COVID-19, Embracing 🇬🇧 vs Preventing 🇱🇰
The United Kingdom 🇬🇧 refuses to take drastic action against the spread of COVID-19 despite continuous warnings from other nations like Italy and USA who have faced the full force of the virus. They are expecting to build what is known as “Herd Immunity” where they are trying to immune the people of UK by actually letting them catch the virus.
UK’s chief scientific adviser says they are expecting to build up heard immunity by letting at least 60% of UK citizens(66.44 million population) catch COVID-19 which is nearly 40 million people. By taking into consideration the fatality rate of COVID-19 of 3.4%, UK is letting 1.36 million of UK citizens die of the initial hit of COVID-19. The main fact that they have failed to consider is that COVID - 19 is a very new virus and scientists are not even sure that Herd Immunity can be build for this virus. Sicknesses like the common cold, Dengue etc. which are caused by viruses that have been around for a long time has no ability to build Herd Immunity among people. How can people think that a virus which has just been identified 5 months ago has the ability to generate Herd Immunity.
Therefor, health workers of UK who are working at ground level are saying that the government had told the public not to come to hospitals except if they are in critical condition. We can see from the speech by UK’s chief scientific adviser that they are solely made this decision based on theories and hypothesis in a very academic way which is according to my knowledge rarely fit perfectly to the actual world (I’m just a second year undergraduate 😂😂). If in the case of COVID-19 in UK the model does not properly fit into the actual world, they would not be able to control the virus after a certain point in which the number of patients exceed the fixed capacity of the medical service. On top of all this, one can question the human rights violation side of the actions taken by the UK’s government where they are letting 1.36 million people die whether or not their theories actually work or not.
These sort of reasons are why we Sri Lankan’s 🇱🇰 should consider ourselves very lucky as the main objective of our system to fight COVID -19 involves preventing the spread of the virus in the first place rather than letting the virus spread and trying to create immunity among people which is based on theories and has a lot of limitations. 😌😌
For more information see the interview of UK's chief scientific officer with Sky News by clicking here
Hashan Senaratne
Faculty of Business,
University of Moratuwa
UK’s chief scientific adviser says they are expecting to build up heard immunity by letting at least 60% of UK citizens(66.44 million population) catch COVID-19 which is nearly 40 million people. By taking into consideration the fatality rate of COVID-19 of 3.4%, UK is letting 1.36 million of UK citizens die of the initial hit of COVID-19. The main fact that they have failed to consider is that COVID - 19 is a very new virus and scientists are not even sure that Herd Immunity can be build for this virus. Sicknesses like the common cold, Dengue etc. which are caused by viruses that have been around for a long time has no ability to build Herd Immunity among people. How can people think that a virus which has just been identified 5 months ago has the ability to generate Herd Immunity.
Therefor, health workers of UK who are working at ground level are saying that the government had told the public not to come to hospitals except if they are in critical condition. We can see from the speech by UK’s chief scientific adviser that they are solely made this decision based on theories and hypothesis in a very academic way which is according to my knowledge rarely fit perfectly to the actual world (I’m just a second year undergraduate 😂😂). If in the case of COVID-19 in UK the model does not properly fit into the actual world, they would not be able to control the virus after a certain point in which the number of patients exceed the fixed capacity of the medical service. On top of all this, one can question the human rights violation side of the actions taken by the UK’s government where they are letting 1.36 million people die whether or not their theories actually work or not.
These sort of reasons are why we Sri Lankan’s 🇱🇰 should consider ourselves very lucky as the main objective of our system to fight COVID -19 involves preventing the spread of the virus in the first place rather than letting the virus spread and trying to create immunity among people which is based on theories and has a lot of limitations. 😌😌
For more information see the interview of UK's chief scientific officer with Sky News by clicking here
Hashan Senaratne
Faculty of Business,
University of Moratuwa
Perfect as always brother ♥️♥️
ReplyDeleteThis is the situation where whole world is put into litmus test with their health service. It doesn't matter whether it is rich or poor the disease would be too burden to any system. It has been already proved without any doubt. In the same time I believe rather than going behind myths or belief it is time to let the science to speak. People purposely ignoring the science doesn't matter you rich or poor , educate or uneducated at this pandemic situation. First of all we should stop laughing at other countries pointing out their no of deaths as this is un presidential challenge to any health system and as well as for the doctors. All the countries are doing their best and it is the nature of the pandemic.Before we comparing health system we need to understand that health system are totally different to one other including demography, wealth, social well being, life expectancy, population,epidimiology etc. As a person who has worked in those two countries a their is vast difference between the system. In the UK elderly population is so high and literally there are four generations exist two generations are already sick (Grand Parents and Great Grand parents). Also life expectancy is so high. Where country like Italy you get the 2nd highest elderly population in the world. That is why you see most of the cases in SL age between 40-65, where in Italy average age is 65 and average dying age is 81.When come to the disease again their is no question about SL as a country doing great job.Salute to my friends in health service. But it is yet to say what will happen after the lock down/curfew. China- Wuhan lock down starts January 20 and it says earliest they believe to open April and already they did it. China can do that because of their economic power. But still no clear idea what will happen afterwards. According to epidemiology it says strict lock down will again cause a another peak or wave afterwards. Country like us still very difficult to say how far we can go with the lock down as economic burden carries out with it is massive. This pandemic comes with price tag and only can do reduce the damage by strict measurement. UK approach in systemic way and according what they say, Containment Phase- Stop coming new cases to country and self isolate cases and contact tracing. Then Mitigation with social distancing when the death rate starts to rise. Also now they going above plus social distancing of most vulnerable group ( age >70yrs) for 12 weeks. What so ever method comes with price tag as it is the nature of pandemic and we can't deny that. Also it says one person can infect between 2-3 cases( Where normal flu/ Inflenza it is 1.5) and we detect only 10% of the cases. Also one death cause after 21 days and you can imagine how many patients already infected behind one death. Lock down is mediavel method and only it can't prevent the burden. So still no time to celebrate or cheer up! Let the science to talk. This pandemic can control only in three ways, either vaccine, death of the last person from the earth or population immunity where further virus can't infect the population. Vaccine is 12-18 months away and first option is very unlikely. Then you will realize what will be the remaining option- Immunity. I am not expert in this , but I would like to bring the scientific thinking pattern behind the situation into our educate population at least. When I see the comments of UK and NHS I feel sorry for them. The amount of process , programming, arrangements, commitments behind the NHS is massive. Still we didn't hit the hardest way. Worst yet to come. Finally this is not Ebola. This is simple flu where we try to save most vulnerable crowd, who is our parents. STAY IN!As you said Good Luck and long live for SLNHS- Sri Lanks Health Service.
ReplyDeleteThank you very much for your interest in this topic. First of all, I would like to comment on the phrase, "this is simple flu where we try to save most vulnerable crowd who is our parents". In Sri Lanka, the adult population mostly stay at home they are not the " at risk group" we try save from this catastrophe. It is the working population, the breadwinners of the family that we are worried about. I hope one can identify the difference between simple flu and a pandemic. People who have taken COVID-19 as something simple has suffered a lot. Slowly, almost all the countries in the world has come to a some state of lock down. Even Sri Lanka is not under full lock-down, only few neighborhoods are under strict lock-down. We should not forget that if Sri Lanka reacted a little bit earlier by Quarantining people who came to Sri Lanka a bit earlier, we would have been able to contain this virus better and lift the curfew far sooner, and if we had not done what we have done up-to now, we would be in a more dire situation than this. When it comes to immunity, there is no evidence that immunity can be built for COVID -19 and like diseases like Dengue and Common flue which doesn't have immunity, if this virus also does not have immunity, due to the high cotangent rate of the virus, countries and people will not be able to control the deaths. One other thing, although the mortality rate is higher for older generation rather than the middle age generation, since there is a very high number of middle aged and young aged people infected compared to older generation due to them being breadwinners, the actual death count is higher of middle and young aged people compared to older aged people. Here also, we can see that it is not just the older generation that is at risk, but also the middle aged and young aged generation is also at considerably high risk due to exposure to the outside world. Yes, this is not Ebola, and no this cannot be considered a simple flue. Only 11,323 people dies of Ebola and was mostly contained to the African continent while for COVID - 19, as of today 126,000 people have died and has become a worldwide pandemic. The mortality rate of COVID-19 is lower than of Ebola, but the contagion rate is significantly higher which means the actual number of deaths are very high and continuously rising. Also I would like to point out that people are not laughing in this situation, we are just trying to understand what good things and not so good things other countries have done in order to implement the good practices and ignore the bad practices to survive and come out alive from this world wide pandemic.
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