Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Yes that is consistent with other data, and their daily new infections data should show a more advanced stage of things than that, since that one above is for number of people with symptoms which introduces quite a bit of lag and smoothing into the picture it shows, very much inclding making falls take longer to show up distinctly.

I'll probably continue to use hospital data the demonstrate the situation in the days ahead, as trajectory changes are starting to show up there and it will also cover the regional variations.

I'm glad that the post-Christmas period seems to resemble my expectations in regards not expecting to see a distinct spike that lots of people were expecting to see a while after Christmas, because I assumed there would be many factors working in the opposite direction over Christmas, such as people being on holiday from schools, workplaces etc. Not to mention various restrictions and change in atmosphere that happened at various stages of December. Not that we are necessarily totally out of the woods on that yet, if infection chains of transmission have been sparked by Christmas and then really get going in some sections of society over time, or if there are big differences between regions.

Next on my list of concerns is whether a bounce-back to higher activity levels once Christmas holidays were over will have a bad affect on trajectory in the next period, or whether various measures, change of mood etc are enough to keep things going down. And then of course its a question of how rapidly levels will come down, whether we get stuck with very high levels for quite a while. And whether all regions manage to follow the same trend.
 
Last edited:
One of the most galling aspect of this pandemic is how tub thumping politicised and nationalistic it's been.




Not just from the Tories, though they've certainly done much more than most, and not just from the UK.
 
Mation said:
1) Today a workmate in his 60s asked what he should do re coming to work if his wife gets covid. It was genuinely news to him that he should self-isolate and get a test. But, granted, he's not struggling to cope. He's almost totally oblivious. /anecdata

6) What?

7) :hmm:

8) :hmm: :hmm: :hmm: (Though I did read it as meaning a causal link. If it in fact meant 'things will get better' then I'd reduce the number of hmms to one.)
Click to expand...

I suspect it's not from psychologists. Shared with good intentions though.
 
Last edited:
elbows said:
Yes and I remember some conversation here where there was some quibbling about going on about percentage increases without the context of low numbers, and I believe the Isle of Wight was the example used. I've mostly retired from droning on about exponential growth but it seems some still hadnt got their heads round that stuff. As for the government tier decisions, I recall being unimpressed at the time and making some sweeping statements about how there were no areas I would have placed in lower tiers at that time.

Meanwhile from the tentative signs department, daily hospital admissions/diagnoses in England by region using data from Statistics » COVID-19 Hospital Activity

View attachment 248576
Click to expand...

Fingers crossed this is a lasting trend.
 
Sunray said:
Fingers crossed this is a lasting trend.
Click to expand...

Hopefully. It helps that multiple different sorts of data are showing the same thing.

Nick Triggle of the BBC has noticed the trend but via number of positive cases rather than the hospital data and ZOE app estimates that we've talked about here so far.

His stuff is lower down the page of a BBC article:

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid: Play your part in fight against virus, says Patel

The home secretary says she will back police to enforce virus rules, as another 1,243 die in the UK.
www.bbc.co.uk

There is a big focus on adherence to lockdown rules. But what has almost gone unnoticed is the fact that cases may have actually started falling.

There has now been two consecutive days where newly diagnosed cases have hovered around the 46,000 mark. Up to the weekend, the average was close to 60,000.
Click to expand...

However he parrots the usual conventional wisdom about data timing which I looked into months ago in preparation for this wave, and determined not to be anything like as true as it sounds like it should be:

Hospital cases are still rising - patients being admitted at the moment are the ones who were infected a week or so ago - but it does at least offer a glimmer of hope.
Click to expand...

In reality I have always found the timing gap between positive case data and hospital data to be much smaller than that. In part because the positive cases that show up in todays figure were also infected some time ago.

It also depends what hospital data you use. Changing trends do start to show up reasonably quickly in the 'number of covid-19 patients in hospital' figure, but not as sharply as in the hospital admissions/diagnoses daily numbers. However the daily admissions figures do take a day or so longer to publish.

So I am not surprised to be seeing the same sorts of signs in these different sorts of data at roughly the same time. We are well into a period where these signs have been visible for some days, which is why I mentioned tentative signs in the first place days ago. Now with each day that passes there is slightly more confidence that the trend seen is real rather than a data blip etc, it starts to show up more clearly on graphs, it becomes easier to talk about it without feeling like I've gone out on a limb or too soon.

However it obviously doesnt suddenly change the horrible situation hospitals are in, so I do find it a bit of a struggle at moments like this when I want to share good news signs of peaks, but where there is much still to be coped with in the weeks and months ahead.

Triggle also draws attention to the uneven nature of the picture by region:

The drop has largely been driven by falls in new cases in London, the south east and east of England.

In some regions, cases are still going up. The north west of England is causing particular concern.
Click to expand...

The article he links to in that sentence is about Liverpool where things sound very bad again.

www.bbc.co.uk

Covid-19: Liverpool facing 'tsunami' of virus infections

The steep rise in coronavirus cases prompts calls to set up a mass vaccination hub in the city.
www.bbc.co.uk
 
cupid_stunt said:
I banged on about people moaning that Worthing was placed in tier 2 with just 25 cases/100k, when the IoW on 31 got put into tier 1, it was like banging my head against the wall, explaining our little urban borough was surrounded by rural district council areas with far higher rates, and those people come into Worthing for work, shopping & leisure, so we couldn't be compared to the IoW.

Then, I was also banging by head against the wall, when I pointed out in a zoom meeting that cases were doubling every week, and got push back from people saying 'yeah, but from low numbers'. :facepalm:

And what happened in just 4 weeks? 25 > 50 > 100 > 200 > 400, it's slowed a bit recently, but we're still on 730. Still, strangely, better off than the IoW.
Click to expand...
There were tales of people from Southampton and Portsmouth hopping on a ferry over to the Island to go drinking in the pubs. That and people "going home for xmas" is the root cause I think.
Plus a lot of Islanders work on the mainland, and there's clearly a lot of food etc deliveries.
Once the new variant got onto the Island, there was no stopping it, as people there were too relaxed, having escaped serious infection levels up to then.
Clear case against the tier system.
 
We are very much into the period of hospital pressure where I fret about discharge policies:

www.theguardian.com

Hospital patients to be sent to hotels to free up beds for critical Covid patients

Exclusive: emergency measures will let hospitals in England discharge thousands of patients early
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Thousands of hospital patients are to be discharged early to hotels or their own homes to free up beds for Covid-19 sufferers needing life-or-death care, the Guardian has learned.

Hospital chiefs in England intend to start discharging patients early on a scale never seen before, as an emergency measure to create “extra emergency contingency capacity” and stop parts of the NHS collapsing, senior sources said.

Documents seen by the Guardian also revealed that the NHS is asking care homes to start accepting Covid patients directly from hospitals and without a recent negative test, as long as they have been in isolation for 14 days and have shown no new symptoms.
Click to expand...

The policy had been to send Covid patients to designated “hot” care homes where infection spread could be limited and to prevent a repeat of last spring’s epidemic in care homes, which was partly fuelled by hospital discharges. But a target to set up 500 such homes has been missed, leaving only 2,533 beds available.

An NHS document sent to some care providers says: “We are now advising that for some within this group, it will be appropriate for them to move directly to a care home from hospital … because we now know they do not pose an infection risk to other residents in a care home.”
Click to expand...
 
Been thinking about why it might be that some people seem persistently unable to grasp the situation or think the rules don't apply to them.

We've had a few people at work now who have come in with symptoms, despite repeated, clear instructions not to come in if not feeling well. It's one of the few ways my employer is good. Feeling unwell? Don't come in. Get a test.

But still people come in, saying things like: oh, it's fine, it's more like a cold; it's definitely not covid; don't worry, I wouldn't put anyone at risk.

They're not coming in saying fuck you, I don't care if I spread it. They seem genuinely to think they know it's ok, as they don't have covid. And then they test positive.

So I'm thinking that we are all (most of us?) used to knowing ourselves and our bodies reasonably well. If we feel the onset of a cold we can judge roughly how bad it might be and what we're still capable of. Flu might be harder, but at the start we might know we can cope with what we have to do today, before we're laid up, and that although it might get really rough, we've been through it before or seen it before, and it'll be fine. A deep, ingrained sense of knowing how it will go, both for us, and that there aren't going to be any dire consequences for others as a result of how we behave around our own infection.

But this is a new disease. Like anything else, we compare what's happening to what we already know. Oh, this feels like a cold; I'm just a bit run down; I'm just feeling a bit achy; it's only a snotty nose. But, as none of us has had this before (or more than a couple of times, for some, now), we don't have any way of recognising that what we're feeling is down to a new disease. Not a different type of flu, but something that affects the body in ways that flu doesn't. And not helped by its description as a primarily respiratory disease (for the understandable reason that it can severely affect breathing, albeit not by flu-like mechanism).

So perhaps what people aren't getting is that we need to follow the rules, e.g. not to come in to work with flu-like symptoms, precisely because, while we are experienced at judging how ill we are with flu and some other coronaviruses, we can't possibly know that we're right about ourselves with this one. Because it's new. Our deeply ingrained prior knowledge is useless in this instance. It might not be in future. We might learn this one. But right now, we have to ignore what we think we know, and follow blanket rules instead, which is hard.

There is no excusing the government, and this isn't about irresponsible individuals. But perhaps we're fighting something much more hardwired and need to address that too? Not just follow the rules to stop the spread, but why using our own judgement in this very particular case is letting us all down.
 
Orang Utan said:
Really? I haven’t heard any different?
Click to expand...
From posts I’ve seen here and speaking to friends, it seems to often start with cold symptoms, headaches, sore throats. Often people don’t seem to get the cough until a few days in. If you have cold symptoms then a mild fever is generally easy to explain away. We can do all sorts of mental gymnastics if we need to. Which partly explains how a friend’s partner was still convinced he just had a head cold and it was a false positive. The full explanation is that he’s a fucking stupid and selfish conspiraloon but that’s another conversation.
 
The news yesterday and today has brought up two inconsistencies that are infuriating.

First, the whole everyone 'act like you have the virus'. What, self isolate? Or go to work if you have to, go outside for essentials, etc.? Which the fuck is it, because you can't do both. It's a soundbite that just doesn't make sense.

Secondly, the meeting up with one other person for outdoor exercise. Then Hancock was on the radio this morning going on about how it shouldn't be used for socializing. What? Clearly meeting up with one other person for a walk is partly socializing. What does he think we're doing, having a silent walking competition or something? Just make it clear, either you can exercise on your own or only with one of your household, or you can meet up with one other person for exercise and chatting, but be honest and clear what that is, don't try and pretend it's not partly socializing.

Not massive issues in the scale of things, but surely the simple messaging should be clear a year into this?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

elbows
UK Inquiry Module 3: Impact on UK Healthcare Systems
2 3
Replies
72
Views
1K
elbows
elbows
elbows
UK Inquiry Module 1: Resilience and preparedness
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
165
Views
6K
elbows
elbows
elbows
UK Inquiry Module 2: Decision-making & political governance
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
173
Views
4K
elbows
elbows
frogwoman
Shanghai lockdown
2
Replies
55
Views
2K
skyscraper101
skyscraper101
editor
Professional football and coronavirus
Replies
6
Views
574
elbows
elbows
Back
Top Bottom