China coronavirus spread is accelerating, Xi Jinping warns.

The real fear is what happens when all the intensive care beds have run out, that's why Italy being in lock-down is already too late, this will swamp any health service and when it does the death rate will explode because the 1/5 of cases that are not mild appear to really need hospitalisation.

The fact that your relative in her 60's needed hospitalisation scares the hell out of me, I'm in my 60's.

I live on my own, I have no relatives near me, I already live like a hermit, I rarely go out except to go to the supermarket and to get to work, in the last 9 months, I went to London once last August, flew to the Philippines and back in December and went out with my pal to Liverpool for a beer a couple of Saturdays ago, apart from that it's been, home->work->home, sometimes work->supermarket,->home, one visit to a petrol station every 2 months and I still managed to catch a flu like illness at the end of January which I am not yet completely over.

There are people being interviewed on Newsnight just now who are reporting comments in the media effectively treating our elderly as expendable, praising the benefits of the premature deaths of elderly people removing the strain from social systems in general.

Ah great and what's that going to do to all our older politicians.

Again Newsnight mentioned this a moment ago, she has had a lot of recent contact with a lot of people both inside the Health service and Parliament.

Look at the US presidential race, Biden age 77, Sanders age 78, Trump age 73 all three of them in the most endangered age group we could see this year an election seriously influenced by a virus.

Yes I replayed that part of Newsnight over and over as I could not believe my ears, not that Newsnight was saying this they were just reporting other media outlets that had been making comments like this.

Not official yet and I warned this kids that this could be fake news, they sent me this, schools being closed for a month in Metro Manila.

There is a report on Philstar saying that Duterte will announce new measures to fight Covid-19 tonight, so there is a chance that this is real.

I would hope so.