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General Coronavirus (COVID-19) chat

Hyperdark said:
All gone rather quiet on the previously 'big upped' UK vaccine front.
methinks too many in charge of the coffers are that thick they can't tell the difference between genuine progress and a bunch of post-grads telling porkies to secure next years grants
I'll wager the ongoing trials are throwing a bit of reality into the mix and its being surpressed
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And, you are talking complete bollocks, please fuck off.
 
Thankyou for the update, Though a report on them argueing amongst themselves is hardly progress now is it?
I have one underlying medical condition and signed up last week for the trial, havn't heard anything yet and this explains why.
I remain of the belief that its been way way way over sold, to keep people's chins up
Its ok you have a different opinion, though a bit sad you can't express it in a more mature manner.
 
Hyperdark said:
Thankyou for the update, Though a report on them argueing amongst themselves is hardly progress now is it?
I have one underlying medical condition and signed up last week for the trial, havn't heard anything yet and this explains why.
I remain of the belief that its been way way way over sold, to keep people's chins up
Its ok you have a different opinion, though a bit sad you can't express it in a more mature manner.
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Sorry, but I don;t have much time for uneducated potatoes that clearly haven't got a clue what they are talking about.
 
cupid_stunt said:
International comparisons are always difficult, for all-sorts of reasons, you certainly can't compare Sweden to the likes of the UK, Belgium, Spain, Italy, etc.

It's fairer to compare them with their neighbours, so lets look at the deaths per million in the Nordic countries - Norway 47, Finland 60, Denmark 107, Sweden 571.

If you seriously think Sweden has been successful, with one of the highest death rates in Europe, and off the scale compared to its neighbours, and their anti-lock down policy has worked, you frankly need therapy.
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They really dont have a high death rate - especially not in terms of community. And not when comapring population denisty - Stockholm is very dense. Any of their neighbours have an equivelent?
 
elbows said:
I'm interested in what you think we should do if things get worse in terms of hospital admissions and deaths as we get into winter. Because its not hard to make all sorts of cases for different sorts of responses with the situation as it is right now, but when the going gets real tough the options shrink and I am left not understanding the logic and rationale of certain proposals when applied to such situations.

I'm also interested in what you think Sweden will do if things get bad for them this winter. I dont think they have ruled out draconian stuff if they think circumstances demand it.
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Well there are those unused, still empty Nightingale hospitals for a start. Remember when they were built and the cost of building them.
 
waterloowelshy said:
Well there are those unused, still empty Nightingale hospitals for a start. Remember when they were built and the cost of building them.
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They arent terribly useful without a load of the right staff appearing out of thin air to operate them. You can use them for morale and propaganda purposes and to give people a sense that they are doing something, and to avoid hideous scenes of people lying on the floor of hospital corridors. And there are some ways you can actually use them to care for people, but they dont suddenly give us a huge amount of new capacity to treat people, because of the aforementioned staffing issues. They are not an alternative to having to lockdown society to save healthcare system from collapse, they are a measure that can be used as part of handling surges but they are not a solution on their own. I'd be in favour of using them as part of a system that tried to segregate covid cases from the rest of the hospital population, but that is easier said than done too, and massive staffing issues remain.
 
Yeah doing better than the likes of the UK and Spain really isnt a compliment. Their official numbers are worse per capita than the US.
 
cupid_stunt said:
No? Currently in the 8th position worldwide, or 6th if you ignore the micro-nations.

View attachment 226456



And, so are you.
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So done better than UK, Italy and Spain - all of whom have completely trashed their economies. 20% contraction in the UK. And you call me dense! Their rate will stabilise now as the vulnerable have sadly died and the virus will reduce in impact through the general population.
 
Supine said:
so you’d prefer people to be in nightingale hospitals rather than quarantine?
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Yes. Because they are now quarantining anyone testing positive. So you ould be completely healthy but a test shows positive. Dragged out of society for 14 days. I suspect if that happened in the UK you wouldnt be entitled to a further 'furlough' payment. Good luck paying the rent with half a month pay. Oh, and its also permissable for your children / family to be quarantined without your permission. But, yeah, that seems totally 'normal' doesnt it.
 
waterloowelshy said:
So done better than UK, Italy and Spain - all of whom have completely trashed their economies. 20% contraction in the UK. And you call me dense! Their rate will stabilise now as the vulnerable have sadly died and the virus will reduce in impact through the general population.
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My word, urban is blessed with someone who has a crystal ball. :D
 
There are parts of sweden where hardly anyone has had it. The swedish public health authority has a dashboard where they publish rates of positive cases throughout the country.
 

Experience

experience.arcgis.com experience.arcgis.com

Swedens covid dashboard (from the public health authority). If you scroll through the sections it has a map of sweden with the positivity rate.
 
waterloowelshy said:
Yes. Because they are now quarantining anyone testing positive. So you ould be completely healthy but a test shows positive. Dragged out of society for 14 days. I suspect if that happened in the UK you wouldnt be entitled to a further 'furlough' payment. Good luck paying the rent with half a month pay. Oh, and its also permissable for your children / family to be quarantined without your permission. But, yeah, that seems totally 'normal' doesnt it.
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IIRC NZ pays people during this period. I could be wrong though.
 
waterloowelshy said:
Their rate will stabilise now as the vulnerable have sadly died and the virus will reduce in impact through the general population.
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This is not a fact. It might resemble the picture for a period but cannot be at all sure it will last, we have to wait for winter to judge that.

It is a possibility that I will not completely exclude because of gaps in our understanding of immunity and vulnerability, but I will wait for it to be tested in the fullness of time, and it is not the scenario that governments can afford to assume is a likely one. I dont think its the one their expert advisors will tell them is likely either. They certainly have to plan for a winter that involves a large second wave of death, because it would be totally negligent not to plan for that scenario. You have the luxury of assuming that your preferred scenario of no repeated wave of death is the one that will happen, they dont.

I am still waiting for details along that front to be tested by reality, because resurgences in various countries so far are not enough of a conclusive test. This is because in most of the resurgences I've seen so far, lots of death is mostly seen in the specific regions/cities/states etc that did not have a full large wave of death the first time round. So I cannot just look at the USAs daily totals for the entire country and draw all the conclusions I need, that wont happen unless somewhere like New York shows a big resurgence in hospital admissions and deaths.

In the meantime, I know which assumptions authorities have to make and they are mostly the opposite of yours for bloody good reasons.
 
waterloowelshy said:
Yes. Because they are now quarantining anyone testing positive. So you ould be completely healthy but a test shows positive. Dragged out of society for 14 days. I suspect if that happened in the UK you wouldnt be entitled to a further 'furlough' payment. Good luck paying the rent with half a month pay. Oh, and its also permissable for your children / family to be quarantined without your permission. But, yeah, that seems totally 'normal' doesnt it.
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Why don’t you go and read about asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers. If you can’t understand the danger they pose...
 
elbows said:
This is not a fact. It might resemble the picture for a period but cannot be at all sure it will last, we have to wait for winter to judge that.

It is a possibility that I will not completely exclude because of gaps in our understanding of immunity and vulnerability, but I will wait for it to be tested in the fullness of time, and it is not the scenario that governments can afford to assume is a likely one. I dont think its the one their expert advisors will tell them is likely either. They certainly have to plan for a winter that involves a large second wave of death, because it would be totally negligent not to plan for that scenario. You have the luxury of assuming that your preferred scenario of no repeated wave of death is the one that will happen, they dont.

I am still waiting for details along that front to be tested by reality, because resurgences in various countries so far are not enough of a conclusive test. This is because in most of the resurgences I've seen so far, lots of death is mostly seen in the specific regions/cities/states etc that did not have a full large wave of death the first time round. So I cannot just look at the USAs daily totals for the entire country and draw all the conclusions I need, that wont happen unless somewhere like New York shows a big resurgence in hospital admissions and deaths.

In the meantime, I know which assumptions authorities have to make and they are mostly the opposite of yours for bloody good reasons.
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New York hasn't fully reopened yet either tbf. And I imagine many people there are being pretty bloody careful right now.
 
frogwoman said:
New York hasn't fully reopened yet either tbf. And I imagine many people there are being pretty bloody careful right now.
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Yes, and ideally I would not like any country to do things which enable a second wave of death to be observed in full by someone like me so that I can draw full conclusions. So it will be a good while yet before I can have a better stab at figuring out the reality of the next year with the virus.

When I speak of a big second wave of death, its not that I am predicting one to happen here in full. Because a lot of the work done so far means that even somewhere like the UK should be in a position to spot the signs more comprehensively and sooner than they did the first time, so they will be able to take action sooner and achieve a different degree of suppression of serious cases. All the same even if we have many great successes, I would expect that a situation where the big death wave was looming would still offer enough signs that this really was the situation at the time, there will still be some rise in serious cases and deaths, just nowhere close to how many there would be without all the actions. Not that I am complacent about that either though as scenarios still exist where it can all go really horribly wrong again, but I wont really expand on that unless there are very strong signs we are heading in that direction.

The dismal stains that like to promote the idea of going back to a far higher degree of normality unless such a death picture reemerges, are inviting us to squander what we have learnt the hard way before. If you downplay case numbers by pointing to the death rate as being all that matters, then thats exactly what you are inviting, a fresh catastrophe. Because by the time you get a notable death spike its too late, because lots of deaths is a sign that there are so many more infections at levels that will take many weeks to suppress. And most authorities arent going to risk letting that scenario develop too far, so these idiots are wasting their time with their appeals.
 
As for the idea that it used to be about deaths and now its all about overreacting to cases, this only covers a few narrow perspectives, the priorities of societies and specific forces within them, etc.

When it comes to actually managing infectious diseases and the epidemiology, its always been about cases and it always will be. Just because we were shit about trying to find all cases in the first months, and that due to rubbish testing capacity people like me had to use the death figures as a proxy for estimating total number of infections, doesnt mean that case numbers were not a highly relevant part of what proper epidemiology would have looked like at the time. They were key to understanding the situation, and large gaps in this area are one of the big reasons our timing was all wrong. Its easy to find government scientific advisor quotes from the first 13 days of March where they expected the peak was months away in the summer, because their understanding of the situation at the time was wrong, because they didnt have a real handle on case numbers at all. Now they also mentioned summer because their original strategy involved a lot less suppression and they thought they'd get the peak to build slowly, but they still fundamentally failed to recognise the stage our epidemic was at back then. Its not just number of cases either, its what you can then do with that data, such as estimate how long its taking the number of infections to double, which is another key bit of data for getting your suppression timing right.
 
And there are all the other complications people can get such as fatigue, scarring of the lungs, increased risk of strokes and so on.
 
Plus I dont feel like letting some talk about NHS capacity pass without mentioning that part of the UK approach to stopping the healthcare system from collapsing involved changing the standards for who was admitted to hospital for a time, and inviting lots of people to deteriorate and die at home, which plenty did.
 
elbows said:
As for the idea that it used to be about deaths and now its all about overreacting to cases, this only covers a few narrow perspectives, the priorities of societies and specific forces within them, etc.

When it comes to actually managing infectious diseases and the epidemiology, its always been about cases and it always will be. Just because we were shit about trying to find all cases in the first months, and that due to rubbish testing capacity people like me had to use the death figures as a proxy for estimating total number of infections, doesnt mean that case numbers were not a highly relevant part of what proper epidemiology would have looked like at the time. They were key to understanding the situation, and large gaps in this area are one of the big reasons our timing was all wrong. Its easy to find government scientific advisor quotes from the first 13 days of March where they expected the peak was months away in the summer, because their understanding of the situation at the time was wrong, because they didnt have a real handle on case numbers at all. Now they also mentioned summer because their original strategy involved a lot less suppression and they thought they'd get the peak to build slowly, but they still fundamentally failed to recognise the stage our epidemic was at back then. Its not just number of cases either, its what you can then do with that data, such as estimate how long its taking the number of infections to double, which is another key bit of data for getting your suppression timing right.
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If thats the case, then why do we not treat all infectious diseases in the same manner? And as for estimates, they were wildly innacurate (and high) because the infection rate was massively over estimated in the same way the mortality rate for case positivity was massively over estimated. Thats been accepted now, but we now we find ourselves panicking over case increases that aren't leading to increases in illness any longer.
 
elbows said:
I am still waiting for details along that front to be tested by reality, because resurgences in various countries so far are not enough of a conclusive test. This is because in most of the resurgences I've seen so far, lots of death is mostly seen in the specific regions/cities/states etc that did not have a full large wave of death the first time round. So I cannot just look at the USAs daily totals for the entire country and draw all the conclusions I need, that wont happen unless somewhere like New York shows a big resurgence in hospital admissions and deaths.
Click to expand...

Oh I just realised that I havent attempted to check Irans figures on a regional level to see if any of their death resurgences happened in places that were also badly affected in their initial wave. I'm not sure I am up for the challenge of trying to find regional death data for Iran over time.
 
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