wrencat1873 wrote:
The new hospitals that are hastily being "built" at former exhibition centres are just bloody scary.
4000 beds on 2 wards looks like we are planning for mass death, rather than mass treatment ?
Why is this unexpected? Exactly as I said in the General Election thread - those whinging and condemning everything either haven't been paying attention, don't understand, or are too politically biased to form reasonable judgements. The scale of impact and response in China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere should have been telling you what is next for the UK.
There is a shtstorm coming of proportions our mollycoddled Western mindset is going to struggle to accept. If the global experience is consistent we're looking at about 3-4 weeks of rapidly increasing death rates before things start to drop off; all NHS resources dedicated to frantically processing those who will scrape through with treatment and those who will die regardless. Makeshift hospitals and makeshift morgues just to get through the peak. And that's even when 'the curve' is flattened relatively successfully.
This pandemic cannot be contained, controlled or avoided and the countries that lock down most efficiently are simply going to experience further outbreaks when they open up again. In the UK a significant proportion of society will have been infected and that should help prevent rapid outbreaks in the future. Most of us will survive and some won't even know they've had it.
But - this is a novel virus. Our immune systems have nothing to work with, unlike regular flu and the common cold, which are familiar to us on a genetic level. It's a lottery. The reasonably high R0 rate means a high percentage of us will get it (up to 60 or 70% apparently), so even a low fatality rate of 1-2% means very high numbers of deaths over a relatively short period.
