norwaysaint

And sorry to hear about your dad, hope he shakes it off quickly.

That would clearly be a terrible idea. How on Earth would medical services cope if so many people got sick at exactly the same time? This is all about slowing down the infection rate, so that people who can be helped, get that help.

Trump has been doing an incredible job with Covfefe 19, it's beautiful.

During this period? I doubt many players would be too happy about being exposed to proximity and contact like that.

It is. It's going to be very strenuous on a huge amount of people and the recovery will take time. We make this choice because for most people, financial hardship is preferable to losing loved ones when we could have avoided it. I'll tighten my belt for a couple of years rather than put my family in danger just because my comfy life will be compromised.

Are there really still people setting themselves up as the real experts here and feeling they know better than the combined experts of just about every nation on Earth? I find it incredible. Are you also one of those who think it's a conspiracy? That world leaders have got together in a bizzare bid to tank their own economies and preside over a situation they cannot win? The general population has a resistance to the worst effects of flu, either due to vaccination or resistance developed over generations of immunity and natural selection. This is a disease that we have ot developed any resistance to and that leaves huge amounts of people very vulnerable. This isn't a new thing, we destroyed indigenous populations across the world by introducing simple things like influenza to them, when history hadn't given them any level of resistance. Spanish flu did it to us a hundred years ago. But sure, you're the expert here and everyone else is talking nonsense. I'm just glad I read this forum, so that I can find the real truth the "experts" are all missing...

I don't think anyone said is of great importance. I simply commented that they can't be doing it effectively if they aren't testing large proportions of the people with symptoms, not even including those who don't show symptoms. The point is the mortality rates we hear are likely to be utterly inaccurate.

But that won't give you the mortality rate of the disease. If 1000 people in a town are infected, 100 are tested and found positive and 2 die, you have a 2% mortality rate of the infected as far as you know. However, due to the unknown actual total, the real mortality rate was 0.2%.

Really? How can they say what percentage of the infected are dying if they don't know how many are infected? Surely they would just end up with a percentage of those cases severe enough to be reported?

That's pretty much the whole country here. The health service is just way too busy to test every person showing symptoms, especially when there are still so many suffering from the flu season.

I assume you meant to direct this at me as it was me who made the comment he was replying to. I made the comment in reply to this, which really isn't quite the same message as you're giving there, so it's not too surprising that there was some confusion about what you were trying to say:

I have no idea about the UK. Here it was all about slowing down a very fast accelerating infection rate. The numbers were starting to leap and the emergency services couldn't cope with that kind of curve. Therefore, everyone now has to practice social distancing (which sounds about right for Norwegians anyway...). That flattens the curve and keeps the infection rate closer to what can be managed. In theory anyway. It had nothing to do with policing events here, but as I said, here isn't there.

Most people showing symptoms can't get anywhere near a test at the moment, so god knows how they can give an accurate mortality rate.

I work in education and haven't heard much from teachers being "precious". We have had to watch constant warnings about avoiding large gatherings, while presiding over compulsory large gatherings all day every day, so, yes, we've been asking questions about that and pointing out that schools more than fulfill the criteria of places they've said to avoid. Most teachers aren't talking about concern for themselves though, but that they are helping to spread the virus in a very uncontrolled way. Closing the schools isn't great for us on a personal level. I am having to put in far more work teaching from home than I do in a classroom and I'm fighting against constant technology failings at the same time. I have to strictly follow exactly the same timetable, logging on with classes at 8 in the morning and logging off at the end of the school day. As for demanding to stay at home, I would prefer to work from the school building, using their wifi, printers, coffee machine and empty classrooms, but the building is closed, so I'm home teaching in the lounge, next to my teenage kids who are trying to do their own schoolwork. Most of us are currently grateful to be employed in a sector where we still get paid, unlike our friends who work in areas where they have been sent home and won't get paid.

I'm actually not allowed into the school building anymore except the briefest of visits. I felt like the weeks before school was stopped was just a constant battle against appalling hygiene habits. Kids just sneeze or cough into their own hands half the time, and then will touch anything and everything around them. They actually think you're joking when you tell them to just go and wash their hands immediately. Then they are surprised again when you send them back to do it again, but with soap. Adults aren't much better though, I've seen a grown man, at the height of this, lean over a shelf of food in the supermarket and have a coughing fit over everything, without covering up. He then wiped his nose with his fingers and carried on shopping, picking things up and putting them back. People are generally too stupid and selfish to avoid spreading infection and it won't change. We're now teaching from home, but so is most of the world and all teaching platforms are running painfully slowly. Video conferencing with the class from home has been the norm and it's fun and gives some opportunities, but it's not really a patch on classroom teaching for giving real constructive help. I'd be amazed if any country is really "getting it right", because everything is a big mess that we were scarcely prepared for. We make the best of it though. Governments will be criticised throughout this for scaremongering, ineffective, over-reacting or acting too slowly, but it would have been a paranoid country that had lockdown/coping mechanisms in place for something like this. They're making it up as they go along and getting it right sometimes and wrong others. Opposition will of course take morbid delight in pointing out where they went wrong, but probably wouldn't have coped much better.

This message from the Norwegian authorities encouraging students abroad to come home made me laugh, just a little dig in there:

The hospitality industry too. Bar staff, hotel staff, cinema staff etc here are all at home unpaid too. So far, restaurants are allowed to stay open, but I wonder how long that will remain.

I can only speak for Norway, but here people are expecting it to last beyond two weeks. It's not expected to disappear either, but the infection rate was leaping, which overwhelms the health services, so the idea is to slow it down massively, so that they can cope with the numbers. I have zero personal knowledge, just trying to clear up the reasoning behind shutting things down. Shops are open though and still quite busy. They are probably the last remaining gathering point, but people are encouraged not to visit unless they need to. People are pretty stupid generally though. As far as I understood, the UK wants the infection to be allowed to spread through the population freely, or that's what I heard, so then it would make sense to keep everything open. I don't think anyone really knows what the end result of either method is going to be, do they? Generally I'd listen to the experts, but as always, people who have decided to accept one "truth" will sneer at people who have decided to accept another.

Seriously, just ignore that nonsense. That's someone very needy for attention.

I think getting out into the great outdoors is advisable for both mental and physical wellbeing. We're keeping distances, but I was in the mountains at the weekend and there were probably about a hundred others on the same mountain, but there was never any need to come close to anyone else. I think some people are just shutting themselves in their homes for two weeks, which I don't think is necessary. It doesn't take much common sense to get out, but still hold a distance. There is a pretty vast world out there.

A lot of people here decided to self-isolate by heading off to their cabins in the mountains, which most families have. They are now planning to send out the national guard to remove them, because it means thousands of extra people are added to tiny rural communities that won't be able to deal with the burden if they get sick.

Public transport was the big blindspot here. They were going on about staying one metre apart and still allowing buses and trams to be packed tight for about three or four hours a day. At the same time we have massive tolls for driving in the city, still active and discouraging everyone from using private cars.

They've been criticised here for not shutting things down sooner, but here they are trying to slow the spread, so that services can cope. The UK is going for this herd thing and just letting people catch it, so things are bound to be different.

Just done my first couple of lessons online. It was okay, we had a video conference and I set them a research task, which they did independently and came back to share an hour later. It went surprisingly smoothly, but obviously not as good as a normal lesson. Norway has a very strict 10% rule on absence and if you go above it without documentation, you don't graduate. It's being enforced for home learning too, so if they don't log on, they get absence. I had a full class for the first one, two missing for the second.

Oh, is this one of those "hypo and SOG squabble with each other threads :uhoh:". Damn.