There's lots of fat people in the UK as well. Are you trying to say that we model things based on a hypothetical population that is all a size 8, or do we model on the basis of the population as it really is?
No I am making the point that if people are morbidly obese, then they are part of the population that should be sheilded along with the old and others with underlying health issues.
Define what you mean by "vulnerable people" - by the sound of it you would include 18-34's with a bit of a beer belly?
No morbidly obese people.
How do you propose "shielding" them so that they never come in contact with a virus that is raging through the rest of the population - and are they not the exact same population that are more vulnerable to "other illnesses", how will you treat them?
Do the best you can. Who said the virus will be raging through the population? Predictions from a couple of weeks ago are already showing to be false. Probably still working with Neil Ferguson's discredited model.
Right now the odds seem pretty good on that - obviously we don't know for certain, but the main uncertainty is the nature of immunity to SARS2 in general - and your strategy is equally reliant on that particular uncertainty. If there's no lasting immunity to SARS2, then your strategy will have killed millions of people for nothing.
Most of the commentry I am hearing from scientists is that we should get used to living with covid. Promises of when vaccines will be available are getting further away.
Exactly - and that's why poor countries who can least afford to wreck their economy, have been taking the cheap option of lockdowns etc. And most of them have been doing much better than the UK. Even countries that have economies more like the UK's have found that hitting it hard and fast means that they can get back to relative normality already - see something like Taiwan as an example. The virus hits the economy far more than the lockdowns, you can't get a functioning economy back without controlling the virus.
Poor countries are doing better than the UK because they have young populations. India has a life expectancy of 69. Considering the average age for death from covid is 82, the most suseptable are no longer alive anyway. I doubt a lot of countries have strict locksdowns like in Europe, they would not have the resources, especially in Africa.
Ultimately it comes down to maths - this chart considers the case where we're at 400 cases per 100,000 in a week or two's time. If you take measures to get R down to 0.7, then you'll be down to 50 cases/100k within 3 weeks or so, and down to negligible levels within 6-8 weeks.
Lots of questions about the accuracy of testing still. Best case for false positives in the governments testing is 0.8%. If testing 200,000 people per day, that gives us 1600 false positives per day.
If you do a half-hearted lockdown that only reduces R to 0.9, then you don't reach 50 cases/100k for two months, and it takes 6+ months to disappear.
https://www.news.com.au/world/coron...s/news-story/f2188f2aebff1b7b291b297731c3da74
Dithering and half-arsedness cost you as much as a tighter lockdown, and prevent one getting on with one's life. But that's not easy for people-pleaser politicians - see how Jenrick's Newark constituency has 182 cases/100k and Johnson's Hillingdon has 81 cases/100k and are not in lockdown, whereas Bolton and Bury went into local lockdown when they had only 30 cases/100k.
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