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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

littlebabyjesus said:
Yeah, there's all kinds of stuff to account for. Some of it no doubt won't be accounted for a long time yet. All we can know is that the reality is worse than the stated figures.

But those figures are all we have to go on atm, and I don't see a reason why the general shape of the official figures won't reflect the general shape of the infection's progress.

I agree with you about non-c19 deaths and general hardship, though. I know from the situation of someone close to me that social services have ground to a halt - people aren't getting emergency housing, for instance. Not to mention all the other operations put on hold. There is a lot of collateral damage going on.
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I'm not just talking about non-c19 deaths, I'm talking about the potential there is for the rest to have been higher while we've tested less, along with the drop in figures for people presenting at hospital.
I do know that while we use (for eg) Spain and Italy as a measure, there is a comparison to be made - that they also had significant numbers of people dying in care homes, for eg - but it's difficult for us to measure those extra deaths, or growth in cases outside, when we continue to have such little information given on those, or on much relevant data in general.

Separately, I know of someone who works in homelessness - they were tasked in finding homes for all of their registered homeless population, in one London borough, in one day - and guess what, they managed to do it.
Before lockdown, obvs - and with an insane amount of work - but fuck, I'm so angry at how well the gov can provide now. Those homes already existed, they were already available and those people were already sleeping on fucking pavements, for years before this.
Just how well they're able to scrabble together their shitty solutions and chuck money at it, during a crisis that they have only escalated, while they happily sit on them otherwise.
 
Sue said:
sheothebudworths, I was thinking that exact same thing earlier. Where I live (Hackney), the number of people sleeping on the streets has increased massively in the last few years. That it takes a pandemic to find those people places to stay is absolutely disgusting. And what happens when this is over? Will they end up back on the streets?
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It's all of that, isn't it?
What happens to the NHS, to their staff, to careworkers, what happens to the homeless, what happens to people who were already living on such disgustingly low incomes, people reliant on food banks, at the mercy of DWP staff being forced to implement financial punsishments leaving people with nothing to live on, people who are unwell and/or not fit to work jumping through endless hoops set up to see them fail, the general, unwritten rule around sickness at work being frowned upon and dealt with by increasing stages of disciplinaries attached to them, to self-employed people, or zero-hour workers and many others with no entitlement to sick pay or holidays - this magic, now, that looks to incorporate all of that (I know it doesn't) while we ARE all staying in - while we don't need telling to do that, funnily enough - what happens later, too?
 
Also, we (UK) seem to have been failing to give either recovery figures, at all, or updated serious/critical figures (iirc, they were stuck at 150, odd, for a while and have now been stuck on 1,559 for ages - no record of jumps in between).
Anyone know why? I might be looking at the wrong place to collate figures, tbf (worldometer).
 
sheothebudworths said:
Also, we (UK) seem to have been failing to give either recovery figures, at all, or updated serious/critical figures (iirc, they were stuck at 150, odd, for a while and have now been stuck on 1,559 for ages - no record of jumps in between).
Anyone know why? I might be looking at the wrong place to collate figures, tbf (worldometer).
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That would interest me too, Germany saying 88,000 recovered, our last figure was 436?
 
2hats said:
Methinks you need to look up the definitions of cite and credit.

The chart you proffer up is a BBC graphic of an "example" case. It's not from a Lancet paper which isn't even cited properly in the BBC piece you link to.

The most relevant study in The Lancet (DOI: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30243-7) indicates a "mean duration from onset of symptoms to death to be 17·8 days (95% credible interval [CrI] 16·9–19·2)". Add on to that varying times for reporting, and then incubation being anything from 1-5, or even up to 14 days, and you have too broad a peak to draw conclusions.
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What you detail merely supports the basic analysis. The mean time from infection to death reporting would have to be around 28 days and you are showing that the width of the distribution of this duration is only a few days. That means that the effects of policy changes will appear over just a few days around 28 days after the policy change. And that is what we see in the data. And it means that the early focussed policies were sufficient to cause the fatal infections to start to decline. So you too are arguing in support of my analysis that the broad lockdown was unnecessary.
 
Maltin said:
Interesting with the 17.8 days mean duration per their study. The peak daily reported deaths so far in Italy, UK and Spain came 16, 17 and 18 days respectively after their lockdowns, so fairly close to their figures. As you say, reporting times have an impact on when the peaks actually were and obviously the peak may be in the future too when things start to open up again.
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The reason peak deaths came about the same time after broad lockdown as in the UK in other countries is that they too had focussed measures a week or two before their broad lockdowns. For example Italy had local lockdowns in the districts of high infection. Clearly, those focussed measures were probably responsible for the early peaking of deaths per day in those countries too. The lesson is that properly focussed measures are much more cost-effective than broad lockdowns and can do the whole job in themselves.
 
sheothebudworths said:
Also, we (UK) seem to have been failing to give either recovery figures, at all, or updated serious/critical figures (iirc, they were stuck at 150, odd, for a while and have now been stuck on 1,559 for ages - no record of jumps in between).
Anyone know why? I might be looking at the wrong place to collate figures, tbf (worldometer).
Click to expand...
Probably lack of community testing and testing hospital patients on discharge. They weren't even routinely testing patients discharged to care homes until the scandal broke (another criminally negligent policy to add to the sordid list).

Even if they started testing all hospital patients on discharge, given the prognosis if you end up in hospital, it could cause mass panic if people thought that was the universal recovery rate. Can't really be done until mass testing testing starts and there's enough capacity to test twice.

Important thing to emphasize is that while vast majority of people will recover, the consequences are so severe for the minority who deteriorate that the virus' spread must be suppressed.
 
Taphoi said:
What you detail merely supports the basic analysis. The mean time from infection to death reporting would have to be around 28 days and you are showing that the width of the distribution of this duration is only a few days. That means that the effects of policy changes will appear over just a few days around 28 days after the policy change. And that is what we see in the data. And it means that the early focussed policies were sufficient to cause the fatal infections to start to decline. So you too are arguing in support of my analysis that the broad lockdown was unnecessary.
Click to expand...
deckchair.jpeg
 
Taphoi said:
What you detail merely supports the basic analysis. The mean time from infection to death reporting would have to be around 28 days and you are showing that the width of the distribution of this duration is only a few days. That means that the effects of policy changes will appear over just a few days around 28 days after the policy change. And that is what we see in the data. And it means that the early focussed policies were sufficient to cause the fatal infections to start to decline. So you too are arguing in support of my analysis that the broad lockdown was unnecessary.
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Your argument undermines your conclusion. 28 days after 'full' lockdown in the UK is tomorrow and the latest modelling indicates we are most likely just arriving at the peak.

The research referred to informs us that 'mean' time from infection to death is just under 18 days. Further research, which underpins WHO advice, identifies a typical 'mean' incubation time of 5 days (that used for the 'no symptoms' stage of the BBC graphic). So that's typically just under 23 days from infection to death.

A very small number of cases have been reported to have incubation periods as long as 24 days. A very small number of cases have seen incubation periods of under 2 days.

The data itself is incomplete and disparate across different administrative regions; as was each 'lockdown'.

Furthermore it tells us absolutely nothing about asymptomatic spread, which is likely some 30-50% of all infections.

It's folly to build conclusions about a randomly (if at all) enforced and varyingly respected, hand-waving lockdown on such wide ranges of numbers with large unknowns.
So you too are arguing in support of my analysis that the broad lockdown was unnecessary.
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One thing is for sure though, I'm not supporting your analysis. A full, proper lockdown is absolutely necessary.

Your propensity to misrepresent others has been noted.
 
I feel that all the published numbers are giving us false assurances of control and predictability. There are still huge unknowns about herd immunity, mortality rates and vaccines. Seems to me that total UK deaths could be anything from 60,000 to 600,000. Have I got that wrong?
 
David Clapson said:
I feel that all the published numbers are giving us false assurances of control and predictability. There are still huge unknowns about herd immunity, mortality rates and vaccines. Seems to me that total UK deaths could be anything from 60,000 to 600,000. Have I got that wrong?
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Modelled fatalities in the first wave are currently put at around 49K (four separate models suggest this).

Right now (likely near peak) reported hospital plus some care home plus some community deaths are just over 16K. Likely with all cohorts this number is presently something in the 20-25K range. Expect (very rough rule of thumb) as many deaths rolling down off the peak of a given wave as climbing it.
 
David Clapson said:
You've just proved my point.
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Not really. Sadly I think 2hats is probably right that the toll all told from this first wave is likely to be close to the 50k mark once all the counting is in.

So that represents a first wave.

Hard to predict anything with much certainty beyond that, but I would predict one thing, which is that if there are further waves they will have much lower peaks. If the government is not entirely useless (big IF, I know), then there is no reason why the UK's future waves shouldn't be the size of Germany's first wave or smaller. It would be gross negligence to allow anything worse than that.

And I would suggest that the above is the worst-case scenario: a series of further outbreaks, each with much lower peaks than this first one. Other possibilities remain, including that a large percentage of us have either already had it or been exposed to it and have resistance to catching it, meaning that there won't be significant further waves.
 
sheothebudworths said:
But we do also have to account for the fact that there is also, apparently, a drop downwards in people accessing emergency health care in general (where cases may or may not be covid-19 related) out of fear, I think?
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Some people have died through fear of going to hospital. I saw a leaflet (that I can't find now) encouraging parents not to ignore symptoms of other illnesses, and it included a boy who'd died of liver failure because he was waiting for a transplant and his parents didn't take him to hospital when his condition got worse, and a kid who died of meningitis because his parents didn't take him to hospital, plus some other cases I can't remember now. :(
 
I suppose the absence of confirmed recovered case figures would show the dreadful lack of tests as each statistic would require a test to confirm infection and two more to confirm the virus gone and patient recovered.
 
I was making a baked pancake and needed a lemon so added it to the shopping list. I needed a firm one as they're sweet and soft ones are bitter. No gloves on so I had to keep taking the useless ones until I got one I wanted. sCouldn't put 'em back, could I? Sigh.

IMG_20200419_172847.jpg
 
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