Coronavirus in the UK

They relaxed far too early in June and July we are paying the price for people wanting holidays, the time to be most vigilant is when the virus numbers are really low we reopened when the R0 was still 0.7 had we pushed it down to 0.3 or less and retained travel restrictions and social distancing we would be almost clear of it by now and keeping a lid on it now would have been much easier.

This is not a second wave we are still in the first one because we never stamped it out, people might look at the graphs and think it looks like a wave but the case count by testing never got below a couple of thousand positives a day and the real case incidence was 5 to 10 times what we were counting, so they relaxed restrictions when in reality there were still likely something like 10,000 real cases a day we just didn't know about them because the test coverage and test capacity never got to the point where random testing could uncover the true extent of infection in the population and to this day we are still really only testing people who think they are symptomatic.

Influenza waves result from an oscillation of infection from North to South hemispheres as the seasons change, Influenza almost dies out every year but spreads to the other hemisphere mutating all the time to some back as a new variant the following Autumn/Winter season, SARS-CoV-2 doesn't and hasn't worked like that even though I think there are hints of seasonality in the Philippine data.

You're right but basically that's because they are all culturally incapable of putting politics aside and focusing on reality, Asian countries acted immediately, South Korea stamped out a major outbreak in the south immediately and got it under control, and south Korea is not a small country it is the size of Scotland but has a population only a little smaller than ours.

We should have been locked down in February, start of February.

Don't give them that much credit Mike, they aren't that bright.

Strictly speaking she is not on a ventilator as ventilators are an invasive procedure where the person is intubated i.e. has tubes inserted into their trachea to force the oxygen into their lungs mechanically, it is so invasive that you are put into an induced coma, she would not be awake, what she is on is a full face respirator providing her with a high concentration of oxygen but she is breathing on her own.

Good to know she is doing that well the ones on ventilators aren't.

When I was in hospital in June I was terrified of being operated on, the terror was because of the general anaesthesia, all general anaesthesia is dangerous there is always a chance of brain damage or death, but just to add to the stress I was asked to sign a Covid release form because there was a chance that the equipment used to put me under could be contaminated, it was literally 1 hour before the operation that I was informed that I had a choice of a spinal local anaesthetic and I jumped at that, stay awake at any cost and off of a ventilator.

What's it been like John, have you been furloughed since March?

From memory you are still under pension age but only just and I've never enquired if you have any personal pension provision?

We furloughed a few people back a the beginning when we were worried about our customers not needing as much support, I even thought we might have to furlough some of our dev staff but luckily that never happened as we had enough specifiable work to keep my guys going.

After the short furloughs for a few members of staff we realised that our customer base still needed us and that the remaining staff were suffering from the pressures of lack of support people, so basically we ended furlough quite early on as we were still busy.