littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Anti-democracy dressed up as democracy. Very in vogue at the moment.
Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion
- Thread starter Sasaferrato
- Start date
LDC
On est tous des pangolins
The answer to that question has been given to that many, many times and the reality is getting 'back to normal' is a long time off, but exactly when depends on a load of variables, until then we need to adjust to this.
It's shit, but constantly asking the same question isn't going to get any different answers for a while. It's like kids asking "Are we there yet?" incessantly when you've only just left the house.
Last edited:
belboid
Exasperated, not angry.
It would just be brushed off with the usual guff tho. Without an option to follow up, pin down and tease out the contradictions between answers, they’re all going to be a bit rubbish really.
cupid_stunt
Chief seagull hater & farmerbarleymow's nemesis.
The problem has been the lag in collecting data, there's under 300 NHS trusts that are feeding figures into their system daily, whereas IIRC there's over 50,000 care settings, and there was no reporting system, so the ONS had to wait for deaths to be registered & collate data that way, as they are still doing with community deaths.
Someone I know that runs a care home told me last week, the Care Quality Commission had rolled out a new portal, for care homes to start reporting daily, which I guess is why the new ONS figures are for only up to 17/4/20, to include care homes AND community deaths, whereas the CQC announced care home deaths up to 24/4/20.
Catching up with some reading - an interesting blog from the LSE on the role of experts at the start of the crisis and going forward...
Science in inaction – The shifting priorities of the UK government’s response to COVID-19 highlights the need for publicly accountable expert advice.
Science in inaction – The shifting priorities of the UK government’s response to COVID-19 highlights the need for publicly accountable expert advice.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
The lag is an issue for if you're trying to look at the trends over time. It's an issue if you want to report x number died per day. It's not an issue for reporting a total. I just find it strange the total known deaths aren't being reported very much. In fact, I don't know the total reported deaths up to now, even though that is clearly a figure both government and journalists have access to. I understand why the government wouldn't jump to report it, less clear on why journalists aren't.
Edit to add: of course there are always problems in definitions. But the point of this whole line of thought is that it is looking like hospital deaths is a poor proxy for full figures. Hospital deaths plus care home deaths would get closer, and if we have any decent figures on people who have died at home it should be hospital deaths + care home deaths + home deaths.
Final piece: an update on the Jenner Institute vaccine
In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead
In Race for a Coronavirus Vaccine, an Oxford Group Leaps Ahead
maomao
普費斯
The press are against the lockdown generally as it presents a pretty immediate threat to their livelihoods. Keeping numbers low is in their interests too.
Brainaddict
slight system overdrive
Not sure guardian gets much of its income from shops, and their website income has probably risen during lockdown. I don't really think it's a conspiracy or anything. I think it's just sloppiness in taking the figures the government offers them rather than doing a bit of work of their own. It's a really shit thing to be sloppy about.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
Because Emperor Augustus was not happy about having a month with fewer days than his bro' Julius.
weltweit
Well-Known Member
I agree but I don't blame the questioner, the people that chose that question out of the hundreds they received are to blame.
andysays
Love and solidarity
Sure, it would be brushed off, I'm not naive enough to think it would be answered by the minister saying "of course, Andy, we will immediately and completely rethink and revise the way work and workers are valued in the way this crisis has conclusively demonstrated we should do".
But that doesn't mean it isn't worth asking, even if only so we could all see them attempt to brush it off.
I doubt anyone will be allowed to put that question or a similar one to the relevant minister, for reasons already discussed.
quimcunx
imprimeo, lamino, distribuo
See even if you accept their concerns about people not accepting lockdown or it being unpopular then the answer to that would have been to start the 'messaging' earlier. They could have been putting out regular messaging in February for instance that companies should be putting plans in place to have some or all employees working from home at some point in the coming weeks. Depending on company decision-makers' attitudes to the risk loads more people could have been working from home part or full time in the weeks before official lockdown with little or no adverse effect on the economy, but a potentially large reduction in transmission. Many employers did this in the previous week despite the messaging not being there. Again depending on individuals' risk appetite stockpiling might have started earlier and been less panicked. That last minute panic probably increased transmission. etc etc.
Last edited:
elbows
Well-Known Member
One of the problems is that data journalists who want to cover this side of things properly are rather aware of lag and issues with historical comparisons.
The ones doing this properly are keenly aware that there is no point only looking at the deaths that actually ended up with Covid-19 on the death certificate. You have to look at excess mortality as a whole, because many deaths relating to pandemics and epidemics are never recorded as such, and this has been known for hundreds of years! So a better guide is to compare total deaths against the normal range of deaths for that time of year.
In recent weeks I immersed myself in historical data so that I could put current rate of death in context. Unfortunately there are issues with the format of historical data, so I am not always comparing like for like. I will explain a little using the latest number:
22,351 deaths were registered in England & Wales in the week ending 17th April. This compares to an average for that week over the previous 5 years of 10,497.
22,351 is a huge number for deaths registered in a week. But directly comparable, robust figures in that format only go back to 1993. And I currently only have such weekly figures going back to 1999. Using these, the highest I'd previously seen was 18,581 for the last week of 1999 when a nasty H3N2 flu epidemic was raging.
I do have daily death figures going back to the start of 1970. But these are based on actual date of death, not date of registration. I wont have equivalent daily total death figures for April 2020 for another month, so quite the wait to do a direct comparison. If I turn daily numbers into weekly numbers then I can get some clues, but still potentially misleading because the 2020 weekly figures I have are for registration date, not actual date of death. Even so, I can say that we are very much into the realm of the sorts of numbers of total deaths last seen when the H3N2 influenza pandemic of the late 1960s was doing its worst in England & Wales at the end of 1969 and start of 1970.
Anyway I am aware that this sort of historical analysis is just one way of looking at things, and it would be cause for single headlines, rather than ongoing front page news. There is nothing surprising about the fact that other, more readily accessible figures are being used daily, even though they dont come close to telling the whole story.
The actual picture in other countries also takes time to emerge. I dont even have equivalent numbers for Germany for March yet, let alone April.
Anyway, even though I prefer to look at all cause mortality, I still sometimes have to make do with Covid-19 specific ONS numbers instead when studying certain aspects. Because I do actually have daily numbers by date of death (not just date of registration) for those. For example here is an informative graph from the latest ONS release.
Deaths registered weekly in England and Wales, provisional - Office for National Statistics
Provisional counts of the number of deaths registered in England and Wales, including deaths involving the coronavirus (COVID-19), by age, sex and region, in the latest weeks for which data are available.
www.ons.gov.uk
This will be missing many deaths that were likely Covid-19 related but where it isnt mentioned ont he death certificate. So I use it more for a sense of proportions and timing rather than absolute magnitude.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Looks like Scotland arent just going to sit around waiting for SAGE etc to come to some agreement about the public wearing masks:
Coronavirus: Scottish government suggests covering face in shops
Nicola Sturgeon says there may be "some benefit" in wearing a cloth face covering in enclosed areas.
www.bbc.co.uk
teuchter
je suis teuchter
Does it actually matter though?
Whether it's 20k or 30k or 40k - does this meaningfully affect anyone's decisions at present? What is important at the moment is the rate of change, and its direction.
The absolute numbers are useful in some extent to compare with what's going on in other countries, and I think you can come to some kind of useful conclusion when one country's number per capita is 10 or 100 times greater than another's - but beyond that, there are so many variables in how the numbers are reported, and in the implications of the numbers according to what ind of places the outbreaks are appearing in, that it's a fool's errand to try and extract much useful info from them.
The true numbers will undoubtably be important to establish in retrospect, and there will be a multitude of papers published which try and untangle some kind of meaning from the enormous amount of data that will come out of this crisis, and hopefully discover things that will be useful for future epidemics.
Am I right in thinking that people who are sadly dying in care homes won't actually be tested? I mean in that if they've not been tested already and they pass on no one is going to do an autopsy or anything? It'll just be the view of whomever writes up the death certificate, typically a local doctor?
elbows
Well-Known Member
Thats one of the reasons I will ultimately use all cause excess mortality rather than cases that actually had Covid-19 on the death certificate.
Its always this way, including in normal times. Many people will have experienced a relative passing away in non-pandemic times and the cause being described somewhat vaguely as pneumonia, rather than the actual influenza-like-illness having been properly identified. And especially during pandemics, there are plenty of deaths which are caused by the virus but present in slightly untypical ways without major obvious lung involvement. In this particular pandemic, it seems rather likely that some people are dying via a stroke, for example.
elbows
Well-Known Member
Scotland again. This is from the BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52450742
elbows
Well-Known Member
The following chart covering care homes is another example of why we should consider all cause mortality rather than just those identified as Covid-19 on death certificates.
From
From
Coronavirus: Care home deaths up as hospital cases fall
Outbreaks in care homes claiming 2,000 lives a week, but hospital fatalities are going down.
www.bbc.co.uk
planetgeli
There's no future in England's dreaming
I'm just not getting (understanding) some of this Welsh stuff. As I've mentioned, I live under the Hywel Dda health board. We 'appear' to have one of the lowest death rates in the UK. But as I've also mentioned, I don't trust the figures because a) they are so low and b) the same applied to Betsi Cadwaladr (north Wales) who then mentioned 84 deaths last week, up from 0 as they hadn't implemented the new computer system and nobody seemed to notice the anamoly in their zero figure.
Now for Hywel Dda we have this today.
"The Welsh health minister Vaughan Gething told a press conference there had been “challenges in communication” between Betsi Cadwaladr health board and Public Health Wales, and there had also been a “material under-reporting issue” in the Hywel Dda health board area, where 31 deaths were not reported and did not appear in Public Health Wales figures."
"Gething said “individual family communication” had not been affected, with those who had lost loved ones informed of the deaths at the time, and that figures would now be “fully up to date”.
So figures now fully up to date. So we're looking for a figure somewhere above 31 for Hywel Dda right?
Here's the latest figures.
public.tableau.com
That says Hywel Dda 5.
Figures now fully up to date eh?
Farce.
Now for Hywel Dda we have this today.
"The Welsh health minister Vaughan Gething told a press conference there had been “challenges in communication” between Betsi Cadwaladr health board and Public Health Wales, and there had also been a “material under-reporting issue” in the Hywel Dda health board area, where 31 deaths were not reported and did not appear in Public Health Wales figures."
"Gething said “individual family communication” had not been affected, with those who had lost loved ones informed of the deaths at the time, and that figures would now be “fully up to date”.
So figures now fully up to date. So we're looking for a figure somewhere above 31 for Hywel Dda right?
Here's the latest figures.
Tableau Public
That says Hywel Dda 5.
Figures now fully up to date eh?
Farce.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
In terms of showing up the powerful, yeah, I'll take what I can get in these shitty times. However I'm not really a fan of the 'ask cutting question... get 3 seconds of reply.... shout... rinse and repeat' technique. Sometimes it really works, like James O'Brien's evisceration of farage, which was a thing of beauty, but usually it ends up not much more than a score draw.
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
This really. An honest presentation of data would present the daily hospital figures for what they are, but give more prominence to the 'all in' figure at the point it is presented (each week?).
Not that surprising really...
www.theguardian.com
Concerns over delays and errors at UK drive-in coronavirus test centres
Staff at one NHS trust have been told not to use the facilities after expansion of testing
Last edited:
gentlegreen
I hummus, therefore I am ...
Indeed - unseasonal deaths has to be CV19 - or flu - and presumably there's plenty of stats on flu deaths ?
Wilf
Slouching towards Billingham
elbows
Well-Known Member
Flu deaths are generally underreported too, which is one of the reasons we have winter excess mortality statistics every year, to compensate for the underreporting phenomenon.
What we do have is various flu surveillance systems which were able to tell us that our main flu season had passed before the Covid-19 deaths started to increase. That doesnt mean there are currently no flu deaths at all every week, but it would not be expected to be a significant part of the picture at this point in the year, so we can probably afford to assume that the excess deaths so far are largely from Covid-19. As time goes on, indirect deaths as a result of the lockdown and fear of attending healthcare facilities are likely to become more of the picture, but we will have to dig down into the various causes of death to get a handle on that. Whitty often goes on about the indirect deaths, its not something that will be overlooked when judging the pandemics toll as a whole.
Similar threads
