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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Mation said:
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).
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Its an entirely inappropriate response for existing diseases such as influenza too. When people ignore what could be flu and carry on with their lives, it contributes to epidemics that kill tends of thousands of people in a country like ours every so many years.

So you are focussing on very important stuff, but I would go further. The mistakes now are based on things we always get wrong, and have been encouraged to get wrong in normal times, the default response to flu is as inappropriate as the dangerous responses to Covid-19.

This is also deep in territory where the establishment, the mainstream, have disgusting double-standards and most people know it. This was demonstrated when a doctor in another country (possibly Australia or New Zealand, I forget), early in the pandemic, caused outrage when it turns out they had been at work treating patients for days despite having symptoms. There was a lot of outrage and empty statements about how we all know that healthcare professionals and others should not go to work when sick, which people would have found to be some kind of sick joke. Because we know that there is always pressure to say the right things but actually the pressure is to do the wrong things. Claims that the system and ethics/values always encouraged people in that situation to stay off work do not ring true to those who have been in that situation in normal times, the pressure has always been in the direction of going to work.

I hope, just like I did at the start of the pandemic, that at least all the focus on wide range of symptoms, disease severity and the large number of asymptomatic cases will at least shatter the common misconceptions about flu that haunt us every season, eg when people think it 'isnt proper flu' unless you are bedridden. Flu is just like Covid-19 in that symptoms actually cross the full spectrum, from none to critical illness and death. So 'man flu' assumptions are fit only for the bin.
 
two sheds said:
:mad:
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I do not comprehend the basis for this reaction.

Our brains and the way we learn and process risk is not well suited to the realities of large numbers of different conditions presenting very similar symptoms. Its much easier for us to get our heads round things when there is consistency and uniqueness involved. If a disease has novel and consistent symptoms then its easy to jump to conclusions without making huge errors. We are not actually afforded that luxury so often, especially not with respiratory illnesses.
 
two sheds said:
I've had man flu: runny nose, slight chill, bit of a wheeze, feel somewhat achey it's HORRIFIC I tell you :mad:

sorry :(
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But what I'm saying is the very opposite of claiming that man flu wasnt actually real flu.

This stuff can also be filed under 'reasons why we should have a proper, routine mass diagnostics setup in this country'. Dont assume, dont guess, have things ruled in or out properly via testing. Something this country was not keen on or setup to do when this pandemic arrived, but that has probably since changed forever, especially given we now have infrastructure to do it at scale.
 
existentialist said:
The downside of presenteeism - another price we pay for our exploitative work culture.
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Actually, I got to thinking about this. While we are busily (and righteously) ripping this clown cabinet a new one for their in-the-moment cockups throughout the pandemic, the really bad shit is happening because of decisions taken long ago, and kept in place even now.

Accommodation - how many people here (just for example) are living in situations where they're stuck with housemates, landlords, or lodgers because housing policy over the last 30+ years has been all about restricting the supply of housing, particularly to those at the lower end of the income scale? How much easier would it have been to control in-home infections, if the shortage of housing had not created a situation where people are living, essentially purely for cost reasons, in what are effectively mixed households?

Employment - a culture of presenteeism has suited the Government (and particularly those huge businesses who are so generous with their funding to the Tories) very nicely up until now. OK, we've had a few rumblings during the nastier 'flu seasons about people coming in and infecting colleagues, but much of it has been against a kind of acceptance that struggling in to work with obvious symptoms was the Right Thing To Do. Plenty of employers might say "oh, if you have 'flu, don't come in" but it's often within workplaces where sick pay has been pared to the bone, or subject to the iniquitious Bradford Scale, complete with intrusive and punitive return-to-work interviews and an a priori assumption that anyone taking time off sick must be swinging the lead.

On top of that, we have the progressive loosening of employment protections that has led to the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, leading to a situation where a vast swathe of the more important tasks being done are being done by people with absolutely no employment security (or sick pay) at all. People like those in the care sector, and - yes - delivery drivers, etc. Which leads on to...

Benefits - OK, so nobody on Urban is going to be shocked by the idea that our current benefits system is utterly predicated on the assumption that anyone claiming benefits is doing so because they're a workshy scrounger just out to exploit the State, so they can sit at home watching their flat screen TV while necking tins of Scrumpy Jack. Which wasn't ever true in the vast majority of cases, but is even less true as people that the Government would presumably have lauded as good hard-working citizens find themselves in a position where they, too, are needing to claim benefits. OK, there was a grudging uplift in the rate of UC being paid, and by all accounts the application process suddenly became a lot less aggressively nasty. I'd like to think the latter is down to the Government having a realisation that, if they ended up treating some of these new claimants - people with arguably more social capital, less beaten down by the system, and more likely to articulate their outrage at the way it works - the same, they'd have some serious pushback on their hands...although I suspect it was probably more by accident than design, when the system became so overwhelmed that they didn't have time to put the claimants through the usual shit mill.

Education - I have watched, from varying distances, as our education system has clunked further and further towards a box-ticking exercise whereby the most important thing is exam results. Less academic subjects have been progressively (about the only time I'll use that word in connection with this Government :hmm:) stripped away, along with the staff to teach them. There has been a race to the bottom which has resulted in capable, experienced teachers being put at a disadvantage as they compete for jobs with cheaper NQTs when they apply for jobs at cash-strapped schools, and (nice cheap) LSAs taking on more and more of the teacher's role. The educational house of cards has had every possible "non-essential" card pulled out, to the point that it totters in the slightest breeze.

Health - any sensible government would, when faced with successive "winter challenges" to the NHS, rather than insist that we're doing a brilliant job, have addressed the issue. But they couldn't, because their whole philosophy is predicated on cutting everything to the bone. It has apparently been preferable to see the NHS, and the people within it, brought to the brink of collapse in the hope that we'll get through on a wing and a prayer.

Coupled with that has been the, frankly, abusive nature of the relationship between the government and NHS staff. Nurses have long had their vocations taken advantage of - everybody knows that a nurse isn't going to walk off a ward if there isn't any cover, handing NHS managers and the Government the perfect bit of plausible deniability that enables them to on the one hand forbid employees from working beyond their shift times (H&S, anyone), while at the same time tacitly allowing it to continue. Then they decided they'd pull a similar stunt on junior doctors. And remember, all of this is against a background whereby fewer people have been applying for (expensive) medical training, we've been scouring the world to steal nurses and other grades - many of whom, thanks to Brexit, have now buggered off home - and we're facing a continual and worsening staffing shortfall with, apparently, no motivation or intention on the part of Government to do a damn thing about improving that situation.

So now we're left with a health service that, faced with a pandemic, and the inevitable consequences on staff, is in a perfect storm, where demand is stratospheric at exactly the same time as its staff are collapsing from burnout, PTSD, and Covid infections (I don't think I need to retread the whole sorry PPE debâcle again here).


All this didn't happen yesterday, or even during the current Tory government...it's been going on for years, and what I think we are seeing now is a real-world example of what happens when you cheesepare all of your social provisions to the bone (bit of a mixed metaphor there!).

If one good thing can come of Covid, it's the realisation that we just can't carry on like this. Systems need spare capacity, and resilience, as do the people within them. Operating them on skeleton staffing and resources, where both are stretched thin just to operate in normal circumstances, must surely be obviously futile and dangerous to anyone prepared to look.

But will anything change? Absent some kind of dramatic action, I bet it doesn't.
 
wayward bob said:
i reckon fractured trust w/everyone - political class, neighbours, selves, historical precident (fostered by years of public policy) means we're in huge part entirely fucking lost with who/what to trust and thereby pinned immobile - at some point we may as well "trust" what suits/serves our interests and stop taking in new information? (may just be me ;)🤷)
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elbows said:
Its an entirely inappropriate response for existing diseases such as influenza too. When people ignore what could be flu and carry on with their lives, it contributes to epidemics that kill tends of thousands of people in a country like ours every so many years.

So you are focussing on very important stuff, but I would go further. The mistakes now are based on things we always get wrong, and have been encouraged to get wrong in normal times, the default response to flu is as inappropriate as the dangerous responses to Covid-19.

This is also deep in territory where the establishment, the mainstream, have disgusting double-standards and most people know it. This was demonstrated when a doctor in another country (possibly Australia or New Zealand, I forget), early in the pandemic, caused outrage when it turns out they had been at work treating patients for days despite having symptoms. There was a lot of outrage and empty statements about how we all know that healthcare professionals and others should not go to work when sick, which people would have found to be some kind of sick joke. Because we know that there is always pressure to say the right things but actually the pressure is to do the wrong things. Claims that the system and ethics/values always encouraged people in that situation to stay off work do not ring true to those who have been in that situation in normal times, the pressure has always been in the direction of going to work.

I hope, just like I did at the start of the pandemic, that at least all the focus on wide range of symptoms, disease severity and the large number of asymptomatic cases will at least shatter the common misconceptions about flu that haunt us every season, eg when people think it 'isnt proper flu' unless you are bedridden. Flu is just like Covid-19 in that symptoms actually cross the full spectrum, from none to critical illness and death. So 'man flu' assumptions are fit only for the bin.
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Yes to both of you, and others who have suggested other really valid reasons around toxic work culture and lack of support for people in precarious positions.

I don't mean to suggest that not being able to trust our learned confidence in our own judgement about our bodies is the only factor. I was trying to say that it might be an additional, potentially important factor that also needs to be addressed, but hasn't been.

'Reckless' and inappropriate behaviour, and the external factors that contribute to that are not new, and are part of some current conversation. Trusting external opinion and advice seems to be a very relevant problem. And a common response to not knowing who else to trust is to revert to trusting yourself and your own interpretation. But I'm not sure it's being thought about or discussed or communicated that that the reasons why, in this case, trusting your own knowledge about your body aren't going to work.

I'd very tentatively suggest that perhaps one of the reasons why (see how tentative?) we always get this wrong is that we have only focussed on central communications and failings, and on individual response to acting in favour of personal and communal benefit, whilst missing out on considering how important our intrinsic default response of trusting our own personal knowledge and senses is to how we respond to a failure of trust in leadership.

There's always been information about what to do and why. There hasn't been information (that I know of) about why our fallback trust in ourselves about a new disease isn't helpful. I'm suggesting this as an extra tool in the armoury.
 
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^ That (my post, not froggy's) sounds like I'm suggesting really negative comms.

More 'stranger danger' (where the stranger is the new disease), than 'this is why you're wrong'!

e2a whose post I was referring to.
 
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[
Sue said:
I also think so many companies have insisted for such a long time that you come in to work unless you're very ill (and at pain of disciplinary action if your absence rate is 'too' high), that people don't really believe/trust what their employers are saying now. And I can't say I blame them.

And couple that with some people not getting paid unless they work and 🤷‍♀️.
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Heroes going the extra mile :mad:

It has always fucked me off. Stay home. I don't want your flu, cold or deadly virus ffs
 
existentialist said:
Actually, I got to thinking about this. While we are busily (and righteously) ripping this clown cabinet a new one for their in-the-moment cockups throughout the pandemic, the really bad shit is happening because of decisions taken long ago, and kept in place even now.

Accommodation - how many people here (just for example) are living in situations where they're stuck with housemates, landlords, or lodgers because housing policy over the last 30+ years has been all about restricting the supply of housing, particularly to those at the lower end of the income scale? How much easier would it have been to control in-home infections, if the shortage of housing had not created a situation where people are living, essentially purely for cost reasons, in what are effectively mixed households?

Employment - a culture of presenteeism has suited the Government (and particularly those huge businesses who are so generous with their funding to the Tories) very nicely up until now. OK, we've had a few rumblings during the nastier 'flu seasons about people coming in and infecting colleagues, but much of it has been against a kind of acceptance that struggling in to work with obvious symptoms was the Right Thing To Do. Plenty of employers might say "oh, if you have 'flu, don't come in" but it's often within workplaces where sick pay has been pared to the bone, or subject to the iniquitious Bradford Scale, complete with intrusive and punitive return-to-work interviews and an a priori assumption that anyone taking time off sick must be swinging the lead.

On top of that, we have the progressive loosening of employment protections that has led to the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, leading to a situation where a vast swathe of the more important tasks being done are being done by people with absolutely no employment security (or sick pay) at all. People like those in the care sector, and - yes - delivery drivers, etc. Which leads on to...

Benefits - OK, so nobody on Urban is going to be shocked by the idea that our current benefits system is utterly predicated on the assumption that anyone claiming benefits is doing so because they're a workshy scrounger just out to exploit the State, so they can sit at home watching their flat screen TV while necking tins of Scrumpy Jack. Which wasn't ever true in the vast majority of cases, but is even less true as people that the Government would presumably have lauded as good hard-working citizens find themselves in a position where they, too, are needing to claim benefits. OK, there was a grudging uplift in the rate of UC being paid, and by all accounts the application process suddenly became a lot less aggressively nasty. I'd like to think the latter is down to the Government having a realisation that, if they ended up treating some of these new claimants - people with arguably more social capital, less beaten down by the system, and more likely to articulate their outrage at the way it works - the same, they'd have some serious pushback on their hands...although I suspect it was probably more by accident than design, when the system became so overwhelmed that they didn't have time to put the claimants through the usual shit mill.

Education - I have watched, from varying distances, as our education system has clunked further and further towards a box-ticking exercise whereby the most important thing is exam results. Less academic subjects have been progressively (about the only time I'll use that word in connection with this Government :hmm:) stripped away, along with the staff to teach them. There has been a race to the bottom which has resulted in capable, experienced teachers being put at a disadvantage as they compete for jobs with cheaper NQTs when they apply for jobs at cash-strapped schools, and (nice cheap) LSAs taking on more and more of the teacher's role. The educational house of cards has had every possible "non-essential" card pulled out, to the point that it totters in the slightest breeze.

Health - any sensible government would, when faced with successive "winter challenges" to the NHS, rather than insist that we're doing a brilliant job, have addressed the issue. But they couldn't, because their whole philosophy is predicated on cutting everything to the bone. It has apparently been preferable to see the NHS, and the people within it, brought to the brink of collapse in the hope that we'll get through on a wing and a prayer.

Coupled with that has been the, frankly, abusive nature of the relationship between the government and NHS staff. Nurses have long had their vocations taken advantage of - everybody knows that a nurse isn't going to walk off a ward if there isn't any cover, handing NHS managers and the Government the perfect bit of plausible deniability that enables them to on the one hand forbid employees from working beyond their shift times (H&S, anyone), while at the same time tacitly allowing it to continue. Then they decided they'd pull a similar stunt on junior doctors. And remember, all of this is against a background whereby fewer people have been applying for (expensive) medical training, we've been scouring the world to steal nurses and other grades - many of whom, thanks to Brexit, have now buggered off home - and we're facing a continual and worsening staffing shortfall with, apparently, no motivation or intention on the part of Government to do a damn thing about improving that situation.

So now we're left with a health service that, faced with a pandemic, and the inevitable consequences on staff, is in a perfect storm, where demand is stratospheric at exactly the same time as its staff are collapsing from burnout, PTSD, and Covid infections (I don't think I need to retread the whole sorry PPE debâcle again here).


All this didn't happen yesterday, or even during the current Tory government...it's been going on for years, and what I think we are seeing now is a real-world example of what happens when you cheesepare all of your social provisions to the bone (bit of a mixed metaphor there!).

If one good thing can come of Covid, it's the realisation that we just can't carry on like this. Systems need spare capacity, and resilience, as do the people within them. Operating them on skeleton staffing and resources, where both are stretched thin just to operate in normal circumstances, must surely be obviously futile and dangerous to anyone prepared to look.

But will anything change? Absent some kind of dramatic action, I bet it doesn't.
Click to expand...

I need one of those standing ovation gifs! Yes, yes and thrice yes to all of that.
 
existentialist said:
Actually, I got to thinking about this. While we are busily (and righteously) ripping this clown cabinet a new one for their in-the-moment cockups throughout the pandemic, the really bad shit is happening because of decisions taken long ago, and kept in place even now.

Accommodation - how many people here (just for example) are living in situations where they're stuck with housemates, landlords, or lodgers because housing policy over the last 30+ years has been all about restricting the supply of housing, particularly to those at the lower end of the income scale? How much easier would it have been to control in-home infections, if the shortage of housing had not created a situation where people are living, essentially purely for cost reasons, in what are effectively mixed households?

Employment - a culture of presenteeism has suited the Government (and particularly those huge businesses who are so generous with their funding to the Tories) very nicely up until now. OK, we've had a few rumblings during the nastier 'flu seasons about people coming in and infecting colleagues, but much of it has been against a kind of acceptance that struggling in to work with obvious symptoms was the Right Thing To Do. Plenty of employers might say "oh, if you have 'flu, don't come in" but it's often within workplaces where sick pay has been pared to the bone, or subject to the iniquitious Bradford Scale, complete with intrusive and punitive return-to-work interviews and an a priori assumption that anyone taking time off sick must be swinging the lead.

On top of that, we have the progressive loosening of employment protections that has led to the gig economy and zero-hours contracts, leading to a situation where a vast swathe of the more important tasks being done are being done by people with absolutely no employment security (or sick pay) at all. People like those in the care sector, and - yes - delivery drivers, etc. Which leads on to...

Benefits - OK, so nobody on Urban is going to be shocked by the idea that our current benefits system is utterly predicated on the assumption that anyone claiming benefits is doing so because they're a workshy scrounger just out to exploit the State, so they can sit at home watching their flat screen TV while necking tins of Scrumpy Jack. Which wasn't ever true in the vast majority of cases, but is even less true as people that the Government would presumably have lauded as good hard-working citizens find themselves in a position where they, too, are needing to claim benefits. OK, there was a grudging uplift in the rate of UC being paid, and by all accounts the application process suddenly became a lot less aggressively nasty. I'd like to think the latter is down to the Government having a realisation that, if they ended up treating some of these new claimants - people with arguably more social capital, less beaten down by the system, and more likely to articulate their outrage at the way it works - the same, they'd have some serious pushback on their hands...although I suspect it was probably more by accident than design, when the system became so overwhelmed that they didn't have time to put the claimants through the usual shit mill.

Education - I have watched, from varying distances, as our education system has clunked further and further towards a box-ticking exercise whereby the most important thing is exam results. Less academic subjects have been progressively (about the only time I'll use that word in connection with this Government :hmm:) stripped away, along with the staff to teach them. There has been a race to the bottom which has resulted in capable, experienced teachers being put at a disadvantage as they compete for jobs with cheaper NQTs when they apply for jobs at cash-strapped schools, and (nice cheap) LSAs taking on more and more of the teacher's role. The educational house of cards has had every possible "non-essential" card pulled out, to the point that it totters in the slightest breeze.

Health - any sensible government would, when faced with successive "winter challenges" to the NHS, rather than insist that we're doing a brilliant job, have addressed the issue. But they couldn't, because their whole philosophy is predicated on cutting everything to the bone. It has apparently been preferable to see the NHS, and the people within it, brought to the brink of collapse in the hope that we'll get through on a wing and a prayer.

Coupled with that has been the, frankly, abusive nature of the relationship between the government and NHS staff. Nurses have long had their vocations taken advantage of - everybody knows that a nurse isn't going to walk off a ward if there isn't any cover, handing NHS managers and the Government the perfect bit of plausible deniability that enables them to on the one hand forbid employees from working beyond their shift times (H&S, anyone), while at the same time tacitly allowing it to continue. Then they decided they'd pull a similar stunt on junior doctors. And remember, all of this is against a background whereby fewer people have been applying for (expensive) medical training, we've been scouring the world to steal nurses and other grades - many of whom, thanks to Brexit, have now buggered off home - and we're facing a continual and worsening staffing shortfall with, apparently, no motivation or intention on the part of Government to do a damn thing about improving that situation.

So now we're left with a health service that, faced with a pandemic, and the inevitable consequences on staff, is in a perfect storm, where demand is stratospheric at exactly the same time as its staff are collapsing from burnout, PTSD, and Covid infections (I don't think I need to retread the whole sorry PPE debâcle again here).


All this didn't happen yesterday, or even during the current Tory government...it's been going on for years, and what I think we are seeing now is a real-world example of what happens when you cheesepare all of your social provisions to the bone (bit of a mixed metaphor there!).

If one good thing can come of Covid, it's the realisation that we just can't carry on like this. Systems need spare capacity, and resilience, as do the people within them. Operating them on skeleton staffing and resources, where both are stretched thin just to operate in normal circumstances, must surely be obviously futile and dangerous to anyone prepared to look.

But will anything change? Absent some kind of dramatic action, I bet it doesn't.
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Yep, all of that.

But if there was a general election tomorrow the tories would still have a comfortable majority :facepalm:
 
zora said:
I need one of those standing ovation gifs! Yes, yes and thrice yes to all of that.
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I quite like this one in these situations :D

applause4.gif

(although I note that they are seated :()
 
elbows said:
But what I'm saying is the very opposite of claiming that man flu wasnt actually real flu.

This stuff can also be filed under 'reasons why we should have a proper, routine mass diagnostics setup in this country'. Dont assume, dont guess, have things ruled in or out properly via testing. Something this country was not keen on or setup to do when this pandemic arrived, but that has probably since changed forever, especially given we now have infrastructure to do it at scale.
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Ah ok I let you off then :)
 
The tentative signs of improvement are now being mentioned by the likes of Hancock and Johnson.

A BBC Realick Check piece in response to that contains the usual statements that I disagree with:

At Prime Minister’s Questions, Boris Johnson said “the lockdown measures we had in place, combined with tier four measures, are starting to show some signs of effect.”

Looking at cases of Covid-19 in England, the average for the week ending 1 January was almost 55,000 cases.

The week ending 5 January shows a slight dip, to 52,400.

These people will have been infected before England’s lockdown came in on 5 January, although much of the country was under very strict measures before then.

So, using publicly available data, it might be too early to make this assessment.

And in the past month, we’ve seen that a couple of days of decline can quickly be followed by a sustained increase in cases.

But what is clear is that hospital admissions from coronavirus appear to be increasing (they usually peak up to a couple of weeks after high numbers of cases).

The latest seven-day average (ending on 7 January) saw 3,705 people admitted to hospital daily in England – that’s the highest throughout the entire pandemic.
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( 13:56 entry of BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-55643842 )

Specifically what they say about hospital admissions simply isnt true, at least not in terms of the timing of things in data made public. There wasnt a couple of week gap between positive case data dropping and hospital admission data dropping in the first wave, and there isnt this time around either. I hope to demonstrate this again today when the latest hospital data comes out. Using rolling averages does introduce more lag to the picture so they might not be wrong when talking about seven day averages of hospital admissions, but its certainly wrong when looking at each days figures in raw form.

I would agree with their note of caustion about how declines are not guaranteed to continue, the trajectory could change again. But I wouldnt use the wording they chose to use in regards that either, since I do not consider the previous drops that came before a sustained rise to have only lasted 'a couple of days'.
 
Here is a graph I should use to make that point. Data is England only. And I have fiddled with the scales of the different sorts of numbers so that they all end up the same sort of size on this graph, so one doesnt dwarf the others.

There is no lag that requires careful consideration between the picture shown by published positive cases data and that shown by hospital admissions. At least not this time, when unlike the first wave we actually have a proper testing system for detecting large numbers of positive cases in the community. There is the expected lag between those measures and deaths by date of reporting.

The only thing I'm not allowing for in this chart is that daily hospital admissions numbers are generally published 2 days later, so perhaps it would be fairer if I moved the blue line two days to the right. But I've tested that and it really doesnt make much difference so I havent bothered on this occasion. And I would rather not have used a 7 day average for deaths because that introduces its own lag compared to raw daily figures, but those figures just jump around too much to put on the graph in raw form without it turning into a big mess of spikes that distract from the picture I'm trying to show.

Screenshot 2021-01-13 at 15.36.39.png
 
elbows said:
The tentative signs of improvement are now being mentioned by the likes of Hancock and Johnson.

A BBC Realick Check piece in response to that contains the usual statements that I disagree with:



( 13:56 entry of BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-55643842 )

Specifically what they say about hospital admissions simply isnt true, at least not in terms of the timing of things in data made public. There wasnt a couple of week gap between positive case data dropping and hospital admission data dropping in the first wave, and there isnt this time around either. I hope to demonstrate this again today when the latest hospital data comes out. Using rolling averages does introduce more lag to the picture so they might not be wrong when talking about seven day averages of hospital admissions, but its certainly wrong when looking at each days figures in raw form.

I would agree with their note of caustion about how declines are not guaranteed to continue, the trajectory could change again. But I wouldnt use the wording they chose to use in regards that either, since I do not consider the previous drops that came before a sustained rise to have only lasted 'a couple of days'.
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As well as all of that, the tentative signs of improvement don't seem to take account of the regional picture.

I've mainly been looking at new cases data for this thought, which is 6 days old before the regional data comes out, but from that it looks like any signs of improvement are mainly in the south east and east (where the new strain hit first) and things are (or were) deteriorating in other areas (Merseyside, the Bournemouth area and some others stand out).

It looks to me like the new strain has spread like a wave across England from (south) east to west, and while its beginning to show signs of having peaked where it hit first (including the most populous area of the country, London), it's still hitting other areas now and could go on to hit other areas yet.

Have you got any data to support or disprove this theory?
 
Spandex said:
As well as all of that, the tentative signs of improvement don't seem to take account of the regional picture.

I've mainly been looking at new cases data for this thought, which is 6 days old before the regional data comes out, but from that it looks like any signs of improvement are mainly in the south east and east (where the new strain hit first) and things are (or were) deteriorating in other areas (Merseyside, the Bournemouth area and some others stand out).

It looks to me like the new strain has spread like a wave across England from (south) east to west, and while its beginning to show signs of having peaked where it hit first (including the most populous area of the country, London), it's still hitting other areas now and could go on to hit other areas yet.

Have you got any data to support or disprove this theory?
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Considerable regional variations are expected at this time, yes. I will find some documents relating to this in a bit. Regional variation was mentioned by thr BBCs Nick Triggle when discussing the tentative signs, including Liverpool as an example of where things have gotten bad again. I'm expecting to increasingly focus on the regional pictures over the net period, once I have a bit more data.

As for the new variant stuff, I am retaining an open mind about that aspect for now, and there may well be clues about its role as a result of what actually ends up happening in different regions now and in the coming weeks.
 
Yeah, just saw that figure for deaths. Grim. Maybe new cases are going down more consistently though...? <fingers crossed>

And looks like there's been mutterings about exercise restrictions. I mean seriously? They really think that's a significant area of infection? More than work or all the other shit going on like that?!
 
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