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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Im saving an old box of lateral flow tests as my back up emergency box. they are the crappier old kind with the longer throat swab and 'soy sauce squeezie' add your own liquid. What fun :D

Seems like lots of delays to the daily update at the mo. More numbers means more data means more time to process?
 
That's quite scary

Edit...am I reading that correctly?, does it really say that not far off 1 in every 1000 85+ in England are going into hospital with covid every day?
I dont like trying to do these calculations myself, but on this occasion I had a look at the underlying data and unless I also managed to make a mistake (quite possible!) the BBC might have fucked it up.

I'm thinking the numbers they have plotted are a better match to 7 day running totals, not 7 day averages. So they should either have changed the wording or divided their numbers by 7.

But maybe I am wrong.

One sanity check we can do is to look at the grand totals and rates per 100,000 for the entire pandemic so far. According to the UK dashboard data before todays delayed update has arrived, for England so far there have been just shy of 100,000 hospital admissions in the 85+ age group (99,788 to be precise). They also show this as a rate per 100,000, in this case the figure as of yesterdays data was 7095.2 per 100,000, so just over 7% of all 85+ year olds have been recorded in the covid hospital admissions/diagnoses figures so far in this pandemic. And at the start of this data being available in the first pandemic wave, it took a little over 1 month, till 25th April 2020, for the grand total of admissions in that age group to reach 1% of that ages population. It is reasonable to conclude that even during a period that includes a sharp massive peak, the total for this badly affected age group was not increasing at anything as high as 0.1% per day. So per week is far more plausible for this particular moment in this wave than per day.

And in terms of raw numbers, yesterdays published figure for that age group was 269 people. The total for that day and the 6 previous days combined was 1,327. I dont have the exact figures they use for number of people in the English population who are that age, but it seems to be in the 1.3-1.4 million sort of range, and I could in fact figure it out properly and quite trivially by using some of the earlier numbers I mentioned for totals so far in the entire pandemic. I dont really like posting the results of my maths, but in this case I think yeah, just over 1.4 million.
 
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Not having much luck getting a PCR online at the moment, either delivered or at a testing centre, and the site said not to call the helplines. I'll keep trying.

It's all a bit odd. I went for a PCR test in my local walk-in centre in north london this afternoon and it was like the Mary Celeste there.. I was literally the only person having one.. about 10 staff looking bored shitless.
 
I dont like trying to do these calculations myself, but on this occasion I had a look at the underlying data and unless I also managed to make a mistake (quite possible!) the BBC might have fucked it up.

I'm thinking the numbers they have plotted are a better match to 7 day running totals, not 7 day averages. So they should either have changed the wording or divided their numbers by 7.

But maybe I am wrong.

One sanity check we can do is to look at the grand totals and rates per 100,000 for the entire pandemic so far. According to the UK dashboard data before todays delayed update has arrived, for England so far there have been just shy of 100,000 hospital admissions in the 85+ age group (99,788 to be precise). They also show this as a rate per 100,000, in this case the figure as of yesterdays data was 7095.2 per 100,000, so just over 7% of all 85+ year olds have been recorded in the covid hospital admissions/diagnoses figures so far in this pandemic. And at the start of this data being available in the first pandemic wave, it took a little over 1 month, till 25th April 2020, for the grand total of admissions in that age group to reach 1% of that ages population. It is reasonable to conclude that even during a period that includes a sharp massive peak, the total for this badly affected age group was not increasing at anything as high as 0.1% per day. So per week is far more plausible for this particular moment in this wave than per day.

And in terms of raw numbers, yesterdays published figure for that age group was 269 people. The total for that day and the 6 previous days combined was 1,327. I dont have the exact figures they use for number of people in the English population who are that age, but it seems to be in the 1.3-1.4 million sort of range, and I could in fact figure it out properly and quite trivially by using some of the earlier numbers I mentioned for totals so far in the entire pandemic. I dont really like posting the results of my maths, but in this case I think yeah, just over 1.4 million.

thank you for clarifying, I was frantically working iout odds and it took a couple of hefty shots to calm me down hence the earlier post...hopefully the bbc didn’t put too many in a+e either....!
 
Not surprisingly, there's a delay to today's dashboard update ...

  • 30 December 2021
    Because of a delay in receiving deaths data for England, today's update is delayed. The current estimate for release is 7:30pm. Further updates will be provided here.

Now extended to 20:30 [8:30pm] ...
 
There have been plenty of blatantly dodgy decisions made in this pandemic, where the real priorities are showing.

This one certainly qualifies:

The English Football League has removed the need for clubs to test players for Covid-19 on matchdays in an effort to prevent late postponements.

Hull City's Championship game with Blackburn on Boxing Day was called off about two hours before kick-off when away fans were already travelling.
The EFL accept the situation was not ideal and believe that testing every day, apart from matchday, is enough.

The decision comes as eight EFL games over new year have been postponed.

 
There have been plenty of blatantly dodgy decisions made in this pandemic, where the real priorities are showing.

This one certainly qualifies:



That's stupidly reckless ...
 
Number of people in hospital has certainly jumped. Number of people on ventilators has not. Might be a positive for the idea we're not as likely to see so many serious illnesses and deaths due to omicron severity and vaccines.
 
Number of people in hospital has certainly jumped. Number of people on ventilators has not. Might be a positive for the idea we're not as likely to see so many serious illnesses and deaths due to omicron severity and vaccines.
From the link I posted above, the case numbers have been affected by the inclusion of more than 1 days data for Wales and NI (so not affected too much given the small populations in those nations). Hospital figures are inflated as NHS England is reporting all deaths in hospital from 24 Dec onwards. Suggests the death totals are up, but not massively so, I'm guessing.
 
There's nothing at all to suggest that death totals are up. It's just reporting lag. Look at the numbers by date of death.

Nothing there that implies any change from the trend of a very gradual decline that's been going on for the past month or so.


Screenshot 2021-12-30 at 23.27.55.jpg
 
There's nothing at all to suggest that death totals are up. It's just reporting lag. Look at the numbers by date of death.

Nothing there that implies any change from the trend of a very gradual decline that's been going on for the past month or so.


View attachment 303830
Yeah, I was just doing mental arithmetic in comparison to the previous days figure mentioned in the article (57 I think).
 
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