ROVEN Posted October 30, 2020 Posted October 30, 2020 There's no stopping the second wave of coronavirus, it seems, despite a bundle of new rules designed to do just that. Infection rates are rising rapidly, with estimates suggesting up to 100,000 people a day may be catching the virus. Across the Channel, France has admitted its regional approach is not working, by announcing a new national lockdown. Germany, to a lesser extent, is also planning one. Wales is in the middle of a short "fire-breaker" lockdown, in which bars, restaurants, churches and most shops have shut for a fortnight. So is a full-on UK-wide lockdown only a matter of time? The scientists certainly think so Many of those advising government have given it their backing. Sir Jeremy Farrar, a member of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), which advises ministers, says it should have happened already - and definitely needs to now. Any delay, he said, will be costly and will mean later restrictions will be "harder and longer". The tools we have at our disposal are not proving effective, said Dr Duncan Robertson, a disease modeller at Loughborough University. The test-and trace-system, designed to nip outbreaks in the bud, can't cope, he said. The service has consistently failed to reach enough close contacts of people who test positive. It's just a "matter of time" before a lockdown is introduced, he believes. …although Downing Street doesn't The government, though, seems determined to hold out - with ministers in England saying publicly they want to stick to their regional approach which has seen areas placed into one of three tiers each with different level of restrictions. There is not much in the data to suggest it might be effective yet - although one glimmer of hope could be in the slowing of hospital admissions in the North West. In Scotland the targeting of its central belt also appears to be having an impact. Death numbers could force a change of policy If the virus continues to spread, deaths will rise too, Dr Robertson said. "How many deaths would the public accept? I think they would soon become too large to bear." Robert West, a professor in health psychology, and a government adviser, agrees. He said the rising numbers will have a huge "emotional impact", forcing a full lockdown. He dismissed the idea put forward by some that the public have become "desensitised" to the situation. So just how bad could deaths get? This week has seen reported deaths top 300 a day twice with the weekly average standing at 230. That compares with a peak of more than 1,000 in April. One scenario produced for the government over the summer - a "reasonable worst case" - suggested total deaths could reach 120,000 from September to the end of March, with cases peaking in January before the virus burns out. That would be treble what was seen during the spring peak. But it is only a scenario, based on the worst assumptions and without taking into account people changing their behaviour, extra restrictions or improved treatments having an effect. Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at Oxford University, says such projections should be treated with extreme caution. He believes the focus on the daily reported Covid death figures, which just count the people who have died with 28 days of a positive test, is "distorting" the debate. There needs to be more focus on different measures of mortality, he says, such as how many extra people are dying. One way of doing that is to look at the death rate adjusted for age and size of the po[CENSORED]tion. If you do that for the first wave - the year to the end of August - the death rate in 2020 is worse than in previous years. But go back just over a decade and you will find a comparably deadly year, as this graph shows.
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