Would the NHS have been better funded if we had a Labour government for the last 10 years? The UK should have been acting in Jan 2019 same as South Korea and other Asian countries, would Labour have acted earlier if they had been privy to the details available in Jan 2019 maybe or maybe not but either way if they had consistently failed throughout the whole sorry mess as badly as the Tory government has then they should and would have been equally as culpable as the Conservatives. Ministers were warned NHS would be stretched to ‘breaking point’ by pandemic in 2016 practice run (politicshome.com)
Published in November 2020 and still referring to a redacted report from 2016 which is not available to the public. The exercise was about pandemic preparedness, the fact that the assumption was that it would be an Influenza epidemic is immaterial the lessons learned would apply to all major outbreaks, the point is nothing was done to prepare the exercise came and went and was not acted on.
I know! Always good to get as much info as possible before making judgement especially from the horses mouth and not just one commentary that in mg view ( last paragraph) carries an amount of unsubstantiated scaremongering.
That was still 2 or more weeks earlier than the UK Jim, my kids were being schooled from home at the start of March, and note that unlike Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, South Korea the pandemic has been substantially worse in the Philippines and required much harsher action than has been employed in the likes of South Korea.
I made a point of not quoting the Sun and Daily Mail et al. reporting on this story at the time last April, I had found the government sources as well but preferred to quote the opinion piece from that politics site in spite of their spelling mistakes.
In the Washington Post. Deadly Covid 19 Pandemic is Obscuring Another - Obesity.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...vid-19-pandemic-is-obscuring-another-obesity/ “As America emerges from the covid-19 pandemic, we need to focus urgent attention on another disease that kills hundreds of thousands every year: obesity. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of Americanshave obesity. Nearly 1 in 10 have severe obesity, up from 1 in 20 two decades ago. Obesity is a risk factor for other chronic diseases, including diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and several cancers. By itself, it’s the second-leading cause of preventable death, after tobacco, responsible for an estimated 300,000 deaths per year.”
Brazil is not known as a country with mostly obese people yet they are losing many, many thousands to Covid-19 every day?
Agreed. Half of all intensive care beds in Brazil were occupied by people under the age of 40 last month. Covid: Younger Brazilians fall ill as cases explode - BBC News It's a serious illness not just a very bad cold that can kill fat people who might or might not have other contributing factors that increase their risk. One of my lads was unwell a couple of weeks back he is young and fit, runs every day, does not have a weight problem, when he got sick I told him to get tested but he didn't want to because his wife was regularly getting lateral flow tests from the school and had not tested positive and he had not been in any other company. He really wasn't well but he pushed through it and worked through it and said he was fine and he certainly sounded like he was getting better. This week he tells me his GP who he went to see about a sinus problem last week was sending him for a chest X-ray because he thought that the lad had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 but had recovered, the reason he was sending him for the X-Ray was that his blood oxygen was still abnormally low so I asked him what the number was and he said the GP had not told him but that he used his phone to check it (built in oximeter) and the result was 86 which he himself felt was good enough as he felt ok. He checked again when I asked and got a reading of 94 which is the bare minimum value you should ever have for blood oxygen, the advice is contact a doctor if you have Covid symptoms and your blood oxygen goes to 93 or less actually if it is persistently 94 you should be calling 111 for advice whether to go to hospital A&E. This lad is in his early thirties, never sick, the GP wants the X-Ray and bloods, the bloods for antibody testing and the X-Ray to look for granulation in the alveoli. I've stated before that asymptomatic people are getting chest X-rays after antibody tests show positive and finding out their lungs are a mess even though they had no symptoms, so the notion that any section of the population can safely accept the risk of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 is to my mind just wrong, just about everyone who gets infected gets damaged by it in some fashion and to some degree whether they realise it or not. As a side note I think I mentioned before that the last time I was in A&E one of the Doctors told me they had abandoned lateral flow tests because they were getting hundreds of false negative test results with them, i.e. they were next to useless.
Also, obesity has been a problem in the USA for about fifty years and 578,000+ people have died from Covid-19. Alarm bells would have been going off in 2019.
I have posted the stats several times. Oss has seen them. Also relevant medical journals such as the BMJ. You don’t have to look very far to find this data. It just doesn’t come out in mainstream news much. Well it does but it’s mixed in with all the trash so Joe Public is left bewildered.
I have repeated myself hoarse. It isn’t age, it’s metabolic health that is important when it comes to the severe cases culminating in death or thereabouts. I shall repeat again. It is not age. It is metabolic health that counts.
Lads. I didn’t have to look very far to find this in the Lancet. It should quell your curiosity on Brazil. It’s entitled : “Metabolic health in Brazil: trends and challenges” https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landia/article/PIIS2213-8587(20)30370-3/fulltext In 2014, Brazil, a middle-income country, was ranked third in the world for the absolute number of obese adult men (11.9 million), falling behind only China and the United States.
It is very well known that the USA has an obesity problem. It is also well known that the USA has a gigantuous problem with chronic diseases. What hasnt been so easily recognised is why. There is a good reason for it and I raised the question here on this forum but got no responses. There is a fairly well known reason for the alarm bells not going off. Boris knows. Matt Hancock knows and Tom Watson explained why in the video I posted some months ago. The answers are all posted within this forum.
CDC have already set the alarm bells off. Not everyone is hearing them though. I posted the CDC data more than once on here.
I don't agree, There are two ways of framing this illness or any illness for that matter, one views it as it's a harmless mild disease that only kills metabolically inferior people, everyone else is fine, the other way of framing it is that it is a serious disease which can be fought off by people that don't have other health issues. My problem with labelling it a disease of the metabolically compromised is that you can label any illness that way and thereby the blame is shifted to individual, like how metabolically healthy do you have to be to survive Cholera how metabolically healthy do you have to be to survive Ebola. Covid is killing more and more young people you can't explain it by just saying oh they must have been metabolically inferior, that is dismissive it means you are not going to further investigate the processes that are actually killing these people, I mean when a 16 year old dies must they have been metabolically compromised, how about the 1,300 young children under the age of 2 years in Brazil that have died were they metabolically compromised. And then you one can ask well if it is only metabolic health that matters how come the vaccines work. It does not make sense to me John, this is a disease that kills people in many different ways, one of them just one is the destruction of the alveoli in the lungs by gumming them up with hyaluronic acid, it also kills by causing kidney failure and blood clots and it also leaves hundreds of thousands with persistent damage. I repeat people who were asymptomatic and later find out they have antibodies are showing up on chest X-Rays as having extensive lung damage and they didn't even know they had this virus. I am saying that this is not a bad cold, the ways it kills are not shared by other cold viruses, it is a new novel dangerous virus with new ways of damaging those people it infects which we have not seen before, yes if you are fit and young you could survive it potentially with lung damage and yes if you have metabolic issues then this virus is harder to beat but the virus itself is not a mild disease that just happens to kill people that are not supermen. I would like to see more studies of survivors because unlike normal influenza pneumonia the damage caused by Covid pneumonia is very different and does not appear to get better afterwards.
