Two problems with what you say:

1) We don't know that it's only 1.5 million people which potentially give 90% of deaths. A paper from UCL has estimated that 12-15 million people in the UK have at least one pathology associated with increased mortality due to Covid 

2) Shielding these people is easier said than done. How exactly do we do it and until when? Until the possible vaccine arrives? What about all those people at care homes?

Same in Greece, people are shocked that such a rich and developed country with so much scientific excellence has allowed this to happen, despite having the hindsight from Italy.

First review brought a smile and a grimace from me!

I've always had a set of Wahl clippers at home for beard trimming. They have all the spacers etc. for haircutting.

I gave in this week and went for the #3 all over. I get my wife to trim to a line at the back and that's it. Takes 10 minutes.

I was going for a 70s look and my gf said she fancied the castaway look until I convinced her to cut my hair (I told her she can share the photos on her FB for a laugh). I was expecting the worse, but she did a very good job. I now even think that I may never go back to the barber. 

As I mentioned on the previous page the scientists on c4 last night were v confident that we would have a working vaccine by September but it will not be ready for public use until 2021.

FWIW, out of the 4 us in the office, I was the only one who went to the barber, the rest get their family to do their hair for them!

I guess one side-effect of this is that we've probably reached peak barbers, as there will be plenty who think "stuff it, it's good enough and I'll save money".

Completely the opposite to other scientific research I saw an hour ago.

Based on the last 15 days of data and assuming R0 is roughly constant I've caluclated a rough value of 0.98

That's not good. So close to going over the precipice again.

Not only the widely circulated belief in the UK that Germany doesn't count covid deaths correctly was wrong, their numbers also seem to include deaths at nursing homes. Their daily updates also include:

• ICU admissions and discharges 
• Number of patients on ventilators and those who come off them
• All the info is documented and communicated electronically 

Asked my brother to have a go at my hair. He certainly had a go...disaster. So it ended up being a number 1 all over.

An astonishing 88% of patients in New York who were put on a ventilator have died. 

Yeah but Brian's was from the Mail so it must be right.

I really hope R0 is lower than 0.98. At this level it will take 6 months to get the daily cases down to 100.

We are totally up sh1tcreek. If the lockdown is released the number of cases will explode. Imagine being stuck with an R0 on 0.98 but instead of 300 deaths per day, 3000 deaths per day.

We need to double down on this lockdown, 0.98 is nowhere near enough. People who think we should start to loosen the lockdown are mad.

If we can get R0 down to 0.9 then it would only take a little over a month to get down to 100 confirmed cases.

So herein lies the rub. The difference between 0.9 and 0.98 is very small. Essentially for every 100 people, 90 new are infected vs for every 100 98 new are infected. So this means given the current rate of fall it is unlikely the estimate of 0.98 is too far off.

So exactly how close to the precipice are we. Well for every 100 people if 99 behave and infect only 1 other person. It only takes 1 person in every 100 to infect just 1 additional person over the entire infectious period of the disease to screw everything up.

That one idiot ruins it for the rest of us.

Anyway even if we get down to 0.9 is nowhere near enough, it may have impressively fast results but we need to get down to 0.5, not because the numbers respond faster but because its comfortably far away from 1.

It's in the Guardian too:

French researchers to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients

Study – which stresses serious health risks of smoking – suggest substance in tobacco may lower risk of getting coronavirus

French researchers are planning to test nicotine patches on coronavirus patients and frontline health workers after a study suggested smokers may be much less at risk of contracting the virus.

The study at a major Paris hospital suggests a substance in tobacco – possibly nicotine – may be stopping patients who smoke from catching Covid-19. Clinical trials of nicotine patches are awaiting the approval of the country’s health authorities.

...

Taking into account the age and sex of the patients, the researchers discovered the number of smokers was much lower than that in the general population estimated by the French health authority Santé Publique France at about 40% for those aged 44-53 and between 8.8% and 11.3% for those aged 65-75.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/french-study-suggests-smokers-at-lower-risk-of-getting-coronavirus

Let's get the R0 up to 4, infect ~everyone quickly, kill about a million people and get it over with. 

You make some good points, but I don't think we can estimate the current R0 due to the lack of testing. I am also sure that it's much higher in hospitals and care homes  

Yes, but the study only included those patients who had died or were discharged. It did not include data on patients who were still in hospital.

Yeh this will be an average across the entirety of society.

And I think the estimate is okay, lack of testing isn't so much a problem. A bigger problem is a lag in the testing results. So if you get loads of results from weeks ago coming in now then that will screw up the calculation alot.

However in terms of the actual numbers as long as the number of confirmed (pillar 1) is roughly proportional to the number of total infections then the result will be the same.

Since 11th April we have been recording between 4-5k new cases every day. I wonder if this is the norm now with infections occurring in places like supermarkets. If true, without any relaxing this is the bottom figure and wonder what % this will translate into deaths.

Certainly no spike but is a continuation of the flat lines acceptable? Any relaxing may be hard to action if this is the case, unless we change the way we shop still. It's been said 2m's isn't enough and perhaps face masks MUST be worn in these indoor environments.

RO needs to come down to <0.5 before lockdown can be lifted. We also need to have contact tracing teams in place as well as much more efficient testing. Without all three the infection and death rates will quickly surge as the economy is opened up. 

Have been hearing rumours about this over the last few weeks, but this is interesting. 

Time for another smoke! 

There can no longer be any doubt that the UK’s erratic, amateur and political approach to dealing with this virus has been an unmitigated catastrophe both in terms of lives lost and lives destroyed.

Johnson and co should be on trial.

The ultra 'woke' culture, largely pushed and promoted by the corporate media, is the mark of both physical and intellectual laziness. I, and I am pretty sure 99.9% of people on here, have yet to encounter people in the real world that actually thinks like these vacuous bots.