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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

S☼I said:
So the gov casually dropped this

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No idea who was involved/consulted, how the teachers were selected, if they get paid, if unions were informed, anything.

Tells me schools aren't reopening any time soon
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I know the number of BME teachers is disproportionately low in the UK - lots of problems with racism - but that is really, really starkly white. This would be a great opportunity for some diversity of all kinds.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
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.
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This isn't a taken. Factors (behavioural, societal, mutagenic) can conspire to make subsequent waves worse (as per the Spanish Flu). Pay attention to Japan (though it's not entirely clear yet if this is a second wave of some flavour or an artefact of 'politically modified data flow').
 
Last week when that weeks provisional ONS numbers came out, one of the stories they told about the data was:

“The deaths that were registered in England and Wales during the week ending 3 April is the highest weekly total since we started compiling weekly deaths data in 2005,” said Nick Stripe, head of health analysis and life events at the ONS.
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Which was reported on by the press eg Coronavirus pushes England and Wales death rate to record high

At the time I thought 'your weekly deaths data only goes back to 2005?' and I decided to try to get a broader sense of the historical context. I've ended up with yearly figures going back to 1838, quarterly going back to 1966. And I filled in some weekly gaps for a couple of earlier periods, although with variable quality. Some of it is derived from graphs of some key flu epidemic years so it isnt precise but it at least shows me the shape and I can do some estimates.

Anyway, when I was looking at various datasources it turned out that the ONS themselves had weekly data going back to week 31 of 1999 in one of their spreadsheets. And since the winter of 98/99 and 99/00 had bad flu seasons with a high toll on the elderly, I found the 'since records began' thing to be rather odd. Well it turns out they corrected theit original narrative, it doesnt go on about 2005 any more:

“The 16,387 deaths that were registered in England and Wales during the week ending 3 April is the highest weekly total since Week 2 (early January) 2000.”
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(from updated Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics )

As far as I can tell, the England and Wales registered weekly deaths in that millenium period were 18,581 in week 52 of 1999 and 17,970 in week 1 of 2000.

I dont have good ONS data for the flu a year earlier, but there were old press articles that gave a provisional weekly figure of 20,508 for week 1 1999. I found an old paper of influenza epidemics that gave a weekly figure of all deaths of 19,553 for the peak week of a 1997/98 epidemic and 19,180 for the peak week of 1989/90.

I dont have a number for the epidemic of early 1976, the pandemics of 1968 (1969 in the UK I think) or 1957/58, or the epidemic of 1950/51, or other notable epidemic years. I do have ONS estimated winter excess mortality figures for winter 1950/51 (terribly high numbers!) through to 2018. In terms of total yearly deaths for England/Wales, as far as I can tell, no matter the change in population size over time, the number only went above 600,000 in 1918, although there were some years in the 1970's which got quite close to breaching 600,000. It fell a little below 500,000, for the first time since the early 1950's, from 2009-2012 after several decades of decline, but has been heading back towards 550,000's since.

Anyway this is just some general context because I am preparing myself for tomorrows ONS release, as I expect some of the numbers in it to be quite horrible. I dont know if ONS have weekly data available to them for earlier record weeks, so I dont know what they will compare the numbers in the next report to. But I will want to put it in context myself, as best I can.
 
I see others have mentioned this on this thread, but what we're doing in the UK isn't really 'lockdown', is it....?

What prompted me to start thinking this is hearing an interview on BBC Radio London yesterday with a woman living in Emilia Romagna, Italy. Her description of life under a real lockdown was grim - no being allowed out at all except for essential shopping and a few other things. Police with loudspeakers and drones everywhere enforcing it. In Spain, there are moves to relax the lockdown for children, who haven't been allowed out since 14 March. I did know about this, it was just that hearing/reading those two things, coupled with a walk outside immediately afterwards, really brought it home to me.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any means, but (in common with most on here, I would suspect) I don't trust this government. Is the use of the term 'lockdown' in the UK a form of propaganda to make us believe we're doing more than we should be doing? While I feel very much for those unable to see relatives, people trying to homeschool their kids etc., and obviously many things are shut or cancelled, a lot of life is going on as normal.
 
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Lockdown wasnt really the governments preferred term, it was the media etc that called our version that, despite it lacking some features of an actual lockdown.

I take each week at a time, but so far since they are not rushing to end the measures they imposed, I dont see the need for propaganda on this front in the direction you suggest. Times will change at some stage though.
 
By the way I was taking a break when everyone was talking about that Sunday Times article. It was useful for piecing some details & timing together so that I could better judge where the orthodox establishment/scientific/medical side of things getting in the way ended, and the shit politics of Johnson etc began. The article has some things missing that I would have included. Such as when they say alarm bells were ringing on Feb 28th, thats actually also the date that the first confirmed death that was actually noticed took place (since they just started testing pneumonia cases without the travel history at the time).
 
oryx said:
Thanks - that's interesting to know.
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I might be out of date though. I know 'social distancing measures' was mostly the preferred term to start with, but they might have started saying lockdown more recently, I've lost track a bit.
 
There was discussion earlier about ethnic minorities being disproportionately affected by covid 19. I thought this might be of interest in that. Allowing for the fact that in 10% of cases, ethnicity is not stated, in the other 90%, the non-white proportion of deaths reported in England is almost identical to the figure in the 2011 census: 19%. Given that the biggest outbreaks have generally been in parts of the country with much higher BAME populations - West Mids, London - this raw data doesn't support the idea that it's hitting BAME people harder. In fact, it supports the assertion that race/ethnicity is not really a factor.


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ETA: I suspect this idea came about because of the high-profile cases of younger doctors, nurses and transport workers dying. Within that relatively small sub-group, BAME people are bound to be highly represented even if race isn't itself a risk factor cos of how many BAME people work in the NHS/transport.
 
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Raheem said:
Possibly the main reason for the gov not using the term "lockdown" is that BJ had been on TV the week before saying that having a lockdown was a silly idea and it wouldn't be happening.
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I've got in my notes that when Italy did a nationwide lockdown, Johnson said other countries were 'overreacting'. But I dont seem to have a source, if anyone finds reference to that please let me know, cheers. It would have been within a day or so of March 11th, possibly even on that day.
 
elbows said:
I might be out of date though. I know 'social distancing measures' was mostly the preferred term to start with, but they might have started saying lockdown more recently, I've lost track a bit.
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For me, the distinction is exemplified by the difference between the UK and Sweden currently.

So in Sweden, they've closed some but not all schools, and banned big gatherings and visits to care homes. But bars, restaurants and shops are open, subject to new rules spacing out tables, etc, non-essential workers are recommended but not obliged to work from home.

Here, all bar food shops, pretty much, are closed, all schools shut, all bars, restaurants closed, all gatherings of anyone not of the same household are banned, people are moved on in parks, all non-essential workers not supposed to travel, in London at least, buses and tubes empty, drivers stopped and asked where they're going, people encouraged to tell on neighbours having visitors, a whole nation communicating via Zoom.

While we might not literally be sealed in like they were in Wuhan, I'd call what we have 'lockdown' and what Sweden has 'social distancing measures'.
 
elbows said:
I see you got that from the daily NHS numbers.

Statistics » COVID-19 Daily Deaths

Health and high quality care for all, <br />now and for future generations
www.england.nhs.uk www.england.nhs.uk

I also see they have just today started adding a chart that shows hospital deaths by date of death, and colour to indicate which of those deaths were announced today. So thats one less graph for me to feel the need to do myself very often!

View attachment 207914
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Yeah, much better. Their spreadsheets are horrible to look at!
 
littlebabyjesus said:
There was discussion earlier about ethnic minorities being disproportionately affected by covid 19. I thought this might be of interest in that. Allowing for the fact that in 10% of cases, ethnicity is not stated, in the other 90%, the non-white proportion of deaths reported in England is almost identical to the figure in the 2011 census: 19%. Given that the biggest outbreaks have generally been in parts of the country with much higher BAME populations - West Mids, London - this raw data doesn't support the idea that it's hitting BAME people harder. In fact, it supports the assertion that race/ethnicity is not really a factor.
(...)
ETA: I suspect this idea came about because of the high-profile cases of younger doctors, nurses and transport workers dying. Within that relatively small sub-group, BAME people are bound to be highly represented even if race isn't itself a risk factor cos of how many BAME people work in the NHS/transport.
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Race and pandemic you say ? Why it must be time for an article by Trevor Phillips. Today's Times.

We need to solve ethnic puzzle of Covid-19
Could religion explain why some ethnic minorities seem to be more susceptible than others?

Trevor Phillips
Monday April 20 2020, 12.01am, The Times

You do not need to hail from the Indian subcontinent to feel pride and sorrow at the selflessness shown by Asian heritage doctors and nurses who have died from Covid-19. Nor do you need to be a product of plantation slavery for the report that black Americans are dying in huge numbers to send a shiver down your spine. But both pieces of news have prompted an urgent question, now being raised every day at Downing Street briefings: are people of colour more at risk than others? And if so, why?

Research linking race with disease is explosive. Many believe it should be off limits as a matter of principle. I don’t agree. The families of minority health workers are daily watching the mounting toll of dark faces in horror. Try persuading them that race is merely “a social construct” And knowledge about our differences can be revelatory. In the late 1990s a Pakistani-heritage medical researcher, Sadaf Farooqi, pointed out that Asian families, despite suffering higher infant mortality than average, were significantly less prone to sudden infant death syndrome, a fatal respiratory condition. Her brilliant insight into the way that Asian infants were positioned in their cots contributed to research that reduced the annual death of some 1,500 babies by more than half. In the case of coronavirus, we need to know everything we can. Unwarranted sensitivities could mean some other family grieving for a loved one; political squeamishness could block the path to a treatment.

So far our experts have had little to say about whether the virus has been doling out its grisly rations evenly. Their reluctance to guess is understandable. The combination of medicine, race and politics does not have a happy history. In 1932, American researchers, some of them black, concerned about the effects of syphilis on minorities, undertook a publicly funded programme of research in which they deliberately withheld treatment from 399 African-American men. The ghastly experiment was only terminated after 40 years, by which time 28 of the men had died of the disease, a further 100 perished from related causes, 40 wives had been infected and 19 children born with syphilis. More recently, the suave, British-educated president of South Africa Thabo Mbeki, citing his country’s history of blaming black people for previous epidemics, scoffed at evidence that Aids was a viral infection. His health minister prescribed quack remedies — garlic, beetroot, lemon juice. It is estimated that as a result, over 350,000 people died unnecessarily.

A month ago, rumours began to circulate on social media that black people were unusually resistant to Covid-19. Asked about this, I joked that history suggests we wouldn’t be that lucky. But the grim consequence of this misinformation may have been that African-Americans were slower than others to respond to the threat. In Chicago, a city one-third black, over two thirds of virus deaths have occurred in the black community. Non-urban areas have shown a similar pattern.

Concern about this known unknown was etched on the face of the chief medical officer as he addressed the issue at the weekend; factors like genetics, culture, language and religion could be quietly undermining scientists’ attempt to predict the spread of infection. Public Health England has rightly begun an inquiry. But however hard they try, scientists can’t keep pace with the rumour mill and must ensure the emerging conspiracy theories and knee-jerk victimhood do not go unchallenged.

I have worked with my friend and colleague, Professor Richard Webber, perhaps Britain’s most distinguished geodemographer, to see what public sources can tell us. You can see the detail in our preliminary paper at webberphillips.com. But our headline finding is that, on a per capita basis, coronavirus has struck London boroughs such as Brent, Southwark, Lambeth and Harrow far harder than it should have done; broadly speaking, the higher the proportion of non-whites in an area, the higher the rate of infection.

The pattern isn’t easy to explain. Assumptions about racial biology are unlikely to hold good across a range of non-white groups who are in most ways more unlike each other than they are different from whites. As for poverty, the list of the seventeen most afflicted local authorities includes low-income Brent, but also features multi-ethnic Wandsworth, where median weekly earnings, at £720, are 50 per cent above the national average. And of the virus hotspots, only two appear in the list of England’s ten most overcrowded boroughs. The most significant hotspots outside the capital, Liverpool and Sheffield, are 35th and 107th respectively out of 126 boroughs in order of population density.

So what might explain these data? First, age. Britain’s non-whites are, in general, younger than average. In the multigenerational households common in some minority communities young people, more likely to have had the virus without symptoms, might unknowingly have infected older relatives. Second, many minorities work in high exposure occupations — retail, public transport and the health service. And most intriguingly, might some minority communities have complied more readily with government guidance than others?

One puzzling finding in our report concerns not who is being infected, but is who is not. Were poverty the key determinant, we would expect the virus to be running rampant among Britain’s Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslim communities. Yet they are conspicuous by their absence in the list of hotspots — no Blackburn or Bradford, no Rotherham, Rochdale or Luton. The London borough of Tower Hamlets is more than a third Muslim — the highest density of any in England — and is sandwiched between two Covid-19 hotspots, Newham and Southwark, both home to substantial non-Muslim minority communities. Yet Tower Hamlets lies in the bottom third of the capital’s infection list: 22nd out of the 32 boroughs.

Maybe there is a revelation to be had here; if one key to stopping transmission of the virus is hand washing, might a faith community many of whose members ritually wash before five-times-a-day prayers have something to teach the rest of us? And does an ethnic group where almost 40 per cent are economically inactive — and therefore not regularly using public transport, for example — merely underline the protective value of social isolation? Many believe that only faith will deliver us from this particular evil but even they must know that only science will tell us how.
Maybe there is a revelation to be had here; if one key to stopping transmission of the virus is hand washing, might a faith community many of whose members ritually wash before five-times-a-day prayers have something to teach the rest of us? And does an ethnic group where almost 40 per cent are economically inactive — and therefore not regularly using public transport, for example — merely underline the protective value of social isolation? Many believe that only faith will deliver us from this particular evil but even they must know that only science will tell us how.
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The comments thread underneath it is particularly "choice" :

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elbows said:
I've got in my notes that when Italy did a nationwide lockdown, Johnson said other countries were 'overreacting'. But I dont seem to have a source, if anyone finds reference to that please let me know, cheers. It would have been within a day or so of March 11th, possibly even on that day.
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Think it may be this you are thinking of



Which isn't directly from Johnson, but it has been referred to by other journalists in a way that suggests the 'senior government source' is actually the PM.

There is also a second quote which comes directly from Johnson, where he says something like "A lockdown would be draconian and it's not the way to go". Can't find it at the moment, though, because Googling anyhing including the terms Boris, Johnson and lockdown is a nightmare.
 
So the whole article is based on the premise that "some ethnic minorities seem to be more susceptible than others"

But those NHS stats are only a google away. Did he not check first?
 
littlebabyjesus said:
So the whole article is based on the premise that "some ethnic minorities seem to be more susceptible than others"

But those NHS stats are only a google away. Did he not check first?
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I have worked with my friend and colleague, Professor Richard Webber, perhaps Britain’s most distinguished geodemographer, to see what public sources can tell us.
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I doubt Trevor did anything except apply deep thought.
 
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