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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Six dead kids from Covid so far this month, that's probably one thing they're sitting on :(

Official numbers for England and Wales from the ONS, based on Covid being mentioned on death certificates, has a total of 54 people aged 0-19 having died by that measure during the pandemic so far. Thats by week of occurrence up to 10th September 2021. Using data from the spreadsheet at Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics
 
In our university, they kicked off the term with blended learning i.e. half online, half in person. Lecturers could choose whether to alternate the classroom with online, or do half the term one way and half the other. Predicatbly they all decided to teach the first half online, meaning students turned up with no staff to greet them. Now they're being offered extra pay to come in immediately.
I'm surprised at that, at both Sheffield uni's the phrase 'blended learning' has been banned. Practicalities mean it will have to be like that in some cases, but everyone has been told to go into work as if it were 2019.
 
I'm getting a PCR tomorrow because someone I was (slightly) in contact with tested positive on two LFTs. However that person has now got a negative result from a PCR test that they took the following day. I'm aware that there is a false negative rate with PCRs - how high it is seems up for debate still. I think in their situation I would get a second PCR to confirm, but I don't know them very well and suspect they won't do that - they are blaming it on dodgy LFTs. So what is the chance that this person has covid?
 
Official numbers for England and Wales from the ONS, based on Covid being mentioned on death certificates, has a total of 54 people aged 0-19 having died by that measure during the pandemic so far. Thats by week of occurrence up to 10th September 2021. Using data from the spreadsheet at Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics
So 54 in 18 months, or 3/month, except we don't know how many of the 6 Fruitloop mentioned are included in that number. So somewhere between a 0% and 100% jump, maybe, I guess? You'd expect any school-related bounce to show up in the Scottish figures first, really.
 
Anecdotally there seem to have been a lot more negative PCR tests after a positive or multiple positive LFTs, so if someone has any kind of positive test I would be inclined to assume that they're positive
 
Six dead kids from Covid so far this month, that's probably one thing they're sitting on :(

Anecdotally there seem to have been a lot more negative PCR tests after a positive or multiple positive LFTs, so if someone has any kind of positive test I would be inclined to assume that they're positive

Where are you getting this stuff from?

Facebook or twitter?
 
Anecdotally there seem to have been a lot more negative PCR tests after a positive or multiple positive LFTs, so if someone has any kind of positive test I would be inclined to assume that they're positive
Are you suggesting that PCR tests are inherently unreliable or that this is deliberate?
 
Are you suggesting that PCR tests are inherently unreliable or that this is deliberate?

No idea, like I said it's anecdotal based on people I'm in contact with. But I've heard of several in person and more on twatter, when previously I hadn't heard of any.
 
So 54 in 18 months, or 3/month, except we don't know how many of the 6 Fruitloop mentioned are included in that number. So somewhere between a 0% and 100% jump, maybe, I guess? You'd expect any school-related bounce to show up in the Scottish figures first, really.
Well up until recent posts I had no idea what the source of info was.

Its probably legit, but I'll check the underlying data source for myself and will report back.

Child deaths during the pandemic are a feature for sure, one that has received very little attention due to (a) the small numbers involved and (b) the tendency to diminish such things because they usually involve children with underlying health issues. I am displeased with this phenomenon, although I find it hard to get the balance right.
 
elbows it worries me that 'underlying conditions' is a pretty broad category, I believe asthma is included, along with a bunch of other things that are very common.
 
Also, I fucking hate twitter, if you read something and want to quote it, it's completely impossible to find it once it gets buried under the more recent stuff. The search facility blows goats.
 
Looks like the twitter account is using this as a source


Dammit teuchter, faster than me on the draw. Those are better than the ONS, although from those you can see that they're talking about the same data: Coronavirus (COVID-19) latest insights - Office for National Statistics

ONS data is based on death certificates. Dashboard data is based on deaths within 28 days of a positive test. There is usually some variation between these two different measurements. And ONS data is slower to emerge.

Anyway I checked that website and it is indeed using legitimate data that can be downloaded from the official government dashboard. I have just downloaded that data and created my own charts, and they match what that website shows:

Here are the daily figures from July 1st onwards, to match the time period that is shown for daily figures on that website. And also the same data but stretching over the entire pandemic so far. These figures are for England only.

Screenshot 2021-09-21 at 18.03.jpg
 
Looks like the twitter account is using this as a source


Dammit teuchter, faster than me on the draw. Those are better than the ONS, although from those you can see that they're talking about the same data: Coronavirus (COVID-19) latest insights - Office for National Statistics

But, these data sources don't support the claim that there's been '6 Child deaths so far in September', unless you include deaths in those aged up to 20, which is pushing it somewhat.
 
Yeah she's including 15-19 in that, it was in the twitter thread I posted, the second tweet after the one pictured
 
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elbows it worries me that 'underlying conditions' is a pretty broad category, I believe asthma is included, along with a bunch of other things that are very common.

When it comes to children I recommend looking at studies specific to those age groups.

I recommend looking at the three papers linked to at the bottom of the following article. I never let the headlines and the framing about how incredibly rare these cases are put me off from exploring the detail that such studies also inevitably include. And there is almost always something of interest well beyond the central narrative that such studies generate.


I dont want to summarise all the bits I find interesting right now. It would be nice if someone else could take a look and pick a few alternative headlines that are supported by the data.
 
Regarding the media angle we've been talking about recently, I'm running out of steam for today but just a couple more things:

I've complained before that all sorts of data could be used to create all sorts of headlines and stories that we havent seen in this pandemic. On a number of occasions I have pointed out a bunch of stories I can tell if I separate various data into the different waves. Since the subject of children has come up, I shall probably repeat this exercise with a few different bits of data regarding children, sometime later this week.

The subject of the lack of recent international reporting has come up in the last few posts on the worldwide pandemic thread. That is an interesting area that I dont have time to comment on right now, but I will get round to it as soon as I can. Just mentioning it here to tip people off that were interested in the nature of media coverage, or lack of.
 
Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range. None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause.

elbows is that the reporting that got a bit of a bad rap, because it divided the number of deaths by the total number of children in the UK, rather than the number that had actually had Covid? So in effect in somewhere like NZ where your chances of catching covid are much lower then the chances of dying from it are infintesimal, and at the moment as Covid-19 rips through the younger age-groups in the UK that number will have gone up significantly.
 
Sorry, the hated twatter again but I am kind of enjoying this pile-on to the DfE:


12 of my relatives currently down with covid. Three families, all caught from the kids. Anecdotally things seem really bad at the moment whatever the test numbers say.
 
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