First if you are in the UK don’t worry you can protect yourself and your loved ones by taking the right precautions.
Check out the WHO Advice for public for details. I describe them here:
Those I help over the internet often worry about me because I am 65 and am in the UK. Don’t worry. I know what to do and would be safe even in Wuhan :). You all can be too if you do the right things rigorously.
Most people get only a mild version, 80% recover quickly. Children under 10 wont’ die of this at all, and 99.8% recover under 40. Even if you are old and have health conditions only few in a hundred will die - but you can stop this altogether with the right precautions.
However their decision may lead to a delayed, but major outbreak in the UK and to lead to the UK being a source of COVID-19 to the rest of the world. They expect it to peak in April beyond the end of the flu season and to flatten the peak to make it easier for the NHS to respond.
Video for this article:
https://youtu.be/ZwULBQi0IKABASIS FOR SOME HOPE
My main hope here is that they do succeed in delaying it - and that meanwhile Italy contain their outbreak.
The WHO expect Italy to bring its outbreak under control eventually, and start reducing numbers of cases some time in the next few days.
The WHO have mentioned Italy several times as a country that is responding appropriately to the crisis - doing everything including contact tracing leveraging local community organizations to do the tracing. Other countries that are responding appropriately according to the WHO are the US, and Ireland.
If the UK are successful in delaying their outbreak to April that is long enough for us to notice that other countries have controlled their outbreaks while ours is still continuing.
Here I am of course assuming the WHO have assessed the situation correctly and the UK incorrectly.
The WHO have extensive experience in many areas including eradicating smallpox, stopping Ebola outbreaks, eradicating malaria from many countries, responding to 200 disease outbreaks every year and the head of the China study Bruce Aylward was head of the campaign that lead to almost complete eradication of Polio.
Meanwhile UK experts as far as i can tell are basing their advice only on experience with flu. At least they didn't mention any other disease in the presentation.
For me, there is no contest about who to go with as the most reliable source here.
Meanwhile - I am going to start a petition to the UK government to return to the containment phase.
Meanwhile, if scared - you can totally stop yourself from getting this, and your loved ones too.
UK EXPERTS BUILT THEIR EXPERIENCE WITH FLU EPIDEMICS - BUT THIS IS NOT FLU
The UK are saying this is not a virus that can be contained. But the UK experts only have experience with flu outbreaks. This disease is not flu. It is the first ever coronavirus pandemic and what’s more covid19 behaves very differently even from SARS.
Covid 19 is
The UK decision with covid19 is NOT guided by the science from China / SK or the WHO.
It is ignoring all the evidence that COVID-19 is different from flu. Are just treating it as if it was flu.
Sadly the UK have decided they won’t contain it, just try to delay it
Their actions may mean it takes longer to reach numbers similar to those in Italy.
THE WHO ARE EXPERTS ON STOPPING DISEASES - ANYTHING FROM EBOLA TO SMALLPOX
The WHO are the experts here. They just stopped Ebola again in the Congo. They say that at the height of the outbreak the Ebola tracers were tracing 25,000 contacts in the Congo during a war zone with people shooting each other.
China traced half a million contacts at the height of its epidemic of covid19
The WHO were responsible for eradicating smallpox. With co-operation of many countries, they are close to eradicating polio. They have eradicated malaria from many countries. The expert who lead the team of experts that recently returned from China, Bruce Aylward, was in charge of the polio eradication team.
The WHO know what they are talking about. Why isn’t the UK listening to them?
UK CLAIMS 10,000 INFECTED BUT SO FAR HAVE NO EVIDENCE OF THIS
The UK are claiming that probably 10,000 people have it already, i.e. they are claiming we already have it worse than South Korea or Italy.
They are claiming that many other countries also have thousands with it already.
However they have ZERO EVIDENCE. They haven't even checked to see if this is correct. It is just based on their previous experience with the flu. Not based on any direct evidence with this virus.
They could have checked. The WHO have been saying this for weeks, to check with community surveillance.
On 25th February the international team lead by Bruce Aylward recoommended to all countries to:
Immediately expand surveillance to detect COVID-19 transmission chains, by testing all patients with atypical pneumonias, conducting screening in some patients with upper respiratory illnesses and/or recent COVID-19 exposure, and adding testing for the COVID-19 virus to existing surveillance systems (e.g. systems for influenza-like-illness and SARI)
Two weeks later and the UK still haven’t done any community surveillance for covid19 and as a result have no idea how many there are inthe community.
BORIS JOHNSON SAYING WE NEED TO BE PREPARED TO LOSE OUR LOVED ONES
This is what is scaring so many of the members of the group.
If you are scared by this - remember - your loved ones won’t get the disease if they take those simple precautions. You can protect them and yourself by making sure they know what to do.
However many of the people I talk to via PM in the UK are not fully aware of this advice. It is not widely understood that you can stop this disease in this way or the details of how to do it.
The UK are doing the opposite of what the WHO recommend - they are stopping testing even for mild cases with travel history to other countries.
They say we need to just let it travel though the country and develop immunity to it [actually we don’t yet know how long immunity to COVID-19 lasts, it’s not always lifelong for coronaviuses]
Boris Johnson went as far as to say we need to be prepared to lose loved ones before their time!
I must level with the British public, many more families are going to lose loved ones before their time.
The WHO spoke up about this approach several days ago as deeply unethical.
If anything is going to hurt the world, it’s a moral decay. And not taking the death of the elderly or the senior citizens as a serious issue is one of the moral decays.
Any individual, whatever age, any human being, matters. And it pains us to see, actually, in some places, when they want to move into mitigation, because the virus kills seniors or older people only
That’s dangerous. Whether it kills a young person or an old person or a senior citizen, any country has an obligation to save that person.
So that’s why we’re saying no white flag. We don’t give up. We fight. To protect our children, to protect our senior citizens. At the end of the day, it’s a human life. We cannot, I have said this many times by the way, we cannot say we care about millions when we don’t care about an individual person who may be senior or junior. Who may be young or old.
So that’s what WHO is saying. And for all countries, a comprehensive approach, a blended approach, an approach that can help contain this outbreak, is very important, because the death rate from this outbreak is high.
We shouldn’t categorise it by young or senior. Of course, to understand the epidemiology it’s fine to do that. But for action I think every life matters. Every individual life matters. If we don’t care about one individual, whether it’s old or young, then we’re not serious. And that’s why we’re saying this is a moral decay, if we try to categorise it that way. A moral decay of the society.
The official transcript is here: WHO Emergencies Coronavirus Press Conference 09 March 2020
The video is here:
With this in mind I have made a new petition to the UK government to ask them to reconsider this decision.
The UK government must immediately return to the contain phase for COVID-19
It is not yet ready for signing - the petition has to be checked first which can take up to 7 days.
RECOMMENDATION TO SELF ISOLATE WITH COLDS OR FLU
Their approach is to ask people who have any symptoms of flu or cold to stay at home for 7 days, self isolate. This obviously can’t be enforced, so they will be hoping people follow this advice.
They think that covid19 may be most contagious during the first few days of the mild version of the disease.
Nobody has tried this approach before for covid19 and it is not based on any recommendation by the WHO.
Everyone else is using 14 days and the UK decides to use 7 days.
Many of the contacts pass on the virus before they are symptomatic. They won’t stop that.
Also it makes no sense to ask everyone with a cold and flu throughout the UK to self isolate for 7 days, when we could just ask those who are contacts with those who have the disease to self isolate for 14 days.
Also the isolation of contacts is something that you can enforce and the UK does enforce. This new guideline is based on people voluntarily noticing that they have symptoms and then self isolating.
People who have urgent things to do may make executive decisions not to self isolate, and suppress the symptoms so nobody notices with remedies for colds and flus.
This approach only makes sense if you believe there re already 10,000 in the UK with covid19 but he has given no evidence to show this and the UK haven't even tried to find out.
However if it does delay the transmission then it may reduce the numbers in the UK if not stop it, hopefully long enough to notice that Italy, the US, Ireland etc are having success in following the WHO strategy. That plus the already successful containments in China, South Korea and Singapore may eventually be enough weight of evidence so they can no longer ignore it.
WISE DECISIONS SHOULD BE BASED ON DATA
To make wise decisions we need data. The WHO are an evidence based organization. The UK experts are not, apparently, they go by hunches based on zero data and ignore the data gathered by other countries!
The evidence from the WHO study in China is that it can be contained, it is being contained, and that there is almost no symptomless spreading.
DR WHITTY HAS NO DATA TO SUPPORT HIS HYPOTHESIS
Okay, so Dr Whitty has an alternative hypothesis. He thinks that in the UK, counter to all this evidence, that it is now spreading in the community with 10,000 people already have it.
We have PCR tests, we are a wealth country, we can afford to do the data collecting to test this hypothesis. That is how you do science it has to be evidence based.
The WHO have been saying for weeks that we should do widespread community surviellance to find cases that are not in the clusters.
Many countries have done that and turned up nothing. Singapore tests everyone and finds nothing.
If Italy had done this they could have turned up their outbreak before it started. They should prove this first before acting as if there are 10,000 already infected.
The UK has ignored the WHO’s repeated advice for weeks, to do community level surveillance and is just declaring that it probably has 10,000 undetected cases without looking for them.
UK CLAIMS THAT IT WILL SURGE UP AGAIN IF STOPPED NOW
They claim that if they stopped it completely now it would surge up again months later.
However, China has reduced it so much that it has days with no native transmision cases inside China and it is on the point of re-opening Hubei province.
The evidence is absolutely clear. For instance Hubei province has now closed all 14 of the temporary hospitals it built to treat patients at the height of the epidemic.
There is no surge, there are almost no cases at all.
China's Xi Jinping pays first visit to coronavirus epicentre Wuhan
13 international experts and 12 Chinese experts toured the worst hotspots in China for 9 days and they were unanimous in agreement that the Chinese by their prompt action were stopping it and had saved hundreds of thousands of infections in China.
I can't understand why scientists are ignoring the very clear scientific evidence. They are treating it as if it was flu and ignoring all the details about Covid19 that make it different from flu.
These scientists in the UK have not been to China, not studied this disease in detail, and haven’t collected more than minimal data from the UK either. They are just not trying to collect this data.
MANY COUNTRIES ARE CONTAINING IT AT A FRACTION OF A PERCENT OF THE POPULATION
In China, it is nearly over at 0.006% (100*80,796/1.386 billion)
Even in Hubei province it is only 0.116% (100*67781/58.5 million)
South Korea is close to containing it at 0.015% infected (100*7,869/51.47 million)
Singapore is containing their outbreak at 0.003% (100*187/5.612 million)
This is not flu. You could not do this with flu.
ADVICE FOR PEOPLE WITH MINOR SYMPTOMS TO STAY AT HOME FOR 7 DAYS
On the plus side the advice on people with minor symptoms staying at home for 7 days would slow the spread if we do have many undetected cases.
But if we don’t, then it is unnecessarily getting many people to stay at home for no reason. They won’t even have any way to find out if this strategy is helping - without data you have no way to know what is working and what isn’t, it’s all hunches and guesswork.
They should be testing everyone with mild symptoms if they think it is widespread. That is what China does - they catch covid19 within 3 days of symptoms.
They are only going to test people who go to hospitals and not testing people with mild symptoms, only people with severe symptoms. Nothing to do with travel history.
Clearly they are also going to stop contact tracing - if they are only testing people who go to hospitals there is no point in tracing contacts.
Also, it is the experience of China that the main way to reduce mortality is to act early to stop it progressing to the severe stage. So they should identify Covid19 patients early in order to stop it getting worse, which is another reason to find people as soon as possible.
PROBLEMS FOR DOCTORS SURGERIES
Up to now, if you had covid19 or were a contact, you knew. But now, nobody knows if they have it if they have mild flu symptoms or fever.
So what do you do if you have flu and it turns to pneumonia? I have heard some GPs are now doing consultation via the internet because they don’t want to treat people in person.
After all if someone with COVID-19 comes into a surgery they could infect the other patients waiting there or the doctor, and the doctor has to treat anyone with mild respiratory disease as a possible COVID-19 patient, and yet they can’t get them tested for COVID-19 unless they have severe symptoms resembling COVID-19
People with mild symptoms coming from Italy, Iran or South Korea are not going to be tested at all, even if they have a fever. They will only test them if they reach the point where they need hospital treatment. So again what do these people do if they want to go to their local GP for help with something minor, that could be to do with COVID-19 but is not serious enough for hospital treatment?
What a mess? How can they stop nosocomial infections - infections spreading in hospitals and surgeries?
I can't believe that such distinguished people can say such things not based on science.
Why do they ignore what the WHO say?
NOT POLITICS JUST SCIENTIFIC CONSERVATISM
I think it is scientific conservatism - not conservative politics, I just mean being used to a particular scientific mind set.
They have developed scientific ideas based on one set of evidence and when they find facts that contradict their ideas they constantly doubt the facts even when there is clear evidence against their hypothesis.
In this case their hypothesis is that this disease is like flu. All the evidence is against this hypothesis but they have never had to deal with a respiratory disease that is not like flu.
So, because of their scientific conservatism, instead of recognizing this as a new type of disease they just say the evidence against it being like flu must be wrong.
They have a particular mindset and ways of handling such epidemics from the influenza epidemics and are being very resistant to changing this in response to new scientific data.
Instead of adjusting ideas to the data, they are continuing to doubt the data when faced with the clearest possible evidence.
I don't think this is politically motivated. Just bad science.
CAN ITALY’S EXAMPLE CHANGE THE UK’S DECISION IN THE FUTURE?
Italy’s outbreak is expanding in an apparently uncontrolled way. But Italy is doing a lot to contain it.
Maybe the UK will switch back to contain once they see that Italy is containing its outbreak?
Italy looks like the start of the South Korean outbreak, but they noticed it much later and it is a larger outbreak, so it will take a while for it to turn around.
I expect Italy to see the cases reduce in the next week or two, since the WHO say they are doing everything right.
By then the UK is likely to have thousands of cases, and since they won’t be testing mild cases any more, won’t even know how many cases they have.
But it won’t be too late to contain it, if they then use measures similar to the ones used by Italy and go back to finding cases, contact tracing and isolation.
A larger picture can help tooChina can get new cases from Italy, say. But China now detects cases very quickly so it can't start an outbreak, not unless the numbers outside of China get really huge. China is also quarantining people from Italy.
China is now doing the same thing to other countries that they originally did toChina.
In the same way South Korea can contain its outbreak and then be watchful about any cases from other countries. Then Italy and so on.
It doesn't really matter how many there are in how many countries. It is the overall pattern that matters in the end.
Here is the epidemic curve so far - the cases per day in the Western Pacific are decreasing strongly, in Europe are increasingly strongly, in Eastern mediteranean are increaseing slightly and in the Americas then increasing quite strongly but early days yet. In South East Asia outside of China, most of the new cases were over by the middle of February and Africa hardly has any yet.
So now suppose that Europe turns it around and starts shrinking like the Western Pacific, that would make a big difference already. If the other regions decrease too - then soon it will get less and less and then there won't be any cases left.
The WHO say that everywhere can contain it - it is not a question of whether they can but if they will.
It helps to take this larger picture - dividing it up into smaller regions is confusing because cases splosh over from one country to another but it doesn't really matter how many countries it spreads over if they are well contained. Some countries often have no new cases for 2 weeks at a time - then get reinfected from another country. Countries like that aren’t really contributing to the global trend as the disease never gets a foothold and never actually replicates there.
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You can protect yourself from getting it. Follow the advice and you won't get it.
But this sadly means that the UK is headed for an almost uncontrolled epidemic with some delay.
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any countries that follow this strategy are likely to be the main source of Covid19 in the world by the end of March / April with this approach.
HOWEVER YOU CAN HELP TO STOP IT
If everyone does the hand washing then it will help slow the spread. If people who have mild infections stay at home, it will also help too.
If everyone washes their hands regularly - and avoids touching their face with unwashed hands and keeps a distance it will stop it.
But this policy of theirs is like using a sledge hammer to crack a nut!
See my
See also my: