All about defeating the SARS2 coronavirus and the COVID19 disease it causes
For more detailed onjectives and the author's biography, please see https://bit.ly/blogobjectives
PRESS CONFERENCE LED BY PM JOHNSON 28 May 2020
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Henry is the Features Editor at the Financial Times. He summed up concisely what everyone else was saying:
Last night, Prime Minister Johnson made a televised presentation to the UK public. The focus was on England, as the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are responsible for their own NHS and their own lockdown arrangements. GENERAL ASSESSMENT I welcome the general tone of the presentation. As I hoped in the the previous post , the intention is to ease lockdown as fast as possible but cautiously. Safety first, otherwise R will rise, infections will soar, and further lockdowns will be necessary. Economic damage would then be worse than easing lockdown carefully. But as has been widely reported today (Monday), the lack of detail has meant widespread confusion and dismay. What was my initial reaction on PM Johnson's "road map"? There are 5 "Alert levels" (hence the "Stay Alert" message). But vague on conditions for each step of the plan. Vague on timescales. Indeed the graphic for what would happen when bore n...
Written Sunday 10 May 2020, before PM Johnson's presentation to the UK. In the previous post, we looked at how the UK has got to where it is with COVID-19 and the tragic count of deaths. Yet the importance of easing lockdown rapidly but safely. Now let's look to the future. What needs to be in PM Johnson's "roadmap"? WHAT'S IMPORTANT TO REALISE? What's important going forward?: Vaccines won't be available to the general public for months, perhaps never. This SARS 2 coronavirus is different from flu, and no vaccine is guaranteed either effective or safe. Any vaccine needs to be both Medicines and devices are bieng evaluated. Promising progress with medicines already proved effective against other viruses, and which are known to be adequately safe. But still probably months away against COVID-19 Testing for the virus using swabbing is unreliable, especially for self-swabbing. "False negatives" mean that those with symptoms ...
Tomorrow, Saturday 4 July, the government has planned to substantially ease lockdown restrictions for the general community in England. Are we ready? We weren’t. But has the situation improved sufficiently to make these easings? To answer that question, and understand and manage the pandemic in the general community, we need to understand what is happening to new infections. These are also known as “new cases” as a result of “transmission” of the COVID-19 disease by the SARS-COV-2 virus: Whilst death and hospitalisation data is important, these events occur some weeks after transmission, and are therefore not sufficiently timely There is no data directly relating to transmission. All data has an inherent delay, as explained in each case below. In particular: Symptoms do not occur until at least 5 days after infection Testing typically takes 2 days or more to produce results People can remain asymptomatic yet are still contagious. We...
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