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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

This looks interesting,
"We sequenced 1500 people with Coronavirus in #Norfolk over the 1st wave & have a paper out today with lots of interesting findings: Large scale sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 genomes from one region allows detailed epidemiology and enables local outbreak management "

Twitter thread with text above by @andrewjpage, summarises some of it, (I dont know how to link to Twitter here)
you copy the URL of the tweet and post it as you would any other web page - the board software embeds it.

 
This 3-minute report on covid sniffer dogs was on BBC News this morning.



Fascinating, ta, really worth watching. As a note they're asking for samples of clothes from as many people as possible who have the virus.

I was a bit concerned about my dog picking it up - very rare I understand, but that doesn't seem to be a problem with these dogs, presumably because they're smelling the body's reaction to the virus rather than the virus itself.
 
Fascinating, ta, really worth watching. As a note they're asking for samples of clothes from as many people as possible who have the virus.

I was a bit concerned about my dog picking it up - very rare I understand, but that doesn't seem to be a problem with these dogs, presumably because they're smelling the body's reaction to the virus rather than the virus itself.

I was pondering about how accurate they are likely to be, and a quick google search shows preliminary tests suggest nearly 100% accuracy.

A dog is capable of detecting the presence of the coronavirus within 10 seconds and the entire process takes less than a minute to complete, according to Anna Hielm-Björkman of the University of Helsinki, who is overseeing the trial.

In the university’s preliminary tests, dogs – which have been successfully used to detect diseases such as cancer and diabetes – were able to identify the virus with nearly 100% accuracy, even days before before a patient developed symptoms.

And, regarding concerns for the dogs...

Although Covid-19 is known to infect mink and cats, dogs do not have the receptors necessary for the virus to readily gain a foothold and do not appear to be easily infected, according to Hielm-Björkman. There is no evidence that they can transmit the virus to people or other animals.

 
I was pondering about how accurate they are likely to be, and a quick google search shows preliminary tests suggest nearly 100% accuracy.

350 million smell receptors when we have 5 million I think they said in that video clip?

I do like dogs

And, regarding concerns for the dogs...

ta for that, too, very reassuring :)
 
No mixing of households (indoors anyway) in Liverpool, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.


Chris Whittey's maps yesterday really did paint a worrying picture in the North. I think it was mentioned upthread but I can't help thinking weather plays a role. Down here it's still warm enough for people to sit in pub gardens with a jumper on.
 
No mixing of households (indoors anyway) in Liverpool, Warrington, Hartlepool and Middlesbrough.


Chris Whittey's maps yesterday really did paint a worrying picture in the North. I think it was mentioned upthread but I can't help thinking weather plays a role. Down here it's still warm enough for people to sit in pub gardens with a jumper on.

Weather could be playing a part, although it started taking off in the north weeks before the weather changed, and doesn't explain south Wales, where the weather is currently similar to, for example, the south-east.

1d.png

There's a clickable version of the map in the link below.

 
Weather could be playing a part, although it started taking off in the north weeks before the weather changed, and doesn't explain south Wales, where the weather is currently similar to, for example, the south-east.

View attachment 232492

There's a clickable version of the map in the link below.

Given that the lockdowns in Caerffili and Llanelli appear to have resulted from single incidents, I do wonder how much of this is just random fluctuations, though. Obviously, more densely-populated areas will tend to amplify such events, but the incidence may not be part of a trend.

I also note that on your map, Carmarthenshire - that big blob just in from the Far West of Wales - looks like a plague pit, but in reality the vast bulk of cases are concentrated in Llanelli...although I hear rumours that Carmarthen is edging close to a local lockdown, too.
 
Ministers admit current restrictions are confusing — and undermining public compliance.

About fucking time!

The arrangement could see local areas in England classified from tier one, covering areas with the tightest restrictions like Bolton, to tier two for regions with less tough measures in place, down to level three, which would cover the rest of the country not under local lockdown.

And, that's what they should have done from the start, the muppets.

 
Yes, I saw that and at first thought it was some Nick Triggle weirdness but as its not it's potentially good news. This being said given the amount of measures that are in place both nationally and locally you would hope it would be having a positive impact otherwise whats the point?

The pandemic clowns are annoying because they make it harder to talk about these details without them leaping around going 'stuck your domesday scenario up your arse'. Triggle still wont shut up about the 50,000 illustration given by Whitty & Vallance the other week, for example.

Whitty touched on one of the underlying issues in the press conference yesterday. When it comes to exponential growth, a key factor is what the doubling rate is for that growth. And they estimated this wrongly during a key period in late February/early March, which strongly contributed to their inaccurate sense of what stage the epidemic had reached then, lockdown being so late, etc. They thought it was a week to double when it was actually taking half of that time (these are approximations from my memory).

This time around they will be very keen to avoid that mistake. But perhaps they will overcompensate, and when they mention a weeks doubling time the actual doubling time could be quite a bit longer. And of course its also likely to vary by region, and should certainly vary when new measures are brought in, assuming peoples behaviours actually change under the new measures.

These and some other factors mean that its probably not as straightforward as simply giving a lesson about what exponential growth means this time. Because we know that when left to their own devices in a susceptible population, exponential growth in cases is the norm. But if various measures are changing the number of infections at any one time, and keep stretching out the doubling time to make it longer, its possible to end up with growth that looks far more like linear growth than exponential growth.

I will be trying to dig into this further tomorrow, once other studies data and estimates are available.

In the meantime, the way I would think about our current situation and our measures of it, is that even if we assume the worst, the timing is not the same as last time. Things can still spiral out of control quite quickly, but not as quickly as last time, due to a combination of different doubling time and a much different level of disease surveillance. ie we can see stages of epidemic growth that were really barely visible at all in the data the first time around, and that gives more time to act.

This stuff is also the main reason I have not spent September screaming for the government to do a full lockdown ASAP. But neither is it cause to join the 'lets get on with our lives' idiots.

There is also more than one way to frame very similar things, eg I could have gone on about R instead of the doubling rate.
 
The pandemic clowns are annoying because they make it harder to talk about these details without them leaping around going 'stuck your domesday scenario up your arse'. Triggle still wont shut up about the 50,000 illustration given by Whitty & Vallance the other week, for example.

Nick Triggle is an interesting character in a who exactly is he way. Its almost worth a thread on its own. His wiki page is very sparse he doesn't really have much in the way of linked-in presence. Usually the one thing every journo is good at is self-promotion yet I've found it really hard to find any background on him. He seems to have appeared from nowhere in a plum job at the BBC and doesn't seem to have a basic understanding of science or health.

I'm almost getting a bit conspiracy about him. I know relations between the government and BBC have been interesting of late. Has he been put there for a reason? One of Dom's mates implanted for reasons?
 
Nick Triggle is an interesting character in a who exactly is he way. Its almost worth a thread on its own. His wiki page is very sparse he doesn't really have much in the way of linked-in presence. Usually the one thing every journo is good at is self-promotion yet I've found it really hard to find any background on him. He seems to have appeared from nowhere in a plum job at the BBC and doesn't seem to have a basic understanding of science or health.

I'm almost getting a bit conspiracy about him. I know relations between the government and BBC have been interesting of late. Has he been put there for a reason? One of Dom's mates implanted for reasons?

He has been there for many years already, so certain possibilities can be excluded. Others cannot, but I have no special contacts in any of these worlds so I reached a dead end on that long ago. So I'll stick to picking apart what he says rather than the background. Although this week I have been practicing not bothering to cover his shit anymore.
 
Nick Triggle is an interesting character in a who exactly is he way. Its almost worth a thread on its own. His wiki page is very sparse he doesn't really have much in the way of linked-in presence. Usually the one thing every journo is good at is self-promotion yet I've found it really hard to find any background on him. He seems to have appeared from nowhere in a plum job at the BBC and doesn't seem to have a basic understanding of science or health.

I'm almost getting a bit conspiracy about him. I know relations between the government and BBC have been interesting of late. Has he been put there for a reason? One of Dom's mates implanted for reasons?
Sister in law is a Tory MP
 
they estimate there was a million new cases a week at the peak, so no.

Yeah its not hard to generate 'highest ever' numbers at the moment because we are actually trying to measure those things now, which we were not the first time around.

For example the REACT-1 study upon which those stories are based did not start till May.

An example quote from the latest REACT-1 paper:

However, since mid-August when we first detected a rise in prevalence, there has been a resurgence of the virus in the community, with rates higher now than at any time since we started measuring prevalence in May 2020.


via Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission findings
 
Weather could be playing a part, although it started taking off in the north weeks before the weather changed, and doesn't explain south Wales, where the weather is currently similar to, for example, the south-east.

View attachment 232492

There's a clickable version of the map in the link below.

Not sure if you've ever noticed before, but there's a whole bit of UK that's actually north of "the north", and which is generally even colder and wetter.
 
Weather could be playing a part, although it started taking off in the north weeks before the weather changed, and doesn't explain south Wales, where the weather is currently similar to, for example, the south-east.

View attachment 232492

There's a clickable version of the map in the link below.

I think if you overlaid life expectancy and population density data there would be more correlation than weather.
 
I canot use the current situation to study weather-etc impact on infection because of other factors that complicate the picture. For example the current situation in the North West is something of an inevitable product of things like the fact that they never got the number of infections in that region down to the same level as elsewhere in the first place, so the resurgence there was starting from a higher point, it had more cases of infection as a base to expand upon.
 
I think if you overlaid life expectancy and population density data there would be more correlation than weather.

Density sure but why would life expectancy play a role in inflection? Genuine question. I can understand why it would play a role in deaths from covid but not why it would play a role in positive tests.
 
Studies attempting to look at any correlation between pollution and Covid-19 deaths suffers from the usual problem of not being able to separate other factors too. ie there is an existing correlation between pollution levels, population density, socio-economic status, etc.
 
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