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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

littlebabyjesus said:
If you're healthy, stay home, save lives. If you're ill, get in your car and drive miles from your home.

The whole thing is being organised by the Mad Hatter.
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The advice we got at work was to only get tested if you believe you may have symptoms and have to leave the house. Otherwise just stay indoors.
 
Brainaddict said:
3000 deaths in care homes in a week. It's criminal that these deaths haven't been included in the main numbers. Does anyone know if other countries are doing it differently? All those graphs showing our trajectory versus other countries, are they using hospital-only deaths for all countries? Or have all the comparisons been bollocks?
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I'm not watching the press conference but I see that they are going to start reporting a wider array of deaths in the daily figures from Wednesday onwards, so that should have a knock-on effect in terms of how the media report on deaths.

Addressing deaths outside hospitals, Mr Hancock says 4,343 deaths in care homes have been recorded since Easter.

Deaths in care homes account for a sixth of the total death toll, he says, suggesting that they are in line with yearly averages.

He goes on to say that, from Wednesday, the government will publish daily figures of deaths in care homes and other non-hospital setting, something which he says was not possible before now.

He says the government wants to be as transparent as possible and save as many lives as possible.

He goes on to announce that all residents and care home staff will soon be tested, whether they have symptoms or not.
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From BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52450742
 
emanymton said:
The advice we got at work was to only get tested if you believe you may have symptoms and have to leave the house. Otherwise just stay indoors.
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Sure but we need to move along from that stage. That's 'stay home, save lives'. If we're to move towards a semblance of normality, we need to know every case we can know. Everyone who thinks they might have it needs to be tested, and their families and close contacts as well.
 
elbows said:
I'm not watching the press conference but I see that they are going to start reporting a wider array of deaths in the daily figures from Wednesday onwards, so that should have a knock-on effect in terms of how the media report on deaths.



From BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52450742
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Thanks, appreciate your posts. I see over a third of deaths are in care homes now, and rising as a proportion, so it would be increasingly weird to carry on reporting as they were.
 
cupid_stunt said:
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.
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Hancock has confirmed they will be reporting on the number of deaths recorded by the new CQC portal, on a daily basis from tomorrow.
 
A longer report on the handling of the crisis in Scotland:

But why did Scotland, where cases were far less numerous than in England, agree to the COBRA decision on 12 March to abandon contact tracing? At that point, there were few confirmed cases in Scotland though reporting of cases does not appear to have begun until 17 March. Our public health colleagues tell us that Public Health England rapidly found it had no capacity to undertake contact tracing: it had fewer than 300 staff to do contact tracing operating out of just 9 regional hubs - there are 343 local authorities. The lack of capacity is down to budget cuts and structural changes that removed and fragmented local public services for communicable disease control in England.
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PHE now controls the decimated workforce for communicable disease control including the 300 or so field epidemiologists who, instead of being largely based in local authorities, have been centralised in regional hubs, thereby, reducing their numbers and their effectiveness on the ground. Meanwhile, although there are over 5,000 environmental officers in local authorities, some of whom had indicated that they were ready to go and start contact tracing if called upon, no one made contact with them.
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elbows said:
I'm not watching the press conference but I see that they are going to start reporting a wider array of deaths in the daily figures from Wednesday onwards, so that should have a knock-on effect in terms of how the media report on deaths.



From BBC live updates page https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/world-52450742
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The key questions surely are around why there have been so many deaths in care homes and whether this is part of the reason for the number dying in hospitals (and hence the headline figure used to compare with other countries) plateauing or reducing? There have obviously been issues with PPE in care homes, but there are also questions to ask about people returning from hospitals to care homes (too early or untested after admission for non-Covid issues in hospitals with major Covid outbreaks?) and whether there has been deliberate policy, locally or nationally, to avoid admitting elderly people with Covid symptoms to hospital, hence reducing strain on NHS capacity? There is also the whole issue around DNR decisions.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
If we're to move towards a semblance of normality, we need to know every case we can know. Everyone who thinks they might have it needs to be tested, and their families and close contacts as well.
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There doesn't seem to have been much talk about the tracking and tracing side of testing lately.
But this by John Naughton in the Observer last Sunday provides good, easy to understand technical information on smartphone apps for that purpose.
The Observer said:
Contact apps won't end lockdown. But they might kill off democracy
A tech solution to the crisis of the type being pursed by the UK government will be both ineffective and a civil rights nightmare
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Even someone very non-techie like me, who doesn't even have a bloody smartphone (and I'm only 57 ;) ), found it useful in terms of grasping what's involved. So good on him for emphasising this :
John Naughton said:
Then there’s the problem that not everyone has a smartphone, even though it’s commonly supposed in tech circles that they do. The pandemic has revealed that a significant minority of the population (mostly older people) still relies on olde-worlde feature phones. Moreover, it turns out that not all smartphones are created equal: one estimate is that 50% of all smartphones can’t use the proximity-sensing systems being developed by Apple and Google. Given that any proximity-sensing system would probably have to cover at least 60% of the population to be truly effective, does this mean that Matt Hancock is going to be giving out Huawei handsets like Smarties to the Nokia-using poor?
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Article is also good on the civil liberties implications.
 
Jeremiah18.17 said:
The key questions surely are around why there have been so many deaths in care homes and whether this is part of the reason for the number dying in hospitals (and hence the headline figure used to compare with other countries) plateauing or reducing? There have obviously been issues with PPE in care homes, but there are also questions to ask about people returning from hospitals to care homes (too early or untested after admission for non-Covid issues in hospitals with major Covid outbreaks?) and whether there has been deliberate policy, locally or nationally, to avoid admitting elderly people with Covid symptoms to hospital, hence reducing strain on NHS capacity? There is also the whole issue around DNR decisions.
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Yes there are many important questions on those fronts.

However I think its important to say that when considering 'why so many deaths in care homes' that this was entirely predictable and expected. Its a subject that came up plenty before this was even officially called a pandemic. Of course this fact is not an excuse, its a reason to be even harder on those people and systems that utterly failed to do anything about this, to prepare and protect.

Countries vary in how they report deaths but lots of them have similar gaps in their statistics. The gain from governments from deliberately fudging the numbers is actually limited in some ways because the care home numbers are not hidden, they are just slower to collect, the public do ultimately discover them and its not months or years after the event. And now we reached the stage where they are going to be reported on daily anyway.

Infection control in hospitals (or rather lack of it) and the way this interacts with care homes via people being transferred between them is certainly a really important area.

In terms of deliberate policies regarding admission, to be honest a lot of this is just an extension of the way this sort of thing is also done during normal times. It would not be surprising to learn that they pushed it even further than normal during this pandemic, but many of the underlying principals are built on standard attitudes in regards frailty and treatment. There were already some examples that came out where some organisations handled aspects of this too blatant and insensitive manner, and it got some press. But the subject seems incomplete without the detail of how this stuff is dealt with in this country in non-pandemic times.

When it comes to bad things that have happened as a result of the 'protect the NHS' emphasis, I expect that in addition to various care home related aspects, theres also been a disaster in terms of not tracking the health of those who were infected and stayed in their own homes. Then didnt call for help in time/at all when they deteriorated, or did call for help but were failed by the admissions policy. Too many deaths in general at home during this pandemic so far, though it is of course impossible for me to know quite how many of them were preventable.
 
QueenOfGoths said:
I personally think there are other more reasonable things to ask first.
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Depends on whether you want lockdown to continue reasonably successfully or not.

If you do, then it's probably a good idea to try to address the questions that some people have (at some of their more stressful times), even if you personally don't feel they need to/can't be answered right now (from your current position of being able to cope sufficiently well enough to keep on with these measures, while not knowing).
 
William of Walworth said:
There doesn't seem to have been much talk about the tracking and tracing side of testing lately.
But this by John Naughton in the Observer last Sunday provides good, easy to understand technical information on smartphone apps for that purpose.


Even someone very non-techie like me, who doesn't even have a bloody smartphone (and I'm only 57 ;) ), found it useful in terms of grasping what's involved. So good on him for emphasising this :


Article is also good on the civil liberties implications.
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It's a tricky one. Testing and contact tracing can also be done in a 'soft' way, with support networks in place for those testing positive to self-isolate. It does worry me somewhat that this idea seems to be being passed by in favour of far more authoritarian measures, which may end up being imposed more in response to fear than anything else. I'm more optimistic than many about the possibilities of voluntary isolation if it is properly supported, which means a lot of effort - daily visits and checkups, etc. I think the way the lockdown has been observed by the vast majority without any need for active enforcement is evidence in support of that optimism. I think some policy decisions are being made on the basis of too dim a view of the willingness and ability of people to act in the wider good by carrying out short-term measures such as voluntary self-isolation.
 
Just thought through the way 'heroes' are used to deflect from mass incompetence and cynicism.. The way the NHS is currently being fetishised by certain elements of the media and the sector of politicians more used to dishing it, is very similar to the use of 'heroes' in Helmand. - Mass incompetence and poor equipment being covered up by 'our heroes'. As you were. :rolleyes:
 
The BBC had a look at various mortality data by region. Including a comparison between a 4 week period of deaths in London and the deadliest 4 week period of the Blitz.

www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus: Which regions have been worst hit?

Reality Check examines the weekly deaths figures for nations and regions across the UK.
www.bbc.co.uk

They also mention that the number of all-cause deaths registered in London for the week ending April 17th was the highest since a week in January 1968. I dont have that historical data (data I have isnt down to the regional, town or city level and only goes back to start of 1970), but I checked what the story was with Jan 68. An influenza epidemic, which I suppose was H2N2, since this was still a couple of years before the H3N2 pandemic got round to really affecting the UK. It was certainly quite a bad epidemic but I dont have many detailed figures. I do have one chart for that 1968 UK flu epidemic which also illustrates again the point about proper diagnosis of underlying infectious agents behind many deaths often being missed, and having to rely on broader mortality data to tell a truer story as a result.

Screenshot 2020-04-29 at 00.10.19.png
(from https://europepmc.org/backend/ptpmcrender.fcgi?accid=PMC2130729&blobtype=pdf )
 
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elbows said:
They also mention that the number of all-cause deaths registered in London for the week ending April 17th was the highest since a week in January 1968. I dont have that historical data (data I have isnt down to the regional, town or city level and only goes back to start of 1970)
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The ONS file with the daily deaths since 1970 has a tab with the regional figures since 1981. With the national archives making more content free and accessible online, it is possible that the London data that the BBC obtained going back to WWII is within that. Will see if I can find a link.
 
Marty1 said:
Wearing masks in public after lockdown might be a good idea.
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Just ordered a few more, in the expectation that the UK is going to finally catch up to the rest of the world in the next week or so.

It's weird to think that there are plenty of people still around who will remember the last time we all had to carry masks around with us.
 
The39thStep said:
Does this seem right? If it is Starmer hasnt hit the right spot has he?

View attachment 209374
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Despite that I think Starmer is weary of politicising the pandemic as it would likely backfire on him - perfect example of this is in the US where the daily onslaught of media attacks on Trump are having the reverse intended effect.

Also understand that Boris has just recovered from the virus and may have a lot of support/public sympathy.

I think Starmer is keeping his powder dry and is probably wise to do so - reverence not rhetoric.
 
Buddy Bradley said:
Just ordered a few more, in the expectation that the UK is going to finally catch up to the rest of the world in the next week or so.

It's weird to think that there are plenty of people still around who will remember the last time we all had to carry masks around with us.
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Where and which did you buy Buddy?
 
Marty1 said:
Despite that I think Starmer is weary of politicising the pandemic as it would likely backfire on him - perfect example of this is in the US where the daily onslaught of media attacks on Trump are having the reverse intended effect.

Also understand that Boris has just recovered from the virus and may have a lot of support/public sympathy.

I think Starmer is keeping his powder dry and is probably wise to do so - reverence not rhetoric.
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I think the notion of keeping the powder dry at a time when there are vtal issues to raise about the wokers safety during the lockdown and when it is eased abdicates the leadership that is needed. Its also contradicted by Thomas-Symonds and Reeves raising the outcome of the Patel inquiry which in the scale of things for most people isnt a key issue in their lives. Not so much keeping the powder dry but firing blanks imo.
 
The39thStep said:
I think the notion of keeping the powder dry at a time when there are vtal issues to raise about the wokers safety during the lockdown and when it is eased abdicates the leadership that is needed. Its also contradicted by Thomas-Symonds and Reeves raising the outcome of the Patel inquiry which in the scale of things for most people isnt a key issue in their lives. Not so much keeping the powder dry but firing blanks imo.
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I agree with you about Patel. Reading that this morning, it was ill-judged. Things have moved on even with Patel - her failure to apologise for lack of ppe is more relevant now, I would have thought, especially as the figures for the late onslaught of covid19 through care homes come to light, which really can be laid at the government's door. imo labour could and should have been pushing hard on the two key issues of testing and ppe right from the start of lockdown. It has been obvious for a long while now that these would be key to easing lockdown, for a long time from before the government started talking about it. At the moment, Nicola Sturgeon is essentially the leader of the opposition.

How much of the above is going to be down to the age-old issue of Labour leaders being ignored by the media when they say such things, I don't know, but labour's transition from Corbyn came at a very bad time. Pre-lockdown, Jeremy Cunt was the opposition ffs, and now it's Sturgeon. Labour are all but invisible and irrelevant.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
I agree with you about Patel. Reading that this morning, it was ill-judged. Things have moved on even with Patel - her failure to apologise for lack of ppe is more relevant now, I would have thought, especially as the figures for the late onslaught of covid19 through care homes come to light, which really can be laid at the government's door. imo labour could and should have been pushing hard on the two key issues of testing and ppe right from the start of lockdown. It has been obvious for a long while now that these would be key to easing lockdown, for a long time from before the government started talking about it. At the moment, Nicola Sturgeon is essentially the leader of the opposition.

How much of the above is going to be down to the age-old issue of Labour leaders being ignored by the media when they say such things, I don't know, but labour's transition from Corbyn came at a very bad time. Pre-lockdown, Jeremy Cunt was the opposition ffs, and now it's Sturgeon. Labour are all but invisible and irrelevant.
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I'm still quite surprised how quickly the whole Corbynista bubble has just burst tbh.
 
QueenOfGoths said:
I personally think there are other more reasonable things to ask first.
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“now is not the time, the government needs to focus on the immediate crisis” seems to be the standard response from bootlickers on facebook etc., as though any slightly challenging question to Matt Hancock would reduce the amount of time he has to personally intubate patients at the local Nightingale Hospital.
 
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