778

Apr 21, 2020 -- 4:35PM, mafeking wrote:

7 day figure was around 6000 last week and now down to 5200 for most recent 7 day period. marginal decrease but judging from Italy, spain and france likely to be daily average of 400 to 500 for a few weeks yet

This looks to be accurate to me. People are talking about getting over the peak and looking at releasing lockdown gradually. I'd say that's at least a few weeks premature if Italy and Spain are anything to go by. Releasing it too early will undo a lot of the containment the lockdown achieved and set you back, meaning a longer overall period of restriction.

It's not so much death numbers falling as deaths are about 1-2 weeks behind what is actually happening today. A steady fall in new cases after a consistent amount of tests or else a steady fall in the rate of positives after an increasing number of people being tested is what you'd want to see, but a fall in new cases too because the next stage is to test and track cases and contacts and you can't even start that if your new cases is too high, as you won't have the human resources to go and chase down all the contacts of those new cases quickly enough to get on top of it.

Politicians have been lying to you from the start and are the wrong people to be making these decisions. Fobbing us all off talking about exit strategies to keep people off their backs. They know they've fúcked up and are the cause of this lockdown being needed in the first place. And they know they are miles away still from it being the right time to release it. They will probably look to release it prematurely as well, you'd have to expect that at this stage. They will always consider what is best for them politically and for their backers, which should be irrelevant in any of these decisions.