Gigging during coronavirus

[drTStingray]

If anyone didn't doubt the public concern about this, try buying alcohol based hand cleanser currently - there isn't anywhere in my town that has any such has been the run on it.

I think @Silvia Bluejay is right - the level of punters will drop. As for the government advice, they have already admitted it will be a balance between economic and health concerns - ie trying to avoid the fragile economy crashing - although I suspect that China being in lock down will achieve that worldwide anyway. 

I'm writing this sat on the train as normal at this time - difference today is NO ONE is coughing - which must be a first - I shall be avoiding hand rails etc - if I remember!! 

Anyway I would have thought with the demographic of this forum, most of us would at least qualify as elderly (at risk group)!! 

 

[SH73]

10 hours ago, 41Hz said:

When I go to the shops I don’t get drunks spitting song requests in my face, shaking my hand or hugging me!

I went to the corner shop last Thursday, the shop assistant coughed in my direction as he served me at the till facing me. He was only about 3-4 feet away. Didn't even cover up his gob.

Friday, I am pushing a trolley in the supermarket. An old deer passes by to my left , she coughs without covering up mouth.

To the OP, it's not accelerating eh? 23 cases in UK on Saturday, 36 Sunday. These are only known figures.

[wateroftyne]

6 minutes ago, SH73 said:

Friday, I am pushing a trolley in the supermarket. An old deer passes by to my left , she coughs without covering up mouth.

I would have thought the cough would have been the least shocking thing about this scenario 😄

[SH73]

13 minutes ago, wateroftyne said:

I would have thought the cough would have been the least shocking thing about this scenario 😄

Old dear I meant, bloody fat fingers😂

Might have been venison escaping from the butcher's 😋

Edited March 2, 2020 by SH73
.

[Phil Starr]

3 hours ago, BreadBin said:

Malaria kills over 1200 people a day, every day.

I don't get your point.

Every malaria death is a personal tragedy leaving children without parents and families and friends losing people they love, the economic costs are huge and some parts of the world are held in poverty just by this disease. Some of those deaths are preventable and that is a disgrace. In countries where it is endemic it affects the daily lives of everyone. The research efforts could still be better and so could public health measures in many countries but this is an entirely different disease. If we did nothing it would kill more than this and if we do more we can reduce that toll. That is true about Coronavirus.

Our responses in this country will be in part shaped by public opinion and understanding. There's a lot of nonsense out there on social media but I think people need to know that this is probably coming and it is probably going to be serious but there are things we can do to mitigate. If official advice is just met with cynicism and complacency it is going to be worse for all of us. I'm trying to be as accurate as I can and some of this is potentially not too good. 

[BreadBin]

3 hours ago, Phil Starr said:

I don't get your point.

Every malaria death is a personal tragedy leaving children without parents and families and friends losing people they love, the economic costs are huge and some parts of the world are held in poverty just by this disease. Some of those deaths are preventable and that is a disgrace. In countries where it is endemic it affects the daily lives of everyone. The research efforts could still be better and so could public health measures in many countries but this is an entirely different disease. If we did nothing it would kill more than this and if we do more we can reduce that toll. That is true about Coronavirus.

Our responses in this country will be in part shaped by public opinion and understanding. There's a lot of nonsense out there on social media but I think people need to know that this is probably coming and it is probably going to be serious but there are things we can do to mitigate. If official advice is just met with cynicism and complacency it is going to be worse for all of us. I'm trying to be as accurate as I can and some of this is potentially not too good. 

My point is that there is an enormous amount of attention being paid to the deaths of a relatively small number of people whilst ignoring wider issues in the world. 

[Happy Jack]

3 hours ago, Phil Starr said:

If official advice is just met with cynicism and complacency it is going to be worse for all of us.

Perhaps, Phil, perhaps.

However, there's a very good reason why offical advice is so often met with cynicism and complacency. It's called History.

And most of the comments that I suspect you perceive as negative, on this thread anyway, have nothing to do with official advice and everything to do with attempts to whip up a panic-stricken froth about this.

The comment about malaria was a good example of some much needed context for this, as was my referencing the number of road deaths each week in the UK - something that we are not merely complacent about but genuinely proud of: Have you seen the equivalent figures for France or Italy or Spain or ...

Coronavirus is merely the panic subject of 2020, much as previously we've had World War 3, the oil running out, everyone dying of AIDS and Herpes, a teen generation succumbing to alcopops (remember them?), the next Ice Age (long overdue), being eaten alive by Ebola, and many many more including previous Coronavirus outbreaks. Without an existential threat to prattle on about, most people don't seem to know how to live, so existential threats are discovered, or dredged up, or exaggerated out of all recognition.

Meanwhile, people generally are appallingly bad at understanding statistics or at gauging risk through use of probabilities. Ask any of the 32,000,000 Brits who choose to buy a Lottery ticket regularly. Yes, you read that right. 32m Brits buy a ticket pretty much every week despite this:

The chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot is 1 in 45,057,474, according to the Lotto website, while there is a 1 in 7,509,579 chance of getting five numbers plus the bonus ball. To win the Euromillions jackpot there is a one in 1 in 139,838,160 of all your numbers being drawn.

People understand what a £22m Jackpot is and how it could change their lives. People don't understand what 1 in 45m really means and how ludicrously unlikely it is that they will be that one lucky person.

Similarly, people understand what dying is and they're scared of it. People don't understand how massively the odds are tilted against them dying of Coronavirus, or how urgent it is that a Government as useless and mendacious as the current one must be seen as 'caring' or 'making a difference', so if you tell them that their very lives are at risk they tend to believe you uncritically, without using whatever brain cells or education they may have available.

Is Coronavirus real? Yes.

Is it bad? Yes.

Are people dying? Yes.

Do I wish it wasn't happening? Yes.

Is it an existential threat? No.

Is it a 'game changer'? No.

Will it change the way we all live in future? No.

Will it get a mention in the history books that will be written in 50 years time? No, apart from a brief reference in the chapter on Panics & Scares Of The Early 21st Century.

Sadly, I won't be there to read those books, and anyway I seem to have developed a nasty little cough ...

 

[Cat Burrito]

We have a Spanish tour at the end of the month and I am thinking it could be a problem. We'll see, I guess. 

[Cato]

Without accurate data from China it's not really possible to predict what might happen over here.

But what data there is suggests that coronavirus was spreading completely unchecked in Wuhan city and Hubei Province for one to two months before the government took action to contain it.

 In which case the official figure of 80,000 people in China getting infected, whilst admittedly a lot of people, is a drop in the ocean compared to the overall population of Wuhan city of around 11 million, let alone the 1.3 billion population of China.

Bottom line, it's probably nowhere near as contagious as the 'worst case scenarios' currently making the headlines would suggest.

Edited March 2, 2020 by Cato

[Happy Jack]

And here's exactly the sort of codswallop that we need to be ignoring.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-51699056

Coronavirus: Hospitality industry losses 'in hundreds of thousands'

What was actually said? The head of the completely impartial and balanced Hospitality Ulster (who?) claims that cancelling the Six Nations would have "an economic impact  ... that we would estimate in the hundreds of thousands". Evidence might have been nice. Some sort of explanation as to the basis for his estimates could have helped. But no, just print quotes from someone we've never heard of that suggest that economic catastrophe is now inevitable.

I imagine that his next news release will be to ask the Government for a hand-out to offset the disastrous impact of two people (so far) getting ill in Ireland.

Apropos of nothing, and just for context:

The UK hospitality sector has reached more than 100 Billion Euros in 2018 with expectations of more to reach in 2019 despite the Brexit consequences and staff shortages. The number of hosting and food services facilities has grown nearly 20% in the last five years providing more than 330,000 working opportunities.

[Phil Starr]

5 hours ago, Happy Jack said:

 

Is it an existential threat? No.

Is it a 'game changer'? No.

Will it change the way we all live in future? No.

Will it get a mention in the history books that will be written in 50 years time? No, apart from a brief reference in the chapter on Panics & Scares Of The Early 21st Century.

Sadly, I won't be there to read those books, and anyway I seem to have developed a nasty little cough ...

 

I don't want to get into a long argument about this mainly because neither of us know if any of these things might be true, because there is a lack of data. Comparing it to H1N1 flu virus is interesting though.

You may feel the 2009 pandemic was sound and fury signifying nothing but WHO figures suggest 27% of us were infected and anywhere between 150-575,000 people died prematurely. The fatality rate of those infected was 0.01%

The 1918 pandemic was altogether more serious between 11 and 21% of the worlds population was infected. Fatality rate was 2-3% and the peak death rate was 25 people per 1000 population in the UK. Worldwide for a brief period it dwarfed malaria 40-50million people died in a couple of years. At the moment Coronavirus looks like it is killing 2% of infected people showing symptoms  and infecting about 20% of the population. Given that the world population is four times that of 1918 and the similarity of early figures to H1N1 in 1918 we ought to at least consider the possibility of ten's of millions dying, maybe hundreds of millions. Game changer? certainly for those of us who are killed. Significant? Well I think 150-500,000 is significant even if there are nearly 8 billion of us.

So if it pans out as badly as the 1918 pandemic expect maybe 195,000,000 deaths plus a lot of illness, that's about 400 years worth of malaria deaths (600,000 in 2017, 420,000 in 2018). That's only one possibility amongst many of course. 

It will be a game changer, we have been steadily upping our response capability to novel infections, we can now sequence the DNA of these viruses we are more vigilant than we were and Chinese scientists were warning of a new infectious Coronavirus in 2014. Our skills at containment are getting better, work on AIDS has improved our anti-viral skills. Part of what drives this is public opinion and unfortunately we are all too willing to let problems be ignored.

[Stub Mandrel]

The corona virus has been contained more effectively than flu, but possibly spreads more easily.

The 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic is possibly directly comparable.

Quote

The World Health Organization estimates that 2–3% of those who were infected died (case-fatality ratio).^[51] It is estimated that approximately 30 million were killed by the flu, or about 1.7% of the world population died.^[52] Other estimates range from 17 to 55 million fatalities.

So it ain't going to wipe out civilisation, but it could have a profound impact on us all, as even 1% of the current population is about 70 million people.

[spectoremg]

22 hours ago, Happy Jack said:

Chances are that China now has 100,000 cases of coronavirus. The population of China is 1.4 billion. For the arithmetically challenged, that's 1,400,000,000 people.

So a full month into the outbreak, one Chinese in every 14,000 has the disease. Looked at another way, out of every 14,000 Chinese there are 13,999 who don't have it.

"Yet", I grant you, "Yet". Some more will get it as time goes by, but at the moment the odds are firmly in favour of humanity surviving this.

Not all of those 100,000 will die, of course. The Chinese death rate (if we can believe anything their Government says) is a surprisingly high 5%-ish. Estimates for Europe are suggesting that we will see less than 2%, probably 1%.

All statistics change over time. That's the nature of things. But if you were to assume, just for the sake of the argument, that one in every 14,000 Brits were to develop the disease, and that 2% of those affected were to die, it doesn't take long to work out that the extra 80 deaths - each an individual tragedy for someone - would represent two weeks' road deaths.

You can't sell newspapers, or garner cheap clicks, by publishing this sort of thing. Far better to fire up the panic-stricken auto-headline generator, tell everyone that (1) we're all going to die, (2) it's all the fault of those slitty-eyed b@st@rds in Chinky-land, and (3) that this may affect property prices in the Home Counties.

 

Totally correct, our ever trustful media again. If a terrorist killed a Brit on Tower Bridge tomorrow you wouldn't hear a thing about Coronavirus for days. 

[ribbetingfrog]

22 hours ago, 41Hz said:

When I go to the shops I don’t get drunks spitting song requests in my face, shaking my hand or hugging me!

You don’t go shopping in Manchester then?

[Beedster]

7 hours ago, Happy Jack said:

Perhaps, Phil, perhaps.

However, there's a very good reason why offical advice is so often met with cynicism and complacency. It's called History.

And most of the comments that I suspect you perceive as negative, on this thread anyway, have nothing to do with official advice and everything to do with attempts to whip up a panic-stricken froth about this.

The comment about malaria was a good example of some much needed context for this, as was my referencing the number of road deaths each week in the UK - something that we are not merely complacent about but genuinely proud of: Have you seen the equivalent figures for France or Italy or Spain or ...

Coronavirus is merely the panic subject of 2020, much as previously we've had World War 3, the oil running out, everyone dying of AIDS and Herpes, a teen generation succumbing to alcopops (remember them?), the next Ice Age (long overdue), being eaten alive by Ebola, and many many more including previous Coronavirus outbreaks. Without an existential threat to prattle on about, most people don't seem to know how to live, so existential threats are discovered, or dredged up, or exaggerated out of all recognition.

Meanwhile, people generally are appallingly bad at understanding statistics or at gauging risk through use of probabilities. Ask any of the 32,000,000 Brits who choose to buy a Lottery ticket regularly. Yes, you read that right. 32m Brits buy a ticket pretty much every week despite this:

The chance of winning the National Lottery jackpot is 1 in 45,057,474, according to the Lotto website, while there is a 1 in 7,509,579 chance of getting five numbers plus the bonus ball. To win the Euromillions jackpot there is a one in 1 in 139,838,160 of all your numbers being drawn.

People understand what a £22m Jackpot is and how it could change their lives. People don't understand what 1 in 45m really means and how ludicrously unlikely it is that they will be that one lucky person.

Similarly, people understand what dying is and they're scared of it. People don't understand how massively the odds are tilted against them dying of Coronavirus, or how urgent it is that a Government as useless and mendacious as the current one must be seen as 'caring' or 'making a difference', so if you tell them that their very lives are at risk they tend to believe you uncritically, without using whatever brain cells or education they may have available.

Is Coronavirus real? Yes.

Is it bad? Yes.

Are people dying? Yes.

Do I wish it wasn't happening? Yes.

Is it an existential threat? No.

Is it a 'game changer'? No.

Will it change the way we all live in future? No.

Will it get a mention in the history books that will be written in 50 years time? No, apart from a brief reference in the chapter on Panics & Scares Of The Early 21st Century.

Sadly, I won't be there to read those books, and anyway I seem to have developed a nasty little cough ...

 

Most sensible thing I've read on the issue to date, thanks Jack

[Mickeyboro]

The 24 hour rolling news society of today loves a story like this. 
Sadly...

[Happy Jack]

2 hours ago, Phil Starr said:

So if it pans out as badly as the 1918 pandemic ...

I get that Phil, really I do, but that's a bloody big 'if' based on, putting it bluntly, nothing at all.

Come to that, if it pans out as badly as the Great Plague of 1665, or (God help us) if it pans out as badly as the Black Death of 1347, or ... but y'know, actually it probably won't.

Any sensible practitioner knows that you hope for the best but prepare for the worst. Any news source proprietor knows that you bang on endlessly about the worst case scenario (cos it's so much more exciting than saying "another virus has emerged - we'll be fine") until it fizzles out, then you claim the credit for solving the problem with your 'campaign against viruses'. Any politician, no matter how tiny-minded, corrupt and devoid of principles, knows that you make a big song & dance about how much you're doing to protect the public while looking for a scapegoat against the moment it all goes wrong.

Very little of that helps those of us trying to live our daily lives and refusing to believe that the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Yes, we're all going to die, but not tomorrow. I'm not planning to, anyway. 

 

[Woodinblack]

To be fair, the spanish flu of 1918 had additional complications, a completely unsanitary breeding ground of the trenches and boats going to it, people travelling everywhere because of the war, more pre-existing conditions in both an unhealthy, not well nourished and slightly blown up population, a complete lack of anti-bacterials to counter the secondary infections, a lack of knowledge of how the disease was spreading for the first half of it, conditions made worse by the beliefs of the day.

If it had come a year later, it would have been much less damaging as people wouldn't have been travelling in the same way.

Whatever comes of this, you can't really compare it to that one

[drTStingray]

Well it's interesting to hear you guys crying 'scaremongering' etc. From figures given out today 1 in 340 of those tested so far in this country tested positive. That's pretty scary as far as I'm concerned. 

Apparently, from an interview I've just seen with a leading Republican in the US, it seems only 500 people have been tested in the US so far, and the scientists aren't trusted - indeed a certain person has been tweeting 'fake news' - indeed the interviewee claimed if the US controlled their borders better they wouldn't have the virus (presumably they don't think US citizens travel to Italy or China ever but Mexican immigrants do 😩 ) What a loony world we live in!! So their approach seems to be to talk it down and spin it as a political weapon being used against the Leader by the democrats! They said after all there's only been 9 deaths.... it'll be interesting to see, if as looks likely there is a major outbreak in the US - how they deal with it. I know which country I feel safer in, in the circumstances!! 

My next gig is in a week or two - will be interesting to see whether it still goes ahead - I suspect it will but whether there's an audience or not.... who knows. My company (it's American) has issued a travel ban for staff today on company business to reduce risk... 

Edited March 2, 2020 by drTStingray

[Newfoundfreedom]

All I want to know is when do the zombies start to appear? 

[ribbetingfrog]

8 hours ago, Newfoundfreedom said:

All I want to know is when do the zombies start to appear? 

Be careful!

you’ll start a mass panic!

[Cato]

9 hours ago, drTStingray said:

Well it's interesting to hear you guys crying 'scaremongering' etc. From figures given out today 1 in 340 of those tested so far in this country tested positive. That's pretty scary as far as I'm concerned. 

I'm not sure that's a particularly useful statistic.

It's not 1 in 340 from a random sample of the population.

Until quite recently the only people being tested were those who developed symptoms after visiting high risk countries or had direct contact with people who have been diagnosed with coronavirus.

So that's 1 in 340 from a fairly small and very specific subject group that were thought to be at a much higher risk of contracting coronavirus anyway.

It doesn't really tell us anything about how contagious the virus is or what's happening in the general population.

Edited March 3, 2020 by Cato

[Woodinblack]

8 hours ago, drTStingray said:

My next gig is in a week or two - will be interesting to see whether it still goes ahead

Mine too and it almost certainly will unless someone else decides it won't, or something materially changes. We haven't missed a gig due to illness (apart from my knee replacement, and then only one) in 3 years, I don't think we will be missing it due to an illness that none of us have.

Until something materially changes, I don't really see there is a need for anything to change.

TBH - the current advice of stay in, avoid crowds seems like my idea of heaven anyway.

[Phil Starr]

8 hours ago, Woodinblack said:

To be fair, the spanish flu of 1918 had additional complications, a completely unsanitary breeding ground of the trenches and boats going to it, people travelling everywhere because of the war, more pre-existing conditions in both an unhealthy, not well nourished and slightly blown up population, a complete lack of anti-bacterials to counter the secondary infections, a lack of knowledge of how the disease was spreading for the first half of it, conditions made worse by the beliefs of the day.

If it had come a year later, it would have been much less damaging as people wouldn't have been travelling in the same way.

Whatever comes of this, you can't really compare it to that one

That's absolutely fair and I did consider putting some of that in my post, but my posts tend to be too long anyway. I'm not coming on as a prophet of doom. I've been following this since the coronavirus popped up in 2014 and before that the SARS outbreak. Pretty much any epidemic novel disease interests me. All I'm really trying to do is pass on some of the stuff I'm reading. I'm optimistic by nature and there are things we can do collectively to help. I suppose by giving a bit of perspective I'm hoping people take this thing seriously. It isn't really here yet but people washing their hands will slow colds and flu too, when it does get here properly, if it get's here then the better our understanding the better we will cope. We all know people who think they know best, who will try and leave quarantine because they feel fine, who will fly to the Veneto because they've paid for the holiday, who will go to work because 'it's only a cold'

What you say about the conditions and people moving because of the war is all true, I don't have numbers but in 2018 there were 4.4billion air passengers carried worldwide (Statista) way bigger than the movements of 1918. We just have better transport now. Cities are bigger and more of us are urban dwellers. Worldwide there is less absolute poverty in proportion but still plenty of people who are under nourished or who have little access to healthcare.

My specialism at university was mathematically modelling biological populations. It was a long time ago but is kind of why I've been interested in contagious diseases over the years. It seems whatever the changes in conditions the transmission rate now in our conditions is similar to the transmission rate then in their conditions with a different disease and so is the mortality rate. You'd need far more fine detail than those two crude figures to do any modelling but the figures I've seen haven't been comforting so far.

FWIW I'm checking figures and information before I post, I'll make mistakes of course but i'm trying to be objective.

 

[Happy Jack]

9 hours ago, drTStingray said:

Well it's interesting to hear you guys crying 'scaremongering' etc. From figures given out today 1 in 340 of those tested so far in this country tested positive. That's pretty scary as far as I'm concerned. 

 

1 in 340 out of a population of 60m means about 176,000 people ... assuming of course that the very small sample, already targeted at those considered to be most at risk, can actually be extrapolated out to include the entire population.

OK, 176,000 is a big number, let's take it seriously.

The first thing to note is that the vast majority of Covid-19 cases produce symptoms similar to a cold. Of those that are more serious than a cold, the vast majority produce symptoms similar to flu. Of those that are more serious than flu, most sufferers develop very nasty symptoms that can be life-threatening to a minority of the population. And finally you reach the cases that the media are drooling over ... people dying.

You can do your own research as to the predicted death rate from Covid-19 for Western Europe and choose which number you prefer. For the moment, I'm sticking with 1% but that may not survive contact with reality ... it might be 0.1% and it might be 5%, nobody knows. Yet. We'll find out quite soon.

1% too cautious for you? Fine, let's run with 5%. That means that the 176,000 cases we (allegedly, based on a dodgy survey) already have might generate 176,000 x 5% = 8800 deaths.

Hmmmmmm. Does anyone actually believe that? If at least a month of pandemonium in the most heavily-populated country on Earth (China) has produced fewer deaths than that, why would Brits be dropping like flies? Sounds like b0ll0cks to me. 

Back to 1% then. Even that would produce 1760 deaths. Unacceptable. Intolerable. Something should be done! We need to change everything so that this can never happen again ... eh? What's that you say, Sooty? There are 363,000 new cases of cancer in the UK every year? And 165,000 of them die every year? 

Maybe we're focusing on the wrong pandemic here?

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics-for-the-uk

And don't forget, children, the proportion infected in China after over a month of this is still nowhere near 1 in 340.

Just saying ...