....it’s reintroduced humanity to it’s human frailties. What an unwelcome development. I find myself getting irritated from time to time but I can sense myself actually entertaining self pity, something I scorn in others.
Still one needs only think of prior generations to put things in perspective. Imagine being an 18 year old at the start of 1914 with 2 world wars, the Great Depression and the Spanish Flu all waiting in your next 25 years.
Vasbyt!
Mozart
I went to Berlin in 1973 and while viewing the wall at the Brandenburg Tor ask some elderly ladies about what the area around the viewing platform was like before the war. What was weird was that one of the ladies turned out to be a Mrs Botha from Johannesburg who was visiting her sister in Berlin for the first time after she got married in 1938 to a Mr Botha, Aniother weirdie was she could not speak neither Afrikaans or English after all those years in SA.
They told me that the area was the hub of the city before WWII and was flattened completely by bombing, After the war they did not bother to remove the rubble - they did not try to recover the bodies of the tens of thousands of killed people and just covered the area with soil and plant grass over it,
One of the ladies said they had no real enjoyable time ever since childhood to enjoy life, She was borne just before the 1st World War and often had to go without food and other necessary when she was small. That was followed by the Weimar inflation fiasco when people were starving and without hope - followed then by the Great Depression and just when people started to hope for the better future the 2nd World War broke out, Getting out of the war situation things took at least 10 years before things start to improve for the people,
I asked the other one whether they can visit relatives in East Germany and the other lady said that she did visit Frankfort um Oder the previous year after her brother who returned from Russia after being a prisoner of war since 1943, There was no food other than cauliflower available and for he week they had only cauliflower for meals.
As you said we did not know what suffering millions went through in the 20th century and we should at least not complain over what is happening at present to us, ,
If we are going to shut down Civilization for Corona, what are we going to do in case of a real serious pandemic?
As far as I could make out nobody in Riversdale has been tested positive to date.
I forgot the German inflation.... another trial!
The worldwide death rate has now fallen to 0.6%, mostly sickly old people. As more tests come in it will drop even further. We're shutting down the world for something that's probably going to end up killing fewer people than malaria does every year .
Yes, and this twilight zone is set to continue for more than a few months still... if you look at the newly announced special grants...I'm gobsmacked! This is lunacy!
My lady may kill me before this is all said and done.
Idle hands and all.
She really dislikes Trump...
So I make it my duty to print a new A4 size pic of him daily and put it up around the house somewhere.
This morning it was on the breakfast tray. On the bottom I wrote, "Don't worry, Donnie's got ya."
Just doing my bit hahaha
@sharkbok
The deaths in the UK are indeed sadly likely to be far higher than the official figure suggest as the official death figure in the UK only counts people who have died in hospital. According to the Office of National Statistics as of the 10th of April the actual figure was 41% higher than reported. If that rate of under reporting is still accurate the likely death toll as it stand would be over 24,200 people, meaning the UK would replaced Spain as the 2nd worst hit country in Europe, only just behind Italy, and judging by the current death rate in both countries it will likely overtake Italy as the worst hit country in Europe.
Yeah it's over 6% SB, my maths failed me.
@Stavanger,
The UK apparently has the lowest amount of hospital beds per capita in Europe, or at least out of the countries that have been hit the hardest. Germany has something like 4:1 beds compared to the UK, or more...
The NHS is great but it has been under budgeted for ages. The Coronavirus has exposed this and their will be major questions once this is all over.
I saw something on Facebook (not sure 100% true), but it implied that old people in care homes that needed ventilators, have been to told they are not welcome in hospitals. The reasoning is that if someone is very old a ventilator will not help them...
News paper articles are going around that UK companies are selling PPE to EU countries because the government here does not response to their calls. After waiting over 3 weeks they have to sell what they have manufactured to someone. Meanwhile the NHS does not have enough PPE, let alone the public. Also the new Nightingale hospital are turning down people as they do not have beds...
What you describe is a problem with Government run hospitals and medical facilities worldwide, Aside from the shortage of beds in most cases there are long waiting periods for operations as well. In SA there are many private hospitals catering for what is called medical tourists and even recovery facilities for people after discharge from hospitals,. so here dies the medical tourist come from? Basically from EU countries and the UK with many from African countries as well, . It is often cheaper due to the exchange rate and get immediate treatment,
I am not overly impressed b the statistic on coronavirus deaths at all. The fact is that most of the deaths occurred iro people over 60 where people had underlying serious health problems already with weak resistance against even minor ailments. How many of the elderly would have died anyway without the virus remains a wide-open question, Elderly people over 80 rarely survive pneumonia anyway,
My contention is that the virus is indeed a major problem for the elderly with serious health threats and nothing really serious for most younger people without serious medical problems like TB and Aids for instance,
Should the world economy be cut down to cater for that situation remains a serious problem. Poor people are already suffering from starvation with that complication and the situation in SA is really serious and accompanied by riots by hungry people, No doubt it is extremely urgent to find a vaccine to deal with the issue, but is it necessary to punish the whole population and bankrupt large number of businesses causing massive job losses, while allowing for money printing by Governments world wide running out of control to deal with the situation? But most importantly - why cause starvation in the process?
@Sharkbok,
The UK apparently has the lowest amount of hospital beds per capita in Europe, or at least out of the countries that have been hit the hardest. Germany has something like 4:1 beds compared to the UK, or more...
The NHS is great but it has been under budgeted
for ages. The Coronavirus has exposed this and their will be major
questions once th is is all over.
Not sure if it was the lowest, but it was towards the bottom of the table. Ireland was ranked very low in this area and I believe it had the lowest number of ICU beds in Europe (or maybe just the EU)
Yes the NHS is a brilliant service working miracles with what they have but from what I've read under Tory government its budget has gone up only enough to cover the cost of inflation and has been static for the best part of a decade. In fairness though when this is over I think nearly every country in the world will be taking a long and hard look at health care and how they responded to this crisis.
Facebook is full of fake news, so without verification from a reputable source, I would that claim with a pinch of salt.
As for the PPE claim, the UK actually sent consignments of PPE to China at the start of the outbreak there. The UK government also claim to have missed an e-mail from the EU where the EU asked them did they want to be a part of a EU wide effort to acquire PPE. A top civil servant has come out and said they didn't miss the e-mail, they just chose to ignore it. He's since retracted the claim but whatever the truth is, it shows the UK government is either incompetent or pursuing policies that are putting lives at risk.
The Diamond Princess.....a totally captured experiment with an older bias is still the best indication of the death rate.
712 cases......13 deaths.....7 still critical. This from a complete closed population that was all tested.
I can’t find anything definitive on age, but the first 10 cases were all over 50 and one in their 80s, certainly an older population group with many people likely above 75. That’s the nature of cruises.
So a 2% current death rate with an upper bound of 3% in this older population.....which suggests a number well below 1% in the general population.
Mozart
I saw somewhere published figures of a claim that 85% of the deaths in the USA are people over 60 and something like 67% if those are actually over 70, There were also figures given as to the number of people who had underlying serious health problems and that is about 95% of the total US total deaths.
The other problem is the exceptionally high death rate of people in New York. How many of the deaths are of the thousands of people living on the sidewalks in the city? How many blacks comparative to the total deaths are Blacks - there is a big outcry about that one,