Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
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teuchter
je suis teuchter
With the very high infection rates I think there's a legitimate reason for people to object to the "within 28 days of a positive test" numbers now - and the apparent rise in them - and it would be better to look at the death certificate ones. Of course they have the disadvantage of having a much greater lag on them.
Storm Fox
Trying the find the next noun to verb
I'm health anxious, I've hardly been out since the start. I was 'stab me with that vaccine, stab me now'. That's no comment on your friend, just how different people see the world.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Of course you will say that because its consistent with your attitude towards the deaths all the way through really.
I dont say that with the intention of demolishing your entire point, there has always been a rationale to it, but there arent actually very many good ways to thoroughly decode that picture. And so we end up arguing about the degree to which incidental deaths contributes to the overall death picture, in the same sort of ways people can argue about 'for' and 'with' hospital data. Yes the proportions may have changed these days, but probably not to extent that some will try to convince us of.
For example death certificates likely wont unscramble the picture in the way you might hope, because those can and often do mention covid without saying its the only factor in each of those deaths.
And its not possible to use 'patients in mechanical ventilator beds' to completely untangle the matter either, because those most likely to die are the oldest who are often not deemed suitable for ventilation in the first place.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Plus having thought about it a little more, if the deaths do not rise by a really notable amount then that actually undermines the point you are trying to make, given the very large number of detected positives in recent times compared to the Delta wave. Because if a large proportion of the deaths are incidental to having covid, we'd expect a more notable increase in deaths than has actually been the case so far, especially when general winter deaths are factored in. But obviously I wil revisit this point once the death picture in January is clearer.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
As a matter of interest... what is my "attitude towards the deaths"?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Ultimately, excess deaths is our best guide to how bad a situation has been. Has the advantage of being able to compare it to other places and bypassing reporting issues.
Right now, I would say the picture is unclear to say the least. Numbers have clearly risen, but up to at least mid-December, delta was raging very significantly alongside omicron, so there will still be a fair few delta deaths. In two or three weeks, nearly all the deaths will be omicron only.
You may be surprised to hear that I agree with you, elbows, about the 'for or with' argument. I think its importance can be overstated and we can take general trends as accurately reflecting the changing situation as various factors cancel each other out. In this case, that trend is a certain rise in covid deaths over the last couple of weeks. We'll see how much higher it goes. It's probably already peaking in southern England.
Right now, I would say the picture is unclear to say the least. Numbers have clearly risen, but up to at least mid-December, delta was raging very significantly alongside omicron, so there will still be a fair few delta deaths. In two or three weeks, nearly all the deaths will be omicron only.
You may be surprised to hear that I agree with you, elbows, about the 'for or with' argument. I think its importance can be overstated and we can take general trends as accurately reflecting the changing situation as various factors cancel each other out. In this case, that trend is a certain rise in covid deaths over the last couple of weeks. We'll see how much higher it goes. It's probably already peaking in southern England.
elbows
Well-Known Member
I'm simply refering to the fact you have brought up this sort of point in past waves havent you?
Lets get into the detail more, because I'd love to know what proportion are actually incidental deaths too, but I get the idea we do not share the same assumptions about that.
So you tell me, what sort of proportion do you have in mind? Because as I mentioned in my previous post, there are going to be some ways we can at least begin to test such assumptions. And there is no point making the point if you arent prepared to give some vague indication of how big an issue you think this is in terms of skewing our perception about pandemic deaths.
Lets get into some detail so we can do some very basic analysis on the data now, and again in some weeks time. Probably we could start by only looking at a certain age group upwards. Then I can see how many positive cases were detected in that age group at the peak this time, compared to the peak in the Delta wave. And then we can see to what extent the deaths within 28 days of a positive test for that age group increases compared to how much the cases have increased. This will offer some clues about what proportion might really be incidental, though it wont be anything like perfect, it will just give us some basis with which to think about plausible proportions.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I agree with that in principle, but the number of (tested and reported) infections has gone up so massively in the past few weeks that it seems quite plausible that the numbers of people who die of other things but have covid "incidentally" is going to go up by more than a trivial amount.
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Swale Sheppey East 5168 cases per 100k
Thereafter it's all up north ...
Thereafter it's all up north ...
bimble
floofy
This is just a fact isn't it, if even saying that is to fall on the wrong side of some partisan divide things are even worse than i imagined.
If what this WHO person is saying is even remotely true then its going to be a fairly important thing to learn about and not ignore i think, whether the deceased's covid infections were causal or not. Omicron could infect 50% of Europeans in next two months, says WHO
brogdale
Coming to terms with late onset Anarchism
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Well in very crude terms,
I can look at the gov.uk dashboard for England and see that in early/mid december, the case rate for over 60s was around 130. And by 3rd Jan it was over 1100. That's not quite enough for me to say it increased by an order of magnitude but it's not far off.
it's around half the rate given for under-60s. And we have the recent ONS survey estimating that 1 in 10 people in London or 1 in 15 in England had covid a week or two ago.
So I extropolate that to say that maybe one in 20 or one in 30 over-60s had it.
Of course you may well be able to show me that the proportion of people who are likely to have had it incidentally when they died is actually way less than that, in which case I'll take your point, and it'll be useful in an argument I'm having on another forum where I'm arguing the other direction.
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
I'm health anxious, I've hardly been out since the start. I was 'stab me with that vaccine, stab me now'. That's no comment on your friend, just how different people see the world.
Yeah, totally, complex reasons why people haven't had it, a mix of things from across the spectrum, not the simple 'if you haven't had it you don't want it' stuff spouted by the previous poster.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Cheers, I'm actually not surprised we agree on some of this stuff, one of the reasons my arguments with you went so wrong on occasions is that I was well aware of all the areas where we are on roughly the same page, but that then made some of the divergences in our opinion of other details harder to get my head around and come to terms with!
In terms of deaths from all causes and excess deaths, they were more useful on some occasions than others. They were especially useful during the initial horrible part of the first wave, because it wasnt in winter, and because limited testing meant that there was a rather notable undercount in official covid deaths for a while, part of that wave is missing from the official covid death data but shows up strongly in the deaths from all causes. There are still some complications, for example the lockdowns and behavioural changes were expected to have an effect on other sorts of deaths (eg the start of recessions and reduced economic activity is traditionally associated with a reduction in deaths!). And during winter waves there was also an absence of the usual number of flu deaths to consider. And obviously problems with healthcare and people not going to hospital when they really needed to, again especially in the first wave, would be expected to have an impact on overall mortality, as will healthcare backlogs going forwards.
I was actually messing around with a graph of weekly deaths from all causes in England and Wales, via data in the latest ONS release. Here is the graph I ended up with. Complications with this graph often relate to bank holidays, Christmas and New Year causing delays to death registrations. And some weeks are deemed to have 53 weeks instead of 52. Note for example that the transition between the end of 20202 and the start of 2021 involves a massive leap after an artificial decline.
When comparing the latter half of 2020 to the latter half of 2021, we have to consider not just different variants, but also different strength of restrictions, and a greater return to 'normal economic activity' in this part of 2021, impacting on both covid and non-covid deaths in various ways over time. So I cannot unpick all this stuff neatly. For example with only this graph as a guide, it isnt easy to tell the difference between the vaccine era and the non vaccine era, when it comes to the second half of the years!
Data is from Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yes but incidental covid in hospital admissions is still well under 50 %. I think the current upward trend is real enough even if it turns out to be slightly less steep than it may appear.
London is the lead example. Covid deaths have more than doubled since omicron (from a relatively low figure). It is unlikely that's just an artefact given that incidental covid in London is running at around 30-odd percent tops ( and it was up at about 20 percent pre omicron).
elbows
Well-Known Member
The ONS do helpfully provide estimates per age group, although it isnt brilliantly presented for our purposes. I'll have a look at the underlying data they provide and see if I can present it in a more useful way for our purposes.
Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey, UK - Office for National Statistics
Estimates for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. This survey is being delivered in partnership with University of Oxford, University of Manchester, UK Health Security Agency and Wellcome Trust.
www.ons.gov.uk
I'm still not getting a full sense of what proportion you think may be incidental. But I understand that it is not necessarily easy to come up with a guesstimate even if you believe it does skew the data quite a bit, its not like I am willing to provide my own estimate either! Its not hard to claim we might expect it to make up a bigger proportion than it did in the pre-vaccine era, but I still tend to assume that it isnt such a big deal that it would totally ruin our impression of the ongoing burden of this virus.
But for example I doubt that you are expecting the deaths to shoot up to levels anything like 10 times higher than they were?
I'll let you know next time I have attempted to crudely scrunch some data for these purposes.
bimble
floofy
these 'incidental covid' numbers, are they about people in hospitals only? People who died in hospitals? Or also at home / in care homes / hospices / in car accidents etc?
elbows
Well-Known Member
Plus via things like hospital infections, we might still expect that in some proportion of the incidental hospital cases, death due to covid will still be a real outcome. But it should be less than in the pre-vaccine era.
I will start to look at deaths in London and the whole country by age group, though I probably wont present the results until we are further beyond the period where Christmas and the New Year have interferred with reporting. And I say that even now because I will be sure to include ONS death certificate deaths as well as the 28 day ones that arent so delayed.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Number of people in hospital beds who tested positive for covid.
They come out weekly for England. They are far from precise. Here is what they looked like last time the data came out, for England as a whole (next ones due out on Thursday).
Data is from Statistics » COVID-19 Hospital Activity as are the following comments from the NHS on this data. And their choice of words is in part sponsored by the right-wing press who were shitty about this stuff and tried to use it to serve a particular agenda. Hospital acquired covid is part of this picture too, though the NHS arent drawing attention to that, and the press dont tend to either.
teuchter — I think the best way of thinking about it is that ordinary deaths in winter run at about 0.08% per month (i.e., I’m going to use that to extrapolate the likely “excess” deaths). Crudely, if we apply that to the number of people getting COVID, that tells us how many of those people we might expect to have ordinarily died anyway in a normal year. If it’s 100,000 per day getting COVID, for example, then that’s an exposure rate of about 3 million people per month, and about 2,400 of those people would ordinarily have likely died even without COVID. However, the current weekly average of deaths with COVID is actually 1660, which is about 3 times this normal rate, giving us about 5,000 excess deaths per month, or 160 per day.
So even by trying to statistically strip out the deaths that are somehow incidental to having COVID, we’re still left with a massive excess death rate right now. An excess that is surely unpalatable, which means it doesn’t massively matter what the “true” number is, it’s just something that needs handling.
So even by trying to statistically strip out the deaths that are somehow incidental to having COVID, we’re still left with a massive excess death rate right now. An excess that is surely unpalatable, which means it doesn’t massively matter what the “true” number is, it’s just something that needs handling.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
This current excess deaths situation has not gone un noticed by the "back to business" / anti lockdown crowd and they are arguing it's the product of people dying of stuff that's fallout from the NHS "ignoring everything that wasn't covid".
Indeed, and that’s all taken care of by using an “excess deaths” approach, since whether COVID is implicated directly or indirectly isn’t really the issue
Surely this is just showing that the NHS needs to be much better funded? What are such types suggesting? That people dying of COVID should be ignored by the NHS?
Dystopiary
putting up a hook to hang my hopes upon
wtfftw
melting like a toastie
Anyone seen any reports of positive LFD and then negative PCR?
We got lines on Friday but just had negative PCR results. This is a surprise as we've had sneezes, bit of runny nose, diarrhoea, nausea, banging headache, scratchy throat. He's been sleeping. I've got my usual fatigue but also an heavy painful trunk. Slightly raised temp and sweats for me. ETA to add itchy eyes which we both remarked on but I've now also seen listed as a symptom
Although upon googling I've just seen that we no longer do a PCR after a LFD.
We got lines on Friday but just had negative PCR results. This is a surprise as we've had sneezes, bit of runny nose, diarrhoea, nausea, banging headache, scratchy throat. He's been sleeping. I've got my usual fatigue but also an heavy painful trunk. Slightly raised temp and sweats for me. ETA to add itchy eyes which we both remarked on but I've now also seen listed as a symptom
Although upon googling I've just seen that we no longer do a PCR after a LFD.
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