Re: COVID-19
Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2020 10:47 am
No no no no no. The exact opposite. It's the "proper models" that have given the illusion of knowing more than we do. It's R that gives the clarity.
lpm wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 11:05 amNo no no no no. The exact opposite. It's the "proper models" that have given the illusion of knowing more than we do. It's R that gives the clarity.
Why do we need a proper model, for practical action terms?
All we need to know is currently cases are going up. Significantly so.
Therefore LockdownLevel(8Oct) < LockdownLevel(cases not going up). Significantly so.
Therefore we need to increase LockdownLevel significantly...
Actual paper:The study, reported in Clinical Epidemiology, analysed the symptoms described by more than 36,000 people who were tested between April and June. Only 115 tests came back positive and of those only 27 people, or 23.5%, had symptoms of any description.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/ ... in-22-daysThe number of coronavirus patients in intensive care in the north of England will surpass the April peak if infections continue rising at the current rate, MPs have been warned in a briefing chaired by Chris Whitty and a minister.
MPs were also shown early research by Public Health England suggesting that bars, pubs and restaurants accounted for 41% of cases in which two or more under-30s had visited the same venue in the week before testing positive. This fell to a quarter of infections across all age groups, the MPs were told.
Can't remember which thread now but I posted a paper that followed up 'asymptomatics'. It was a tiny number of people in the study, mind. iirc 10 of the 13 asymptos were actually presymptomatic and developed symptoms within ?7 days.badger wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:39 pmMeanwhile...
Eye catching headline: outbreak Covid: more than 80% of positive UK cases in study had no core symptoms
Some detail:
Actual paper:The study, reported in Clinical Epidemiology, analysed the symptoms described by more than 36,000 people who were tested between April and June. Only 115 tests came back positive and of those only 27 people, or 23.5%, had symptoms of any description.
https://www.dovepress.com/three-quarter ... ticle-CLEP
Does this chime with what is known already in terms of percentage asymptomatic population? And is there anything other than guesswork about transmission by asymptomatics (rather than presymptomatics)?
Ugh, seen stuff going around with people commenting about number of 'symptomless' cases meaning Covid isn't a risk etc etc, not great eh.jdc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 6:49 pmCan't remember which thread now but I posted a paper that followed up 'asymptomatics'. It was a tiny number of people in the study, mind. iirc 10 of the 13 asymptos were actually presymptomatic and developed symptoms within ?7 days.badger wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:39 pmMeanwhile...
Eye catching headline: outbreak Covid: more than 80% of positive UK cases in study had no core symptoms
Some detail:
Actual paper:The study, reported in Clinical Epidemiology, analysed the symptoms described by more than 36,000 people who were tested between April and June. Only 115 tests came back positive and of those only 27 people, or 23.5%, had symptoms of any description.
https://www.dovepress.com/three-quarter ... ticle-CLEP
Does this chime with what is known already in terms of percentage asymptomatic population? And is there anything other than guesswork about transmission by asymptomatics (rather than presymptomatics)?
headline should end "on the day of the test"
Yes it should and I can't believe that it's not in the article or in the paper (as much as I've scanned). I had misread it on the assumption that if it's just on the day of the test that it doesn't tell us much, so why bother reporting it? Thankfully (for me, but probably not for anyone else!) I posted on here as my critical faculties were clearly on the blink.jdc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 6:49 pmCan't remember which thread now but I posted a paper that followed up 'asymptomatics'. It was a tiny number of people in the study, mind. iirc 10 of the 13 asymptos were actually presymptomatic and developed symptoms within ?7 days.badger wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 1:39 pmMeanwhile...
Eye catching headline: outbreak Covid: more than 80% of positive UK cases in study had no core symptoms
Some detail:
Actual paper:The study, reported in Clinical Epidemiology, analysed the symptoms described by more than 36,000 people who were tested between April and June. Only 115 tests came back positive and of those only 27 people, or 23.5%, had symptoms of any description.
https://www.dovepress.com/three-quarter ... ticle-CLEP
Does this chime with what is known already in terms of percentage asymptomatic population? And is there anything other than guesswork about transmission by asymptomatics (rather than presymptomatics)?
headline should end "on the day of the test"
The phrase "on the day of the test" appears four times in the Results paragraph of the Abstract of the paper, and the Conclusions paragraph focuses on the fact that "Having no symptoms doesn't mean no infection". This seems quite responsible to me, so the spin is probably either at the level of the UCL press office or the media outlets.badger wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 7:44 pmYes it should and I can't believe that it's not in the article or in the paper (as much as I've scanned). I had misread it on the assumption that if it's just on the day of the test that it doesn't tell us much, so why bother reporting it? Thankfully (for me, but probably not for anyone else!) I posted on here as my critical faculties were clearly on the blink.jdc wrote: ↑Thu Oct 08, 2020 6:49 pmCan't remember which thread now but I posted a paper that followed up 'asymptomatics'. It was a tiny number of people in the study, mind. iirc 10 of the 13 asymptos were actually presymptomatic and developed symptoms within ?7 days.
headline should end "on the day of the test"
In this latest work, the authors look for the intersection of these stories: pre-existing autoantibodies in coronavirus patients that neutralize one or more types of interferon. The results are striking: in 1,227 healthy controls, four patients were found to have such antibodies. In 663 patients with mild coronavirus infections, none were found at all. But in 987 severely ill patients, at least 101 of them had such antibodies against at least one of the Type I interferons (!) I hope that those four people identified in the first cohort are taking precautions, was my first thought, because it certainly looks like they in a newly identified risk group. Those numbers come out to p-values of less than ten to the minus sixteenth, which means that we all pretty much have to stand up take take off our hats – this one’s real. The anti-interferon antibody patients also skewed older, which suggests that the levels go up over the years (exactly what you don’t want, honestly).
And it's not like there was anything in China in late January that might have done the same.Bird on a Fire wrote: ↑Fri Oct 09, 2020 1:13 pmLuckily there's nothing happening in mid-December that might cause people to move long-distance and mingle.
That p value is presumably for the 3x2 chi square, and you can see from a simple visual inspection that it's going to be homeopathic. (The 10^-16 thing just means that the software gave up; my guess is that it's a lot smaller than that.) But you still have 876 out of 977 severely ill patients without these antibodies. So it would seem to be explaining only 10-12% of the variance in outcome (which, granted, is still nice to have), and we don't know what other interactions are going on.jimbob wrote: ↑Fri Oct 09, 2020 1:29 pmJust catching up on the In the pipeline blog and this was interesting on Interferon and especially those wit antibodies to interferons
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/a ... oronavirus
In this latest work, the authors look for the intersection of these stories: pre-existing autoantibodies in coronavirus patients that neutralize one or more types of interferon. The results are striking: in 1,227 healthy controls, four patients were found to have such antibodies. In 663 patients with mild coronavirus infections, none were found at all. But in 987 severely ill patients, at least 101 of them had such antibodies against at least one of the Type I interferons (!) I hope that those four people identified in the first cohort are taking precautions, was my first thought, because it certainly looks like they in a newly identified risk group. Those numbers come out to p-values of less than ten to the minus sixteenth, which means that we all pretty much have to stand up take take off our hats – this one’s real. The anti-interferon antibody patients also skewed older, which suggests that the levels go up over the years (exactly what you don’t want, honestly).
Unless they are the ones with high levels; in which case restricting their movements will be a gross infringement of civil liberty.sTeamTraen wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 4:18 pm
But I bet that when Toby Young and co get hold of this, we'll hear "Test people for this and lock up the ones who have high levels, so I can go to the pub".
A quick eyeballing suggests to me that the death rate is climbing faster than the case rate - which suggests the cases are being undercounted and the ratio is getting worsesTeamTraen wrote: ↑Tue Oct 13, 2020 4:41 pm143 deaths reported in the UK today - the highest single-day total since 11 June.
More concerning, though, is the way that the 7-day moving average of deaths is very closely tracking the 7-day moving average of new cases, with a lag that looks like 30-40 days --- far longer than in the first wave. (Image by me with data from ECDC; apologies for the clunky X-axis with arbitrary start point.)
It seems to me that one possible explanation of this is that the schoolkids or young pub drinkers who get infected at T0 pass it on to their parents at T1 and their older relatives at T2, cf. the heatmaps that we've had here recently. (In the first wave that presumably also happened, but we didn't know about it because the T0 and T1 people mostly didn't get tested.) If that continues, we'll be looking at 1000 deaths per day this time next month.
UK.png
Have you got an example you can share of the sort of use case you have in mind? It’s just that the set of problems for which Excel is terrible but Access would be great is rather small tbh.Grumble wrote: ↑Mon Oct 05, 2020 12:19 pmI rely on excel for all sorts of stuff that a database would be better for, but I can’t get training in databases and we keep going “how much” when we get quotes. So it never gets sorted. I’ve tried to teach myself Access but I can’t get my head round it. It’s like the instructions are written in a foreign language.