COVID19

[Son of Mathonwy]

New ONS numbers today...
Up to 29 May, we have:
Positive test UK Covid-19 deaths: 38,593
All UK Covid-19 deaths (ONS number): 50,107
So the total UK number is 30% higher than the government number.

Assuming this ratio holds to date, we have as of 9 Jun:
Positive test UK Covid-19 deaths: 40,883
All UK Covid-19 deaths (extrapolated): 53,080

Ultimately a more important number is the excess deaths for any cause, if we assume Covid-19 is the main driver of the excess.
Recently, the excess deaths per week have approximately equalled the "Covid-19 death certificate" ONS number,
So to estimate the excess deaths to 9 Jun I use the 29 May excess number and add the subsequent estimated ONS number:
Excess deaths compared with 5 year average to 29 May: 63,530
Estimated increase in all UK Covid-19 deaths from 29 May to 9 Jun: 53,080 - 50,107 = 2,973
Therefore:
All UK excess deaths (presumably due to Covid-19) to 9 Jun: 66,503
which is 63% higher than the government number.

[Son of Mathonwy]

Last week's prediction:

Prediction for 29 May (based on 22 May ONS + 29 May gov numbers):
All UK, positive tests only: actual = 38,593
All UK, deaths involving Covid-19: prediction: 51,014
All UK, excess deaths: prediction: 64,324

Comparing with today's actual figures (for 29 May):
All UK, positive tests only: actual = 38,593
All UK, deaths involving Covid-19: prediction: 51,014 actual: 50,107 actual/prediction: -1.8%
All UK, excess deaths: prediction: 64,324 actual: 63,530 actual/prediction: -1.3%

For next week:
Prediction for 5 Jun (based on 29 May ONS + 5 Jun gov numbers):
All UK, positive tests only: actual = 40,261
All UK, deaths involving Covid-19: prediction: 52,273
All UK, excess deaths: prediction: 65,696

[Digby]

Btw I heard today (by a secondary source) that medics are being told to gear up for a fairly imminent second wave and a lot more deaths and full morgues. Arse.

Don't worry, they've cancelled the full partial openings of schools (something that never looked possible to begin with)

[morepork]

Full partial.


Textbook.

[Galfon]

Precursor to Partial Full, moving towards Full Full.

[Stom]

Precursor to Partial Full, moving towards Full Full.

You missed out partial full partial and partial partial full

[morepork]

This is how the Titanic sank isn't it?

[Sandydragon]

Btw I heard today (by a secondary source) that medics are being told to gear up for a fairly imminent second wave and a lot more deaths and full morgues. Arse.

Don't worry, they've cancelled the full partial openings of schools (something that never looked possible to begin with)

Half a day per week per child is the aim at my wife’s school. Or was yesterday, it might have changed.

[Digby]

And to reiterate, you should only drive your child to school if you can't drive and please lick Barnard Castle on the way.

[Digby]

This is how the Titanic sank isn't it?

That was probably because the ship was already on fire (the coal stores anyway) and thus couldn't slow down even if someone did spot a glacier ahead, and that's in no way analogous, simply no underlying problems being ignored here

[Donny osmond]

the forthcoming environmental apocalypse is going to make this little chapter look like a fucking picnic.

Yes it looks increasingly like the 'new normal' will not include many songbirds and rose-scented f@rts..

Locust swarms:
https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... iddle-east

Giant Asian Hornets:
https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/1 ... rch-dorset

'Asian hornets were brought across to Europe by mistake when a container of Chinese pottery holding the insects entered France in 2004.'
..Don't let DT get sight of this !...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/anim ... ed-states/
(This one's added so the entomologist mentioned gets an acknowledgement..)

https://www.conservation.org/blog/racia ... ave-missed

[emoji2957][emoji3061][emoji3062][emoji85][emoji86][emoji87]

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[Donny osmond]

In possible good news???

https://thehill.com/homenews/coronaviru ... -very-rare

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[Galfon]

3-stories-you-may-have-missed

picked a few under the radar, obvs...the global extinction topic possibly deserving of it's own thread.

meanwhile...
things don't seem as bad looking forward here, unless recent slackenings deliver another wave..
Ft.com rolling avg figures, daily to jun 8 >>
( Asia, ME & Afr all on the up - the focus on deaths will soon be moving east..
Swe still an anomaly in Eur. re. rise in cases )

Amer:
US 21508 (steady)
Mex 3810 (incr.)

S.Amer:
Bra 25273 (peaking)
Chil 4812
Per 4237 (peaked)
Col 1407
Arg 849

Eur:
Rus 8826 (steady)
UK 1575 (5066 early may)
Swe 1046

Afr:
SA 2229
Egy 1299

M.East:
Iran 2770 (2nd wave)
SauA 2592
Qat 1675
Iraq 945

Asia:
Ind 9699 (incr.)
Pak 4560
Ban 2659
Afg 738

[Eugene Wrayburn]

In possible good news???

https://thehill.com/homenews/coronaviru ... -very-rare

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Bad news in my view. My great hope was that there was a shit ton of hidden transmission and therefore a large body of people who were unknowingly immune.

[Eugene Wrayburn]

I genuinely don't know where we go from here. R is on the increase through the whole country and is at or near 1 having been as low as 0.4 in London. Current estimates are that about a fifth of new cases are actually being reported and confirmed by testing, so that's a shit ton of infected merrily spreading the virus. Simply ordering a further restrictive lockdown won't work because the public is already in "Fuck you" mode due in no small part to the government indicating that rules don't mean shit. In any event the government have no appetite for that whatsoever so it won't happen unless deaths really rocket. We have no contact tracing worth the name and even people like me who really care about this sort of thing won't download the government's app - I don't trust a fucking word those cunts say any more so I'm not about to hand over a load of data about me to them.

At this point a second spike seems absolutely inevitable to me, even if we keep the restrictions we have and they were being obeyed. I'm reasonably mentally robust and I can't bear the thought of another 3 months of this. However more mass death isn't exactly cheering either.

Someone tell me I'm wrong and that everything is going well. Though I can't promise not to call you a pollyanna fuckwit.

It's fine, it'll all be fine don't worry.

I've no idea what a Pollyanna fuckwit is, so have at it.

At the risk of me being several kinds of fuckwit at once... you shouldn't be so worried about CV-19 because the forthcoming environmental apocalypse is going to make this little chapter look like a fucking picnic.

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That's no help at all because you provide no reason to believe it will be fine

[canta_brian]

I need someone brighter than me to explain how the R number can be calculated and compared (just uk figures) when we change who we test all the time. We started out only testing people we were certain had covid. Now we test lots more. I get that positive tests v all tests will be dropping, but what does that actually mean for how the virus is spreading in the population?

[Donny osmond]

I genuinely don't know where we go from here. R is on the increase through the whole country and is at or near 1 having been as low as 0.4 in London. Current estimates are that about a fifth of new cases are actually being reported and confirmed by testing, so that's a shit ton of infected merrily spreading the virus. Simply ordering a further restrictive lockdown won't work because the public is already in "Fuck you" mode due in no small part to the government indicating that rules don't mean shit. In any event the government have no appetite for that whatsoever so it won't happen unless deaths really rocket. We have no contact tracing worth the name and even people like me who really care about this sort of thing won't download the government's app - I don't trust a fucking word those cunts say any more so I'm not about to hand over a load of data about me to them.

At this point a second spike seems absolutely inevitable to me, even if we keep the restrictions we have and they were being obeyed. I'm reasonably mentally robust and I can't bear the thought of another 3 months of this. However more mass death isn't exactly cheering either.

Someone tell me I'm wrong and that everything is going well. Though I can't promise not to call you a pollyanna fuckwit.

It's fine, it'll all be fine don't worry.

I've no idea what a Pollyanna fuckwit is, so have at it.

At the risk of me being several kinds of fuckwit at once... you shouldn't be so worried about CV-19 because the forthcoming environmental apocalypse is going to make this little chapter look like a fucking picnic.

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That's no help at all because you provide no reason to believe it will be fine

In the immortal words of Tom Cruise in his tour de force, and profoundly philosophical film, Cocktail; everything ends badly, or else it wouldn't end.



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[Eugene Wrayburn]

I need someone brighter than me to explain how the R number can be calculated and compared (just uk figures) when we change who we test all the time. We started out only testing people we were certain had covid. Now we test lots more. I get that positive tests v all tests will be dropping, but what does that actually mean for how the virus is spreading in the population?

It's an estimated figure rather than a calculation as such. I imagine they input the number of positive tests and symptomatic people and hospital admissions.

[morepork]

I need someone brighter than me to explain how the R number can be calculated and compared (just uk figures) when we change who we test all the time. We started out only testing people we were certain had covid. Now we test lots more. I get that positive tests v all tests will be dropping, but what does that actually mean for how the virus is spreading in the population?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6302597/

It is a measure of the probability of transmission (or reproduction) of the pathogen in a population. R1 means one infected individual can be predicted to transmit the pathogen to one other individual. It is not a biological constant and relies on complex mathematical modeling of social and viral life cycle variables. Changes in any one variable will impact the R0 value. Calculation requires accurate raw data for all variables, so good luck and god speed with the R0 estimate in whatever dysfunctional society you happen to be stranded in at present

[Eugene Wrayburn]

https://www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/ ... d-kingdom/

By coincidence today the Stats Regulators have a report on the presentation.

[Banquo]

In possible good news???

https://thehill.com/homenews/coronaviru ... -very-rare

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Bad news in my view. My great hope was that there was a shit ton of hidden transmission and therefore a large body of people who were unknowingly immune.

There is some talk of natural immunity, which is/was my great hope. I'm not sure that anyone is sure that being infected does make you immune as yet, unless I've missed that.

This is the issue with a novel virus I suppose; anyone else a little bemused when Edmunds from SAGE said, I paraphrase, we didn't have a clue what was going on in early March (the same interview when he talked about earlier lockdown would have saved live, but there was no evidence for doing so at the time?). I think there was plenty of useful information from around the world at that point- (as opposed to 'evidence'). As we discussed the other day, I'm not sure the right questions were being asked at that point.

[Digby]

Someone tell me I'm wrong and that everything is going well. Though I can't promise not to call you a pollyanna fuckwit.

Not everything, but if you have a ill-conceived idea made worse through development of the product you can claim will help you can probably make a lot of money right now, so swings and roundabouts

[Digby]

Someone tell me I'm wrong and that everything is going well. Though I can't promise not to call you a pollyanna fuckwit.

Not everything, but if you have a ill-conceived idea made worse through development of the product you can claim will help you can probably make a lot of money right now, so swings and roundabouts

About 5 minutes after noting that I was listening to More or Less, and credit where credit is due, Roche are certainly in there making some money

[Galfon]

In possible good news???

https://thehill.com/homenews/coronaviru ... -very-rare

hope so - 'possible' the keyword here. (It's from WHO / unpublished data, conflcting with early research from China):

'...Such undocumented cases are still contagious and the study found them to be the source of most of the virus’s spread in China before the restrictions came in. Even though these people were only 55 per cent as contagious as people with symptoms, the study found that they were the source of 79 per cent of further infections, due to there being more of them, and the higher likelihood that they were out and about.'

https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... ve-got-it/

[Sandydragon]

In possible good news???

https://thehill.com/homenews/coronaviru ... -very-rare

hope so - 'possible' the keyword here. (It's from WHO / unpublished data, conflcting with early research from China):

'...Such undocumented cases are still contagious and the study found them to be the source of most of the virus’s spread in China before the restrictions came in. Even though these people were only 55 per cent as contagious as people with symptoms, the study found that they were the source of 79 per cent of further infections, due to there being more of them, and the higher likelihood that they were out and about.'

https://www.newscientist.com/article/22 ... ve-got-it/

Some reports in the media today that the virus was hitting Chinese hospitals back in August.

I suspect that there will be many unresolved questions in the aftermath of this.