Yes that moment is coming, but it isn’t supposed to be for a few weeks. With hundreds on a plane you’re risking a whole plane full of infected people landing in England. It’ll only take one on the plane to infect virtually everyone. They won’t all be wearing FFP1,2,3 masks keeping 95% of particles out. They’ll probably be wearing cloth masks keeping 10-20% out and there coughs almost in, or no masks.

There are a lot of mixed messages. 5th test to be confident there won’t be another spike. Well without a vaccine you can’t be confident but I get that it’s better said than not. Now there are flights happening when the numbers aren’t down to what they’re aiming for and with the repeated comments by Matt Hancock. The 7 day rolling average of new cases (in lockdown) has just started to fall. It hasn’t fallen at all. It’s just a few less per day than a week ago. In a few weeks it could be well below what it was. Chart here. [Link]

‘ From May 1, flights will resume from Luton to selected airports in Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Portugal, Spain and Israel.

Owain Jones, Wizz Air UK's managing director, said: "As we restart selected Luton flights to provide an essential service to passengers who need to travel, our primary concern is the health, safety and well-being of our customers and crew.’

I’m all for releasing the lockdown but not individuals or companies to make the decision and causing a free for all. And why are flights from Israel essential? Maybe there’s loads of nurses flying to and from Spain and Portugal. I don’t know, although I doubt it. But Israel? Seriously?

I’m getting rather frigged off with people deciding when it’s over. I’d rather it continued for just a bit longer so there’s less spread with everyone cooperating and then we repair our country and keep vulnerable people inside.

COYP

These ongoing flights.

This is obivously missed task by government. There may be rounds of debates for failure of testing numbers & PPE but this one was no-brainer.

True that puppets in WHO officially said travel restriction is not helpful in early February, however at least no putting a ban from suffering countries was a failure. It is clear that milestone for virus spread was the flights.

However, now 2 months have been wasted already, not sure how it can help further. It is now only a conflicting case like Spiderman mentioned, you can not travel to see your daughter but someone else who does not have residency in UK can travel thousands of miles and hang around from airport to his hotel or home destination..

Singapore banned everyone who is not citizen / resident to enter the country. Fo eg my colleague who was temporarily in UK - who has work visa in Singapore- stuck here because he can not go back. That - to me- also is an excessive decision..

[Tweet Link]

Interesting

Agree on a lot of this, apart from Covid being the same as the flu. The rate of spread of covid is the concern. Flu has a shorter serial interval (the time between successive cases) and therefore spreads more easily. COVID-19 has a higher reproductive number, meaning infected individuals pass the virus onto a higher number of people.

His point about testing and getting people back to work. That’s going to be a long process. Think how long it’ll take testing 100,000 a day here.

Edited by Rudi Hedman (27 Apr 2020 2.37pm)

COYP

It is worrying because these doctors are getting themselves involved in what are essentially political decisions. I am forced to wonder if they have a MAGA baseball cap in their lockers.

If, for the sake of argument, their statistics are accepted as fact then their conclusions aren't, in my opinion.

This virus is not like the flu. It is much more contagious but even more importantly we don't have a vaccine for it. Without taking the measures we have the health care facilities would have been overwhelmed and many more deaths resulted. It's only because those measures were put in place that the doctors can report their statistics. Without them things would have been very different.

Of course more people are dying who have pre-existing conditions that increase the risk. That's totally obvious and to be expected. C19 is what tips many over the edge but it is still the cause of death, whether or not these doctors want to regard it as so. Some of those people might not have lived much longer anyway, but the fact remains that C19 was the final straw.

They are quite right to be worried about other health issues being made worse by our response to C19 and this needs to be addressed. Not though simply by abandoning the good work that has been done so far.

The vulnerable will need to continue to be protected until they can be vaccinated. Everyone else will need to practice social distancing to keep the infection rate within manageable limits.

I think their presentation could easily spark a bad situation in the USA. I hope it doesn't here although I see no prospect of the government agreeing with their conclusions.

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

Perhaps we are importing Kibbutz workers!