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Tuesday 12 May 2020

Day 57 of self-isolation - care home statistics.

We have some clarity on "Stay alert". It means "Stay at home as much as possible". So now we know.

The "furlough" scheme has now been extended up to October, which sounds like we're not expecting this to end for another five months,

In the week ending May 1, care home deaths made up 40% of Covid-19 fatalities. Obviously, people in care homes are the most vulnerable in our society, and will have age and preconditions stacked against them, but even so, that's a shocking number, and it makes them sound more like death homes than care homes.

What was happening here? First, how did the virus get into all these care homes, and secondly, why weren't people with acute Covid-19, transferred to hospital? I have a nagging suspicion that someone decided that it wasn't worth giving them hospital care.

That might not be as heartless as it sounds. I had an aunt who was in a care home, and got cancer. She was 91, and they decided that the aggressive treatment that would be needed to do anything about the cancer, would be doing her no favours, and would probably kill her before the cancer would.


The tracing app that's currently being tested in the Isle of Wight, will be made available across the whole country in the next week or so. I haven't heard anything about how widely it's been taken up in IOW.


4 comments:

  1. Charles Dytham12 May 2020 at 18:40

    Dr Geraint Lewis, who is in charge of the development of the NHS Covid-19 app, said that the new tool will only work with newer operating systems on Apple and Samsung phones.
    Speaking to BBC Radio Solent, he said phones needed to have the capability of running Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) and to be running either Apple ios 11 upwards or Android 8 upwards.
    Android 8 rules me out, unless, of course, the Government wants to provide me with a more modern device.

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  2. Has anyone tried to find out what percentage of phones will be able to do this?

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  3. Charles Dytham21 May 2020 at 18:35

    As well as the app, there are human trackers:

    "25,000 contact tracers will be in place by 1 June, with the ability to track 10,000 new cases per day."

    Is it just me that thinks that isn't a very high productivity rate?

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  4. If it's 10,000 cases per day each, then that's not possible.

    But if it means 10,000 cases between them, then I can believe it, because each case will require dozens of phone calls.

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