[triceratops]

"He said that expected increases in National Health Service capacity and ongoing restrictions to people’s movements make him “reasonably confident” the health service can cope when the predicted peak of the epidemic arrives in two or three weeks. UK deaths from the disease are now unlikely to exceed 20,000, he said, and could be much lower."[1]

So basically "Scientist revises model based on new conditions". Isn't that supposed to happen?

A successful prevention is going to feel like failure. It's going to prompt questions like "was this worth all the panic, and tanking the economy?" Bodies are easy to count, deaths prevented are invisible.

1. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...

[jtbayly]

Not quite. You're claiming that this is all because of the lockdown, when it is quite clear that the biggest reason for the change is the changed estimate of R0.

In other words, if this new R0 estimate is correct we were completely mislead about how big a deal this virus is, and comparisons to it "just" being like a bad flu year are more or less correct.

[DanBC]

> and comparisons to it "just" being like a bad flu year are more or less correct.

We've never had to build temporary hospitals to house 4,000 patients before, even in bad flu years. It's more infectious than flu and it hospitalises more people than flu. People keep talking about the death rate: there are other important things. How many people does it hospitalise? What happens to the people who can't get hospital treatment if the hospitals are full?

From places like Spain and Italy we know it puts a lot of people in hospital, and we know when that happens it starts shifting the mortality from the old people who were going to die anyway to younger people.

It's not like flu.

https://twitter.com/iamyourgasman/status/1241267189048578048

https://twitter.com/DrAnneMurphy/status/1241092471452569601

[triceratops]

But it seems like he's revising the R0 estimate upwards, rather than downwards. From the same article:

"New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said."

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2238578-uk-has-enough-i...

[salmon30salmon]

Yeah, revising the R0 upwards is exactly what you would expect to result in a faster infection rate. This means that more people have already been infected and were fine, and that we are at the peak before herd immunity starts to drastically impact the R0 downwards.

[guscost]

Exactly right. If this new R0 estimate is correct then I'm not going to be pleased AT ALL with anyone saying: "We did it, the lockdown worked! By the way, ignore the extra suicides and child abuse this year."