I find this site interesting.
https://covid.joinzoe.com/data
It has limitations as it cannot show asymptomatic individuals and relies on self reporting. IIRC a study conducted by the team showed that a little over half of those who reported themselves symptomatic actually had Covid-19. I do not know how that has changed over time.
However I find it encouraging that in my area for example, only 6 in a 1000 are reporting symptoms. It means if I limit my outings to the necessities and stay away from others as far as possible, I am unlikely to even encounter somebody with Covid-19, let alone be in contact with them long enough to catch it. That is what I am telling myself anyway.
Currently we have about 4% of the population having had it - which you could extrapolate from a 1% mortality being somewhat consistent across nations and the death figures reported. If we're seeing 6/1000 reporting symptoms you could extrapolate that circa 75% are asymptomatic if we assume there is a hospitalisation rate of 5%. This would be surprisingly close to the British Medical Journal's reported 78% of cases being asymptomatic. If anything we can expect the asymptomatic to improve thanks to South Korea and Germany with their expansive test setup and in particular the young age of most of those tested. (
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-bmj-study-suggests-78-dont-show-symptoms-heres-what-that-could-mean-135732 )
The governments advisory committee SAGE, isn't the best informed, Academically brilliant, Professional body it should be. Any so called "Scientific" body appointed by government, that has Political advisors involved in it and is basically nothing more than a bunch of number crunchers (statisticians), who won't submit it's discussions and minutes of meetings for public scrutiny actually smacks of a "well if it all goes t*ts up we'll have a someone else to blame scenario". No wonder all its so called members are being given the anonimity card to play.
As someone involved with statistics many business discussions over the years have been clients trying to discern 'what is the bottom line' whilst ignoring everything else. Only a select few are interested in methods or limitations, they make a judgement on that 'bottom line' based on how charismatic you are, how professional you appear, and your CV. Which is exactly what I imagine you'd get from the press and public if this was to be made public and advice had to be individually 'judged' based on how much they like a particular scientist's face or their dress sense.
They don't want or need to learn much about the limitations of and how many forms of prediction are imperfect by their very nature due to them potentially being based on bad data. The method needs to evolve, the data sets need to be updated and doing this in a 'no blame' culture, internally, allows those models to be explored and perfected far more easily and quickly than having the government PR machine wasting time and energy in managing the public response as these are published.
To use an analogy, when you are in hospital for something serious - doctors have a morning meeting where they discuss the treatment plan for their patients and their prognoses. They don't invite the family in to the discussion unless it's clinically relevant because they aren't medically trained, and they are unlikely to understand much of the terminology and be able to contribute to the discussion due to not having understanding of the physiology of the body either. I'm not sure patients or patient family demanding to be admitted to these discussions would be reasonable. The same is true of public scrutiny of SAGE.
If discussions need to be had on the political impact of, for example, asking schools to re-open (at a potential cost of circa 1300 school children dying before we have a vaccine) - no politician is going to sign 1300+ children's death warrants and if the press/public start objecting to this then it does not help the situation. However there are also other undesirable effects from remaining in lockdown I'm sure the modelers are working on understanding more in depth - an important point made during yesterday's briefing by the CSO was that '
comparisons should be made afterwards, based on excess deaths from all causes adjusted by age'. That sentence alone should tell you that the modelling teams are looking at cancer, depression, domestic abuse, accidents, poverty, heart attacks, strokes, etc and of course COVID and trying to sail the ship on a narrow course to reduce all of these factors as much as possible. You could say that the goal of the government isn't to minimise COVID deaths, but to minimise all causes of deaths even if this means having an inflated R-value (rate at which the virus reproduces) compared to other countries for a period of time. This appears to be the Swedish model the UK very nearly went with originally until the modelers realised the vastly different population densities would likely give very different outcomes.
Before you tell someone to stop arguing and do research you should apply that statement to yourself. You should also accept the fact others have a different opinion than you do. I do not need to conduct any research. I keep up to date with everything. Trying to belittle me on a public forum just because I don't agree with you is childish and it will not change my opinion on wearing a facemask. You are free to do what you wish however learn to accept others will do what they wish. I will wear a mask and disposable gloves as in my experience other people are not following social distancing rules. I have nothing else to say on this matter. I will leave you to argue with yourself as I wont change my opinion on it.
Looking at Germany mandating mask use and South Korea's adoption of it alongside other Asian nations (who had SARS-1 and MERS to content with) perhaps they know something we don't as to how this can be managed in the longer term.
From what I understand of it you're both right in a way, there are meant to be very limited benefits from wearing a standard face mask if your goal is to avoid catching the virus. If you have one and you want to do it when you shop or when you're travelling on the tube (if you have to do so for work, for example) then it probably makes good sense to do so - however it won't be anything like a guarantee and you're probably better off washing your hands more often/not touching your face at all. The key seems to be not adjusting your mask and not wearing it below your nose then fiddling around with it!
That said, if the asymptomatic rate is as high as some studies are reporting - wearing a mask is actually far more likely to reduce the spread from yourself to others when you're out and about if you have it but only a very mild case. If we're still coughing and sneezing on people and feeling more or less fine perhaps someone might put it down to just clearing your throat, but this may be far more useful broadly speaking as a society and what SK and Germany are judging their decisions on. I know in South Korea and Singapore in particular all public buildings and many work places use temperature monitoring to try and quarantine those employees who start showing symptoms early - and masks are a key part of reducing the spread before they start showing definite symptoms.
Definitely interesting times with a lot of changes to get used to.