COVID-19: The Madness of Crowds.

The panic-buying phase seems to be without end at the moment... how much stuff can these people pack away? Lofts across the country must be groaning at the huge amount of baked bean tins stored up there.

Roof fires across the country will also be on the rise due to the amounts of toilet roll stored in lofts too.

It's crazy.

I've had to buy toilet roll for my daughters on two separate days now. The downside of having kids and running your life round them rather than scouring the shops for supplies.

Luckily there's a Tesco across the road from work and I can nip in first thing to get the stuff.  But really, it opens at 7am and by 9am it's down to the last few bog roll options.... madness.

I see people are abusing shop staff when they get told they can't buy the shop out in one go. Almost always foreigners. The government may talk about the Dunkirk spirit, but a these days a large percentage of the country have no idea what Dunkirk or Blitz Spirit is, because they have no family history of suffering the privations of world war 2.

Anyhoo, I'm still at work despite government advice to the contrary. We don't have antiseptic hand gel, because we can't get any. Risk takers, ain't we?

Just had a blood pressure consultation this morning. It's way high because my stress response has been triggered. Not because of COVID-19, that I can handle. No, it's because my autistic son has been refused PIP payments.

The original fight to get him on DLA nearly cost me my sanity and left me with hypertension. I'm not looking forward to having another battle.

COVID-19: Working Against Medical Advice

Well, despite the advice given out by Boris yesterday, I'm at work today.

The advice being if you are eligible for the 'flu jab, then you should isolate for 12 weeks.

Guess what Boris, I can't isolate for 12 days let alone 12 weeks because I can't afford to.

SSP will not pay the bills.

My council tax hasn't been deferred, nor my car insurance, nor rent or my other outgoings. The only good news is I have a couple of week's worth of food in the house now.

So, I am at work today with all of my colleagues. We haven't shut the shop yet because the government hasn't given any advice in that regard. So currently we are serving customers and trying to mitigate infection transfer.

Customers that hand us keys now put them in a tray rather our hands. We wash our hands after each time serving in the shop.

And that's about s much as we can do.

If the virus becomes more endemic, no detail yet, but the owners may look at closing the shop and sticking with online and telephone orders only.

COVID-19: The Current Expected Scenario.

Okay, here's my take on the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic with current biosecurity efforts in place.

All this talk of herd immunity is tosh. It's based on totally irrelevant presumptions that once infected the population has immunity and cannot be infected a second time.

So, after the virus has swept through the population that isn't isolated, we can expect around at least 1% to die. If the numbers increase so much that there are no ventilators for those that become extremely sick, then we can expect those percentages to rise exponentially. As high as 30% mortality at the height of the infection for some parts of the community.

Anyway, the majority survive the first wave and everyone in the UK that has had the virus is now beyond the infectious stage.  And I mean everyone.  If there is a virus shedder out in the wild, then infections and re-infections will continue along with deaths, until everyone is not a shedder.

If there is someone out there that is still shedding the virus, then we continue going round and round and people die 1% or more at a time until the population thins out enough that natural separation takes over. People are so thinly spread out that they don't come into contact with each other and the virus self-isolates until people stop shedding.

Let's say we are successful in isolating the virus and there is no-one in the UK that is infectious and in six months time we open the borders. If anyone shedding the virus arrives from abroad, then we get the whole cycle all over again, because there is no herd immunity, that's bollocks. People will catch another bought of the virus.

Then we go through phase 2, another round of closures, isolations and deaths until we get it under control. Again.

Hopefully we learn and keep the borders closed. Until EVERYONE IN THE WORLD is beyond the infectious phase.

Then we can open the borders again.

Otherwise this becomes the global equivalent of the Bubonic Plague: global numbers decrease until we're all isolated enough to stop infecting each other. What global population figures are for that to happen are anyone's guess.