there are different types of lockdown ... from "please stay home, if it's possible" and "schools closed" to "you're not allowed to leave the house"

every person should limit interactions. if you can work from home (or stay at home), do it. do your shopping as usual, don't hoard and simply wash your hands and follow the other tips. if you can leave your kids at home, leave them at home et cetera.

if everybody would just limit their interactions, this would slow down the spread. if they limit their interactions drastically, the spread is slowed down drastically. it's simple mathematics.

don't know the UK plans, but herd immunity only works, if a certain amount of people is immune, not if a certain amount of people won't die, but are infected and can spread the virus.

if the outbreak is to high/fast, hospitals can't help everyone.

or like lemona said

so thinking certain politicians, who need the votes of the elderly, definitely make the right decisions is pretty optimistic imo.

if the **** hits the fan, this could happen anywhere. but i guess (hope), most countries will do better and stop a massive outbreak before.

kinda funny, that some people question certain measurements, even there examples (China, Korea, Italy) how good/bad things work out and what limits the spread.

Some first hand current evidence of how the virus / fear of the virus is affecting people's booking and attending of events decisions and behaviour.

I run an events company in London, England. Some of my events are indoors, some are outdoors, but all involve ~90% of people having to use public transport to get to them.

New bookings for all events are suddenly down by ~80%.

So far ~25% of people who have already booked have contacted us to cancel, and this figure is likely to rise.

People cancelling have mentioned general anxiousness about being in crowds or mixing with other people, but a lot of people cancelling have said that one or more people in their group that has booked has either got a pre existing medical condition, or is perfectly healthy but over the age of 65.

I've also had many people cancelling who are young (under 35 years old) couples saying they are not concerned for themselves but that they have a 2 1/2 year old / 4 year old etc child at home so are fearful if they did catch it, of passing it on to a vulnerable youngster.

So like for many businesses, jobs and livelihoods in the economy the situation is very unlucky and financially damaging for me. My solution, which I've had to come up with very quickly, is to devise events where people can take part in them in their local area, that are outdoors and within walking distance of their home or their place of work, so involve no public transport or crowds whatsoever.

For the WSOP, as already mentioned by a few ITT, and as added by me ITT to include on line WSOPE events, the solution is simple and pretty obvious, to have a much bigger schedule of on line WSOP events for those in the right jurisdictions in the USA and to simultaneously have a big schedule of WSOPE on line events with a partner Euro poker site.

Live play could only possibly now be on digital tables outdoors when it is not as hot, so ~2 am to 10 am, but even that would likely be pointless as most overseas players simply would not book and travel to LV anyway, many long distance North Americans won't either and many hotels and casinos are at risk of being in lock down at any possible moment.

Great post!

Congratulations they shut down the casinos in my country. Boomers have lost the right to complain about anything to anyone from this point on.

This. They use Triage.
If you are over ~80+ and have heavy breathing problems they just let you die and send you home sorry...
Not wasting anymore resources on already "dead" people..
If you are young and strong you can get treatment.
Anyone who doesn't take this seriously must have no grandparents or parents? It's kinda apocalyptical what's going on there..

In case there is anyone still thinking this is all hype, here is an insiders view, written by an English National Health Service professional.

By now, most people have accepted – even the government has accepted – that coronavirus is going to put considerable pressure on our NHS. Yet as an NHS doctor currently caring for coronavirus patients, let me tell you: you have no idea how bad it’s going to get.

Without wanting to sound alarmist, the numbers are inescapable.

One week ago, we had 40 confirmed cases in the UK. We took no specific general measures other than to contain and trace the contact patients had had with others. Yesterday, we had over ten times that number of cases, and still apart from screening intensive care patients, our testing criteria have barely changed. We still aren’t testing community cases that clinically look like coronavirus if they haven’t travelled or had contact with confirmed cases. Hospital cases are only beginning to be tested this week, and only at the discretion of clinicians.

Until now, a suspected case was not allowed to be tested unless they had an obvious link to certain countries or infected patients. I’ve seen at least three people with severe disease who weren’t allowed to be tested, and heard of dozens more. This long-overdue policy change will soon be reflected – possibly as soon as the next 24-48 hours – in a big spike in case numbers.

For an idea of how quickly case numbers can explode, look to Italy. One week after it hit 320 cases, the country reported 2,036; a week later, nearly 10,000; next week that number will likely rise to 50,000 or more. There’s nothing I have seen that tells me the exact same thing isn’t coming for us in the UK. We only have around 4,000 intensive care unit (ICU) beds in England, 80% of which are already full. If we follow the same trajectory as Italy, with 10% of coronavirus patients needing ICU treatment, we will need 200 beds next week, 1,000 the week after. That’s already the entire ICU capacity. Every two days after that, we will need twice the number of beds again.

Then there is the collateral damage coronavirus will create. For while we are obsessively tracking deaths from Covid-19, it’s really the non-virus mortality we should be worried about. For every coronavirus patient in an ICU bed, one non-viral patient – possibly older, possibly with more complex healthcare needs – may be turned away. If you need intensive care and you don’t get it, it’s unlikely you will survive.

Of course, the crisis will not end when the virus does. We have already begun shutting down some outpatient hospital clinics, and I suspect will close all of them to all this week. There is already a huge backlog of non-urgent surgery and cancer care, much of which will be cancelled entirely to cope with coronavirus. The knock-on effect will be felt for years to come.
Unabated, we could see a million coronavirus cases or more in a month’s time. What happens after that, I don’t know. One thing I do know, however, is that the Italian mortality rate seems much higher than China’s (around 7%, versus 4%), a fact mostly explained by how Italian local healthcare has been pushed to breaking point. Reading the accounts of Italian doctors dealing with their outbreak reads like a warzone. Hospitals diverting all clinical staff to the care of ventilated patients. This is not healthcare but “catastrophe medicine”, of the kind one usually encounters on the battlefield; save who can be saved, leave the rest.

China had the capacity to build 2,000-bed hospitals, lock down 750 million people, and fly in thousands of medical staff. Italy, despite having a well-resourced healthcare sector, has been overwhelmed. With 100,000 missing staff, 10,000 missing doctors, 40,000 missing nurses and around £3bn missing from our budget, we have neither Italy’s well-resourced healthcare system nor China’s capacity.

I come from a medical family and in my house, it feels like we are preparing for war. My husband and I have talked about wills; hundreds of healthcare workers have died so far on the frontline of this crisis. However I am young, fit and therefore low-risk – but that isn’t true of all my colleagues, all of whom will be out there, putting their lives on the line for their patients.
There have been plans mooted to recall recently-retired doctors to help shore up frontline services, or to train up final-year medical students. The government proposed both with some fanfare weeks ago – and yet nothing concrete has materialised on either front. The plans surrounding revalidation, supervision, and basic role expectations have simply not been laid out. I asked a medical student about coronavirus preparation today, he had looked at me blankly.

If we are going to be throwing everybody we have at this in two weeks, why aren’t we training them now? We should be throwing every single resource we have at this, immediately. Rishi Sunak promised “unlimited money” to fight the pandemic – and yet we haven’t seen anything. We should be recalling every medic we can find, rapidly training up existing staff and resourcing central hospitals with every scrap of PPE and ventilation equipment we can lay our hands on. Hospital managers should be told to do whatever they have to, and don’t worry about budget constraints or fiscal penalties. The government should be providing the public directly what we need to contain the epidemic: handwashing areas at transit hubs, supplies at foodbanks, mass disinfection of public transport. We are far behind where we need to be, and every second lost will cost lives.

It is not exaggerated – in fact, it is proportionate – to think of this as a war, a national crisis with a huge potential loss of life. Our army is poorly provisioned after years of neglect, our leaders are woefully underprepared. Now is the time the government must step up and truly deliver us the resources we need. No more delay – right now. Countless lives are on the line.

The author is a doctor working in the NHS.

Yeah this isn't just old people
This will impact anyone who needs acute medical attention or has an injury caused by accidents etc.
Do you really go to a an understaffed hospital where people with Corona go? There won't be enough staff anyways for you and the ones that are there are tired as hell

My country with120 cases closed borders
Pubs close at 8pm
Gyms pools cinemas, everything's closed, sports cancelled
Events over 30 banned

Just shops remain open and pubs till 8pm


And almost nobody's complaining

Are you always a moron or just saving it for a worldwide pandemic?

-BD

Be grateful boomer. We're shutting the whole economy down for you and we're not even getting wined and dined before getting ****ed.

Majority of people are very bad at simple math and probabilities, no surprise the concepts of exponentials and logistic curves are way beyond them. Hence the "it's no big deal, flu kills way more" mentality.

Mods: Do we really need to let the worst examples of vile human garbage continue to post on the forums?

keep fools like him posting, at least we know he takes a pause between his angry wanks

WTF if true. That is where that woman was tho.

WHO says 4.2M people per year die as a direct result of air pollution. We're not shutting down whole economies to save those lives but a few unhealthy boomers die and all of the sudden everything grinds to a historic halt, costing healthy people a ton of money.

Wait till people here lose their jobs. See if you still want to save them then. This kind of reaction is unprecedented, and for what? The amount of money lost could have gone to green energy for entire nations in an instant, get public transport fully electric, do so much to actually save a ton of lives.

I agree with Eponymous that 2+2 and mods need to look to ban and shutdown accounts like this (I know other forums I use have implemented these guidelines after giving the community due notice).

In the midst of a pandemic, it is downright dangerous and unethical for a forum to allow this.

Shut down free speech, do it. I'm sorry, are those 4.2M lives each year not worth saving? Why aren't we pulling all the stops to transition to green energy like right now?

There's no point in debating the mortality rate since it is pretty much unknowable at this point. Relatively few people in the US have been tested. But we know dozens of people have died in the US. What will it look like in a month? Two months? A year? I certainly don't know. But if I were to tell you 3 months ago that there would be this novel virus unleashed on the world. And upwards of half a million people will be killed. And more than 12000 people in the US alone will die. You would probably say, wow... that will really suck. You might even speculate that this would have a tremendously negative effect on world economies... not to mention people's behavior and outlook.

But that's pretty much what happened with the H1N1 pandemic. But few even raised an eyebrow. Markets didn't crumble. Commerce didn't come to a stop. So I continue to ask.. what's different now? Twitter? Can't be just that can it?

As for the Ark reference... that a bit of hyperbole, no? There is no cure for the common cold. No cure for the flu. No cure for a dozen other things that ail and kill humans all the time. Some things are more deadly than others. And all should be taken seriously. And no one is saying, least of all me, there should be no reaction. Why must it be "no reaction" vs a "stoppage of all commerce"?

So, why has Caesars NOT YET acknowledged and announced what everyone with an unbiased view seems to know, that the WSOP live events will be postponed indefinitely or cancelled?

To my uneducated view, Caesars owes a tin of debt it cannot repay. It seems possible that an announcement that it cannot offer the WSOP may be an immediate event of default and trigger the loss of ownership by Caesars shareholders and loss of employment by current management ?

What we have been treated to may be an extended period of wrangling between management/sharehoilders and debt holders over the effect of such an announcement.

Curios about pricing of Caesars secured debt.

Experts estimate 250,000 - 500,000 U.S. deaths in the next year to 18 months.

Yes, to be a fly on the wall in those daily meetings.

Not a "boomer" but there is no room for bigoted or racist comments. Fortuantely calling someone a moron is neither and in this case merely factual.

-BD

And those are conservative estimates assuming the CFR is well below 1% and we don't go over 50% infected which is optimistic imo.

The vastly differing outcomes and incubation periods are what I think make this virus problematic.

Also people just looking at cfr are not focusing on the reason why so many are concerned. There are a spectrum of outcomes that aren't great even if you don't die. And in the likely event where you are in an area where there is a chance you can't get care if you need it. Sounds like a nightmare to me. And that's not just for 70+ yr olds to worry about.