COVID-19 Government's top Doictor admits it's out in the wild now.

Back in my Game Changer post over 3 weeks ago I aid that the virus was most liklely out in the wild and therefore more likely to spread and less likely to be controlled.

Well, Professor Chris Whitty, the Cheif Medical officer has admitted as much. There are now a handful of confirmed cases where there is no defined source of the virus. i.e. no direct link to an outbreak or pocket of the virus.



Video courtesy of the Sun.

So those people in the planes with the "super-spreader" that came over from France, the people he walked past or stood in a queue with may have the virus and not know about it. Those people he had contact with may have had further contact and it's these secondary and tertiary contacts that are cropping up when tested.

It's safe to say there are by now thousands of people with the virus. My colleague across the desk has today taken a day off sick after being in work for the past few days with a serious upper chest infection. My previous comments re: sick pay stand and he's a prime example.

Of course we have put up with things like coughs and colds in the past with very little impact because even serious influenza kills a very low percentage of people that catch it. 0.1 percent or something similar.

COVID-19 has a far higher mortality rate, initially listed as 10%. But even that is an order of magnitude higher than 'flu.

Now there are unconfirmed reports the mortality rate could be as high as 30%.

The reports that there are two strains of the virus might be the only saving grace. It looks like the UK carriers have the less deadly/aggressive strain and people are just putting up with coughs and chest infections and the number of fatalities will be low.

My only current criticism is that even Chris Whitty in the video above assumes an 80% infection rate across the country, but then goes on to say that this figure is based on the 'flu and assumes some level of immunity after infection. At that point his predictions don't bear scrutiny, because as far as is known, infection with COVID-19 imbues the sufferer with no such immunity. They can be re-infected immediately if exposed to an infection.

We still haven't clearly understood if the virus has some form of dormant state where it fails to register on tests, so it's entirely plausible that once infected, people can re-infect themselves, until the point the infection overwhelms their system and they succumb and die.

The eventual infection rate will most likely be close to 100% with no natural immunity to re-infection. So coughs and chest infections will be the future of humanity in the short term at least. As long as we keep the nasty strain away, deaths could be relatively low.

But like I said previously, even if 1% are killed off in the first wave, the ability to continually infect people over and over again means the virus has the capability to chip away at the population, 1% at a time until there is no-one left to infect. The 30% strain of the virus just means that more people die more quickly until the number of people spreads out thinly enough that infected people never meet uninfected ones.

I don't think the population was that thin back even in Medieval times. But that may be where we're heading. Back to pre-industrial population levels, but hopefully not the stone age. At least the survivors should be able to retain some form of civilisation. I'd like to hope we don't get kicked back to the hunter-gatherer stage.

The thing that keeps bugging me is the lengths to which the Chinese government has gone to limit the spread. It seems they have not told us the full picture and I think hindsight will show the W.H.O. and our governments woefully naive in believing the output of the Chinese agencies.

Why are they spraying disinfectant all over the streets? Why are they burning the bodies?

It all points to something more than we are being told at the moment. Western Governments are being left to react to an in-country infection rather than China sharing all the information it has. It clearly has more information on the virus after having at least a month more experience than the West.

Ah well, I suppose time will tell if my fears are correct. So far I'm on the money. I wish I wasn't but sadly I have a brain that can quickly analyse these things and make mostly correct assumptions and model outcomes. In cases like this, I hate it when I'm proved right.

UPDATE.

After thinking about it, the reports of two strains of Corona Virus out in the wild may just mean that there is a previously undetected Corona virus out in the wild and the full deadly Wuhan variety is a different Corona virus.

So the less lethal virus is "a" corona virus and not "the" corona virus from Wuhan.

It could well be the less lethal variety would have passed through the population and been overlooked as a 'flu infection. The full Wuhan obviously is a different beast and cannot be ignored.

We'll see in the next month or so if the Corona virus at large in the UK begins to kill people off. We may have been lucky and all of the people infected in the UK may have been fit enough to survive. But I think that's a bit of a stretch.

The conspiracy theorists may like to debate whether the non-lethal strain was released as a test to see how far it would spread without killing people to test the efficacy of the lethal version, but somehow the full monty was released accidentally instead at some point.