At 22:07 13/03/2020, Greg Dropkin wrote:
>The UK has just sustained a mean growth ratio of 1.32 for 15 days 
>(28/2 - 13/3), and this is not from outliers, it's pretty stable and 
>the latest ratio is 1.34.

Yes, that is apparent from the data (the relevant bits of which you 
posted).  What I was thinking, and didn't express clearly enough, was 
that "no country other than the UK" seems to have had that degree of 
rise sustained for anything like as much as 14 days - leading me to 
seriously wonder whether the same rate of increase was likely be 
sustained for a further 14 days in the UK.  The answer is, of course, 
"Who knows?"!

>another point, again in his article and in the twitter feeds from 
>Italy, is that if the NHS is overwhelmed, there will be a lot of 
>other deaths from other illnesses which were not treated due to the 
>unavoidable focus on COVID-19.

That is certainly a risk, and takes us back to what I recently 
wrote/implied about the prioritisation of access to resources such as 
ICU beds.  In terms of 'overall death figures', I suppose it is only 
the extent of resources that matter - i.e. if N patients are going to 
die as a result of non-availability of ICU beds, it makes no 
difference (to 'the numbers') whether they were N patients with 
Covid-19 infection who couldn't have ICU beds because they were 
occupied patients with other illnesses, or by N patients with other 
illness who could not be treated in ITU because the beds were 
occupied by patients with Covid-19 infection.

What one obviously wants to avoid (and the reason for the thinking 30 
years ago which I mentioned) is to give an ICU patient to an elderly 
patient infected with Covid-19, if use of the bed would be far more 
likely to prevent the death of another, maybe younger, patient with 
some other illness.  However, such prioritisation of the use of 
(invariably finite/limited) clinical resources always has been, and 
probably always will be, an intrinsic part of virtually any healthcare system.

Kind Regards,


John

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