I've been to a classic car show in ExCeL London. The main room they are using is absolutely huge.

They are also building a morgue on site.

See which patients are taken there - that will tell you if you're on the right lines.

From information I am hearing directly from staff working on wards.

There may be some attempts to minimise the significance of what is going on.

Lots of young people being hospitalised and staff going down like nine pins.

I no wa await IR80 to go on about scaremongering. Although considering I am having to meet lots of vulnerable people on a daily basis I am worried enough !!!

Not sure if people have noticed that the government has changed the way it collates needs releases figures of new cases and deaths.

The engineering/engineers arm of the company I work for (BOC Gases) are there now installing the medical oxygen pipelines, been there over a week.

The handling would be comical if it did not impact on people’s lives. The reason we did not join the EU purchasing group was because we did not receive the e-Mail and Raab overstated the number of ventilators by 4000 because he was confused regarding the question.

For a bright bloke he does come across as incredibly thick at times.

Evidently they are claiming that they can only disclose the cause of death if the family give consent; which is simply not true - provided the data is anonymised, no consent is required.

Educated beyond his ability.

Yes I'm sure there's some massive cover-up going in here.

Care to explain exactly why the change in reporting periods is such a drama?

Care to show me where the government claimed consent is required? I heard a journalist mentioned something but work is too demanding to keep up with every leftist conspiracy at the moment.

Why is this unexpected? Exactly as I said in the General Election thread - those whinging and condemning everything either haven't been paying attention, don't understand, or are too politically biased to form reasonable judgements. The scale of impact and response in China, Italy, Spain and elsewhere should have been telling you what is next for the UK.

There is a shtstorm coming of proportions our mollycoddled Western mindset is going to struggle to accept. If the global experience is consistent we're looking at about 3-4 weeks of rapidly increasing death rates before things start to drop off; all NHS resources dedicated to frantically processing those who will scrape through with treatment and those who will die regardless. Makeshift hospitals and makeshift morgues just to get through the peak. And that's even when 'the curve' is flattened relatively successfully.

This pandemic cannot be contained, controlled or avoided and the countries that lock down most efficiently are simply going to experience further outbreaks when they open up again. In the UK a significant proportion of society will have been infected and that should help prevent rapid outbreaks in the future. Most of us will survive and some won't even know they've had it.

But - this is a novel virus. Our immune systems have nothing to work with, unlike regular flu and the common cold, which are familiar to us on a genetic level. It's a lottery. The reasonably high R0 rate means a high percentage of us will get it (up to 60 or 70% apparently), so even a low fatality rate of 1-2% means very high numbers of deaths over a relatively short period.