there is every chance that you and I would strike up a conversation in which either or both of us learned something new and - more importantly - found out which of the things we 'know' are actually wrong.

The numbers are brutally simple, but the misunderstandings and misinformation out there are quite complex, and sometimes surprisingly subtle.

[flaviomatani]

Ah, but perhaps not on DW, where only a tiny handful of people follow me. Maybe I could cut and paste your reply and post it on FB, where I do have a more substantial following. Or you could post to my timeline (I have disabled this but can enable it if you think it is a good idea). I do believe more people need to see it.

I, like most of the population, am very bad at statistics and drawing realistic conclusions out of them. That is one of the problems and perhaps at the root of a lot of the misinformation, so what you have to say is important.