And now Ottery St Mary:

Sidmouth.nub.news

In the last few days listening to all the news of the development of the Corona virus around the world I have been brought back to my days at university when I was studying for my degree in Biology and Chemistry.

Among the many things that crossed my mind there was something I remember being said to us by one of our lecturers. How true it was, I don’t know, but at the moment it looks like his words were filled with great wisdom and knowledge. He said to us: “Nature has its own ways of controlling the population and that is the reason we see famine and epidemics, war and natural disasters occurring at times.

“At the same time when that happens human beings show their worst and their best and that is the reason we hear of horror crimes committed in the name of religious or nationalism, but also we hear about great acts of courage and kindness.”

A week ago an Ottery resident Sarah Crow put a message on Ottery Matters that showed her concern should the spread of the virus would reach the town and how the lonely and vulnerable would be able to cope if they would be forced into isolation.

Within hours there was a meeting of representatives of organisations such as the Help Scheme and the Coledrige Medical Centre and a group under the name of Ottery Community Volunteers was formed.

This group got into action and through the facilities of their own and the local social media pages they asked for volunteers to come forward so they could have enough resources to deliver medicines, basic essentials, food, etc. to those confined to their homes during the crisis. In other words to provide those residents with the necessary reassurance that they had not been forgotten.

The latest figures show that over 200 people have indicated their willingness to help. The group still is looking for people who could help, in particular volunteers that may already have DBS checks in place and can drive.

If you think you could be one of the members of this great group of volunteers, please get in touch with Sarah through this link.

I would like to congratulate Sarah on the success of her initiative which I hope will set up an example for other communities.

It would be wonderful not having to use the services of this group and Ottery spares the damage the virus can bring upon the town but, who knows, this could be the beginning of an initiative that will give those isolated and vulnerable people in the parish the reassurance that there will always be lots of people in town on standby ready to help at any time and under any circumstances.

I am sure we all in Ottery join our voices to thank Sarah and all those volunteers for showing us that in this community there will always be people who care and will come forward to help.

Owl hopes there will be many more community self-help initiatives like this

Daniel Wilkins Exmouth Journal

Otterton residents who are self isolating, either because they have Covid 19 symptoms or because they are elderly or at high risk from the disease are being reassured that help is available for them.

The parish council is setting up a network of volunteers in the village to drop provisions or provide other help to those in need.

Parish council chairman John Hiles said: “We want the people of Otterton to know that support is available to them and urge them to get into contact if they are self isolating. 

“A number of people are ready and willing to help.” 

Anyone needing assistance is asked to email cv19otterton@gmail.com, call 07468429264 or visit the facebook page CV19 Otterton.

“Guided by the science” In a previous post Owl revealed aspects of a discussion about Coronavirus held with trusted friends knowledgeable in health matters. Here is an extension of the discussion:

With a novel virus there is so much we don’t know that health scientists have to resort to modelling using what little is known and filling in the gaps with assumptions. As soon as real data becomes available from an infected population, there needs to be priority given to collect them and use them to refine the modelling. That is a true scientific approach.

In a document reported here:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/15/uk-coronavirus-crisis-to-last-until-spring-2021-and-could-see-79m-hospitalised

The government’s position is spelled out:

• The health service cannot cope with the sheer number of people with symptoms who need to be tested because laboratories are “under significant demand pressures”.
• From now on only the very seriously ill who are already in hospital and people in care homes and prisons where the coronavirus has been detected will get tested.
• Testing services are under such strain that even NHS staff will not be swabbed, despite their key role and the risk of them passing the virus on to patients.

We don’t seem to be collecting data on the number of people “self-isolating” either. So from now on we appear to have no real idea of what is happening accept in terms of hospital admissions yet the government keeps telling us the majority will have only mild symptoms. So how will we know when its all over? (Owl’s experts thought that there might be clever statistical sampling that could be employed but there is no evidence of that).

Here is better informed debate on the subject: from today’s Guardian:

Anthony Costello, a UK paediatrician and former director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said he had written to Whitty asking for testing to continue in the community.

“The key principles from the WHO are intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

This was how South Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan had brought their case numbers down.

“You can really take people out of the population and make sure they are quarantined. That is vital – before you get to social distancing.”

However, the UK government is stopping tests outside of hospital. “For me and the WHO people I have spoken to, this is absolutely the wrong policy. It would mean it just lets rip,” he said.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, expressed his concern on Friday at the end of testing and contact tracing in Britain and some other European countries. “You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” he said. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

As a result Owl does not intent to publish any infection rate data for Devon as is published, for example, on DevonLive. Unfortunately these data are simply unreliable.

More than a million people in Great Britain now live at least a mile from a bus stop with a regular service, BBC research suggests.

The Campaign for Better Transport (CBT) said cuts to services had left some people “trapped in their homes”.

Bus pass use by older and disabled people in England has fallen by almost a fifth in a decade.

The South West is the worst off, with 96,000 poorly served homes

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-51815726

The government has promised £5bn over five years for buses and cycling.

However, Department for Transport (DfT) figures show local and central government support for buses has fallen by £800m a year over 10 years.

Analysis of bus route data for the BBC’s Panorama showed 550,000 properties, equivalent to about 1.3 million people, are at least 2km (1.2 miles) from a bus stop with a service calling on average four times a day.

‘Your heart sinks when you need to get to the doctor’s’

Marion Crawford, from Lower Denby, West Yorkshire, said her local bus stopped about seven years ago, leaving her reliant on charity-run services.
“I’m not benefitting from my bus pass at all,” she said.

“I don’t know what I’d do without the community bus. I’d have no way to go grocery shopping or to the doctors, I’d be reliant on friends.”

The 92-year-old said: “When you go to the doctor and they say they want to see you again, your heart sinks, you think ‘how am I going to get here?'”

Paul Jones, chief officer of the Denby Dale Centre, which provides a charity-funded bus service, said: “Our members tell us some bus routes do not actually reach their villages any more and they feel left alone.”

The charity has received grant funding from the government and the National Lottery for its services.

Judith Lawrence, 75, said she had not left her village of Helperby, North Yorkshire, at all this year because of a lack of bus services.

No private operators run routes through the village, so the local council provides a minibus to take residents to a nearby town twice a week.

“I’ve got a bus pass but no bus,” Ms Lawrence said.

“It’s almost like a discrimination against the people in rural areas with low incomes who can’t afford to take a taxi somewhere.”

The lack of buses is also affecting people trying to get to work.

Construction worker Marti Blagborough said buses between his home in Farnley and Leeds city centre are often delayed or do not turn up.

He said: “If there’s no buses there’s no work, because we can’t get there.

“You have to trust them, I guess you’ve got no other choice.

“If I lived locally I’d have the option of maybe bicycle to work and stuff like that but working further away it’s the only option.”

Bus use has declined over the past decade along with a fall of about 10% in the number of miles covered each year, but it varies across Great Britain

.
According to annual DfT figures, the areas with the most steady declines in estimated miles travelled by bus include Blackburn with Darwen, which has seen a 42% reduction since 2014; Stoke on Trent (41% reduction); and North Yorkshire (41%).

Martin Kelly, Blackburn with Darwen Council’s director of growth and development, said the authority had invested in public transport but “several travel companies in the area have stopped trading or have reduced the services due to falling passenger numbers”.

He said other factors included austerity cuts to council funding, changing employment patterns and “lower demand for traditional shopping patterns”.

“Our figures do seem to have stabilised, however, and we have recently been granted funding from the DfT which should allow us to increase certain services,” he added.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council said commercial operators’ fares increase when usage falls, creating “a vicious circle”. The council is bidding for funding from the government to improve bus reliability and provide more services.

‘Reliant on goodwill’

The government funds free bus passes for pensioners and disabled people in England but the number of journeys made with them has fallen by 18% since 2010.

The DfT said part of this decline was due to the fall in pass holders because the age at which people can receive them has risen in line with changes to the state pension age.

Darren Shirley from the CBT said: “We’re seeing people who are trapped in their home, essentially.”

He said many people left without a bus service would be “reliant on the goodwill of neighbours” to get around.

On average, pensioners and disabled people in England took 26 fewer bus journeys a year on their passes than they did in 2014-15, DfT data showed.

In Somerset the number of concessionary journeys taken was down by 45%.

A spokesman for Somerset County Council said it had reduced spending on concessionary fares for “a variety of reasons, including reductions in both subsidised and commercial bus services” and the collapse of a bus operator in 2016.

He added that the council continued to “meet and exceed” its statutory duties.

A spokeswoman for the DfT said: “Buses are crucial to communities, providing key links to work, school, shops and family and friends.

“We’ve pledged £5 billion to overhaul bus and cycling links, which is on top of the significant £220 million investment we’ve already made to make buses more reliable and convenient.
“We’re also publishing a national bus strategy which will help transform local transport services in every region across the country.”

If you are in the UK, you can watch Panorama: Britain’s bus crisis on Monday 16 March at 20:30 on BBC One or catch up afterwards on iPlayer.
Reporting team: Will Dahlgreen, Rob England, Daniel Wainwright

Public health experts and hundreds of doctors and scientists at home and abroad are urging the UK government to change its strategy against coronavirus, amid fears it will mean the epidemic “lets rip” through the population.

They say the UK is turning its back on strategies that have successfully brought down the numbers of infections and deaths in other countries.

Sarah Boseley  www.theguardian.com

Public health experts and hundreds of doctors and scientists at home and abroad are urging the UK government to change its strategy against coronavirus, amid fears it will mean the epidemic “lets rip” through the population.

They say the UK is turning its back on strategies that have successfully brought down the numbers of infections and deaths in other countries.

On Thursday, Boris Johnson and his medical and scientific advisers announced that only those seriously ill in hospital would be tested. Anyone who had any symptoms should self-isolate at home for seven days, without notifying the NHS.

Banning mass gatherings would not help reduce the spread of infections, the prime minister and his advisers said – although it now seems likely, largely in response to sporting and entertainment bodies cancelling events of their own accord.

Anthony Costello, a UK paediatrician and former director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said he had personally written to the chief medical officer, Professor Chris Whitty, asking for testing to continue in the community.

“The key principles from WHO are intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

This was how South Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan had brought their case numbers down. “You can really take people out of the population and make sure they are quarantined. That is vital – before you get to social distancing.”

Yet the UK government was stopping tests outside of hospital. “For me and the WHO people I have spoken to, this is absolutely the wrong policy. It would mean it just lets rip,” he said.

Costello thinks we will be in the same position as Italy within two weeks. “The basic public health approach is playing second fiddle to mathematical modelling,” he said.

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, expressed his deep concern on Friday at the end of testing and contact tracing in the UK and some other European countries.

“You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” he said. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”

Devi Sridhar, professor of global public health at The University of Edinburgh, listed on Twitter the reasons for continuing to test. “1 People can alter behaviour based on whether they have Covid. 2 Break chains of transmission. 3 Local hospitals can plan for how many patients will need care. 4 To know where cases are emerging (hotspots). 5 How do we know how large problem is?”

A government minister in Singapore has also expressed dismay. “One concern we have with cases such as UK and Switzerland isn’t just about the numbers. It is that these countries have abandoned any measure to contain or restrain the virus,” minister for national development, Lawrence Wong, said at a press briefing on Sunday. “If there’s no attempt to contain, we estimate the number of cases in these countries to rise significantly in the coming days and weeks.”

An open letter from a group including some of the UK’s most senior doctors asked the government to publish the modelling and any other evidence for the policies it is pursuing. “Our country’s public health response to Covid-19 is demonstrably different to most other countries’ responses globally and in Europe … There is also no clear indication that the UK’s response is being informed by experiences of other countries in containing the spread of Covid-19,” it said, pointing out the risks to the NHS of a rapid and huge surge in cases of people needing hospital treatment. The UK has 2.5 beds per 1,000 people in the population, they said, which is fewer than France (6), Italy (3.2) and the United States (2.8).

Immunologists, in a separate open letter, said they had “significant questions” about the government’s apparent strategy to rely on building up “herd immunity” by exposure to the virus in the UK. Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser, has suggested this might be a good outcome from many people becoming infected.

Herd immunity is usually brought about by vaccination – not exposing people to the risks of a disease. “The ultimate aim of herd immunity is to stop disease spread and protect the most vulnerable in society. However, this strategy only works to reduce serious disease if, when building that immunity, vulnerable individuals are protected from becoming ill, for example through social distancing. If not, the consequences could be severe,” says the letter from the British Society for Immunology.

Behavioural scientists joined the concern, saying they believed the government should immediately bring in social distancing measures and not delay for fear of the public getting “behavioural fatigue”.

“If ‘behavioural fatigue’ truly represents a key factor in the government’s decision to delay high-visibility interventions, we urge the government to share an adequate evidence base in support of that decision. If one is lacking, we urge the government to reconsider these decisions,” wrote Prof Ulrike Hahn from Birkbeck, University of London, and others.