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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

So have we got the figures of how many test were posted on Sunday


or was that gathered tests finally being processed?

:hmm:
 
philosophical said:
Bizarre? From this lot?
Hancock started a briefing the other day telling us he had great news.
An antibody test?
A vaccine?
Recovery treatment?

Nah.

IVF work is going to re-start.

Bizarre is how come nobody has chucked a milkshake in Patels face.
Click to expand...

Not so bizarre, they have to start planning how best to repopulate once half of the country has been wiped out by the "Nonsense Rhymes Book of Pandemic Planning" (ages 3 to 5) that they seem to be taking their current advice from.
 
Given the news about the Scottish study on how many deaths an earlier lockdown could have prevented, I thought I would quickly place it into a context I have mentioned before.

First the story about the Scottish study again:

www.bbc.co.uk

Coronavirus: Earlier Scottish lockdown 'could have prevented 2,000 deaths'

Scientists suggest that earlier action could have reduced the Covid-19 death rate in Scotland by about 80%.
www.bbc.co.uk

When trying to establish which aspects of the UKs initial plan and crap response were driven by the establishment expert orthodoxy as opposed to only being driven by the politicians, I was using the ECDC documents for clues. The March 12th edition of the document contained the following which was not present in earlier documents:

The evidence for the effectiveness of closing schools and workplaces, and cancelling mass gatherings is limited. However, one modelling study from China estimated that if a range of non-pharmaceutical interventions, including social distancing, had been conducted one week, two weeks, or three weeks earlier in the country, the number of COVID-19 cases could have been reduced by 66%, 86%, and 95%, respectively, together with significantly reducing the number of affected areas [72].
Click to expand...

(from https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/de...f-novel-coronavirus-disease-2019-COVID-19.pdf )

This is the study which is referred to there as reference 72:

www.medrxiv.org

Effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions for containing the COVID-19 outbreak in China

Background The COVID-19 outbreak containment strategies in China based on non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) appear to be effective. Quantitative research is still needed however to assess the efficacy of different candidate NPIs and their timings to guide ongoing and future responses to...
www.medrxiv.org www.medrxiv.org

March 12th was also the last ill-fated press conference before the u-turn, where Vallances slideshow got stuck and the entire government approach was coming under fire and herd immunity was only days away from being denied as being government policy, and a new approach was thrown together, Imperial College report was made public on the 16th etc.

The timing of all of this is why I will say things like if I had been in charge, possibly the most obvious difference people could have hoped for was that I would have locked down 1-2 weeks earlier than we actually did. Because it would have been really hard to do a lockdown before this period around 8th-12th March, because thats when Italy decided to think the unthinkable and lockdown, the european orthodox approach suddenly shifted, and then people started to demand to know why the UK wasnt doing the same stuff. There are lots of other things that could have been handled very differently before this point, but it is somewhat hard to imagine a lockdown being accepted in the country well before this 8th-12th period I keep focussing on. But once this strange new world became possible, every day lost and wasted by not locking down at that moment made an inexcusable difference to the number if infections, serious illnesses and deaths that we subsequently suffered. Its of some small consolation that lots of people started changing their behaviour in the UK a week before the 'proper lockdown', so although some stuff was at least 2 weeks late, some lives were likely saved by actions taken a week before then. But if all those events had been 2 weeks earlier relative to our epidemic, oh what a difference it should have made, oh what very different numbers I'd have been studying ever since :(
 
philosophical said:
Bizarre? From this lot?
Hancock started a briefing the other day telling us he had great news.
An antibody test?
A vaccine?
Recovery treatment?

Nah.

IVF work is going to re-start.

Bizarre is how come nobody has chucked a milkshake in Patels face.
Click to expand...


SHes managed to get the burglary and shoplifting figures right down
 
I feel like sticking a graph from the Scottish article in here. It makes me sad and angry, especially as if I go back and listen to what various UK government experts were saying throughout the first half of March, they kept going on about how timing would be critical. No wonder my brain nearly burst when they started going on about the UK being 4 weeks behind Italy, given we were actually 2 weeks behind Italy, and given what these models show 2 weeks earlier lockdown would likely have achieved. I still have no idea what data, if any, made them think we were 2 weeks earlier in the epidemic curve than we actually were.

Screenshot 2020-05-11 at 21.28.33.png
 
So the next question in the endless battle to get consistent and timely UK data.

A lot of the data used to come out in conjunction with the daily number 10 press conference slides. Are we not going to get any of that now that they have entered into a different phase of communications? We certainly havent had it for the last 2 days. Is there somewhere else I can see, for example, number of ICU cases daily?

This country is infuriating.
 
I'd also give the media very low marks for holding the government to account over daily data too.

I know certain data is not of interest to everyone. But it was very disheartening when the media were handling daily 'deaths by actual date of death' NHS England data for a while before it was made directly available to the public at the start of April, it was a patchy mess with no reporting consistency or attempts to graph stuff over time. And when the government changed what data was shown in daily slides, for example suddenly stopping the intensive care data that had been available for weeks, then not giving us any for a crucial 2 week period, then bringing it back in a different format. None of that was worthy of remark apparently. Not to mention the time the figures had Scotland and Wales numbers the wrong way round for a few days, or the time recently when the daily deaths number didnt match the cumulative total for a particular day. Hell I'm not even sure the media reported on Vallances slideshow breaking on March 12th and not showing all the slides in the series.

The things that go under the radar unless we watch this stuff closely for ourselves. Stay alert indeed.
 
Ah but speaking of stats, this looks interesting, no brain energy now (had migraine earlier, doh) but I will try to look at it properly soon.

Real-time tracking of a pandemic, as data accumulate over time, is an essential component of a public health response to a new outbreak. This document reports the work of a joint Public Health England (PHE)—University of Cambridge modelling group to nowcast and forecast COVID-19 infections and deaths, together with estimation of relevant epidemiological quantities for England (by NHS region) and Scotland. These estimates have provided the bases of forecasts supplied to the Scientific Pandemic Influenza sub-group on Modelling (SPI-M) and to regional PHE teams.
Click to expand...

Most obvious comment I can make right now is - oh Its got regional estimates for R!

 
elbows said:
Ah but speaking of stats, this looks interesting, no brain energy now (had migraine earlier, doh) but I will try to look at it properly soon.



Most obvious comment I can make right now is - oh Its got regional estimates for R!

Click to expand...
That tells a much better story than I had anticipated tbh. It's also a bit sobering to think that the weekend before lockdown, something like a million people caught it. It shows an amazing effect from lockdown. The bump up in infections at the end of April is presumably when it hit care homes? :(

tbh that does paint a pretty positive picture for where we are now, particularly for London. An estimated 24 new infections a day in London now.

ETA: It also gives a very clear indication of how much better off we would have been if lockdown had come a week earlier, as it really should have, even if everything else had been just as craply done. If those figures are anywhere near right, lockdown a week earlier could have given us a Germany-style outcome. Starting the lockdown effect from around 0.5 million infected, rather than 2.5 million.
 
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littlebabyjesus said:
That tells a much better story than I had anticipated tbh. It's also a bit sobering to think that the weekend before lockdown, something like a million people caught it. It shows an amazing effect from lockdown. The bump up in infections at the end of April is presumably when it hit care homes? :(

tbh that does paint a pretty positive picture for where we are now, particularly for London. An estimated 24 new infections a day in London now.

ETA: It also gives a very clear indication of how much better off we would have been if lockdown had come a week earlier, as it really should have, even if everything else had been just as craply done. If those figures are anywhere near right, lockdown a week earlier could have given us a Germany-style outcome. Starting the lockdown effect from around 0.5 million infected, rather than 2.5 million.
Click to expand...

That is astonishingly low - the number of daily infections in London is of the order of 100 times lower (excuse the clumsy formulation) than most of the rest of the country? I wonder what the mechanism for that is, if correct. London didn’t lock down earlier, I don’t think? Was there a voluntary shadow effective pre-lockdown effect? Was it just much better observed? Would anyone like to speculate?
 
Yeah if my brain hadnt fallen out earlier then I would be saying various things related to how the London numbers and graphs stick out far more than I was expecting - I was expecting some notable difference but I dont have the answers for some of what is shown.

I should save my thoughts until hopefully my brain is in better shape tomorrow, but the following seems to have splurted out now anyway:

In theory the key difference was that Londons epidemic was at a later stage by the time lockdown (& the start of other social distancing some days before that) were implemented. I'd expect that to make a notable diference. But I dont know much about the models or assumptions or data used, which made that difference look even more dramatic than I was expecting.

We have seen from actual data of things like deaths and hospital case levels, that places such as London that were going up very steeply to much higher peak rates, also fell the most abruptly. So this side of things is the sort of stuff I expected to see in this new study too, and the implications of it on the current infection rate, but perhaps they over-egged it. The current estimate for daily infections is so very low for London, its tempting to describe it as absurd but I suppose should allow time for other details and explanations to emerge before writing anything off.
 
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prunus said:
That is astonishingly low - the number of daily infections in London is of the order of 100 times lower (excuse the clumsy formulation) than most of the rest of the country? I wonder what the mechanism for that is, if correct. London didn’t lock down earlier, I don’t think? Was there a voluntary shadow effective pre-lockdown effect? Was it just much better observed? Would anyone like to speculate?
Click to expand...
I don't quite know. The only thing I would say about those figures is that they're estimates of the real numbers, but they must include input from actual new positive tests (be absurd to give the estimated real figure as lower than the known), so at the very least, there must be next to no new positive tests coming from London at the moment.
 
Hopefully what I say above is correct, and there is input from real test results in there. It would be very odd if there weren't. But sadly it does rather remind me of the models that came out a while ago showing death rates for various countries like Spain and Italy quickly dropping to near-zero by, well, by now. Those models looked impossibly wrong to me at the time, and indeed they were.
 
littlebabyjesus said:
Hopefully what I say above is correct, and there is input from real test results in there. It would be very odd if there weren't. But sadly it does rather remind me of the models that came out a while ago showing death rates for various countries like Spain and Italy quickly dropping to near-zero by, well, by now. Those models looked impossibly wrong to me at the time, and indeed they were.
Click to expand...

They only mention deaths in the data sources section as far as I can tell, there is nothing to indicate that other sorts of data are fed in too. So yeah, welcome again to the world of 'modelling should only be used as part of a balanced diet'.

Have you recently seen the projection tracking site that allows easy comparison between what the IHME model you refer to spat out over time? I mentioned just the other day that at least the UK didnt routinely make public pronouncements of expected total deaths based on that model, whereas Trump did for the USA and has had to mention ever larger numbers recently as a result (his 60,000 deaths claim came from that model in mid April but in recent days that model came up with over 130,000 as a total for the USA)

COVID Projections Tracker

www.covid-projections.com www.covid-projections.com

By the way I note that site has also started tracking the LANL model too, which I dont think I have looked at properly yet at all.
 
elbows said:
They only mention deaths in the data sources section as far as I can tell, there is nothing to indicate that other sorts of data are fed in too. So yeah, welcome again to the world of 'modelling should only be used as part of a balanced diet'.

Have you recently seen the projection tracking site that allows easy comparison between what the IHME model you refer to spat out over time? I mentioned just the other day that at least the UK didnt routinely make public pronouncements of expected total deaths based on that model, whereas Trump did for the USA and has had to mention ever larger numbers recently as a result (his 60,000 deaths claim came from that model in mid April but in recent days that model came up with over 130,000 as a total for the USA)

COVID Projections Tracker

www.covid-projections.com www.covid-projections.com

By the way I note that site has also started tracking the LANL model too, which I dont think I have looked at properly yet at all.
Click to expand...
That's mad.

Right, from here, it's going to drop sharply to near-zero very soon.

(few days later). Ok we were wrong last time, but from here, it's going to drop sharply to near-zero very soon.

(few days later). Ok we were wrong last time, but from here, it's going to drop sharply to near-zero very soon.

(few days later). Ok we were wrong last time, but from here, it's going to drop sharply to near-zero very soon.

(few days later). Ok we were wrong last time, but from here, it's going to drop sharply to near-zero very soon.

(few days later). Ok we were wrong last time, but from here, it's going to drop sharply to near-zero very soon.

(few days later) penny finally drops :facepalm: Changes weights. From here, it's going to drop fairly sharply but not to zero any time soon.

Sorry, but what??? :D

(that's the correct number of 'few days later', btw)
 
elbows I've seen some claims recently on the lines of 'herd immunity is the strategy of every government' and I don't see how that can be when countries like New Zealand and South Korea are making such an effort to stamp out the virus, unless there's something I've missed. Do you know what could be meant by that? Surely the strategy of every government isn't to make everyone catch it until there's a vaccine?

Obviously having had it does give you some partial immunity but I don't see how the aim of every government can be herd immunity lol when policies have been introduced which seem to want to get rid of it entirely.
 
David Clapson said:
Just seen a new Excess Deaths total: 56,800. It's on twitter, from Chris Giles of the FT. He says the ONS will publish the number tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Thats an estimate up to May 11th:



I'm very interested in their estimates, but I tend to rely mostly on the actual ONS numbers (the blue bits, which isnt just ONS but also the Scottish and Northern Ireland equivalents). And there are another weeks worth of those out on Tuesday (Wednesday for Scotland, Friday for NI), so I shall probably post again on this subject soon, and the estimate people will also update that estimate you mention to reflect the latest actual data.

edit: here is a larger version of that graph:

Screenshot 2020-05-12 at 00.05.22.png

And a bit of nerdy detail that isnt really important at all but someone might be interested so I'll say it anyway:

The stepped nature of the blue facts ones are due to the weekly nature of reporting. Those weekly reports do include confirmed covid deaths by day, but do not include daily numbers for total deaths, only weekly numbers for those. However I'm hoping that the preliminary monthly report for April will include daily total deaths in the same way that the March report did, and then they can dispense with the earlier estimates that are currently used to smooth out the weekly stepping. Small bumps in the stepped values during a week are because Scotland and Northern Ireland have different days of the week for the start and ends of their weeks.
 
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www.theguardian.com

If we follow Boris Johnson's advice, coronavirus will spread | David Hunter

A large-scale return to work without the ability to test, trace and isolate risks creating super-spreader events, says epidemiology professor David Hunter
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
Those defending the government’s Covid-19 response have reasonably pointed out that policy mistakes are always clearer in retrospect. So let me make a prediction. If we take the prime minister’s advice and return to work in large numbers now – and without the ability to test, trace and isolate – then virus spread will increase, there will be super-spreader events and local or regional lockdowns will have to be reconsidered. The prime minister implied in his speech that relapse will somehow be our fault – we were not sufficiently “alert”. The responsibility will lie, however, with a government that has encouraged a premature return to work before the epidemiologic conditions and interventions were in place to make it safe to do so.
Click to expand...
 
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