cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

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Woodchopper
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Oct 18, 2021 8:38 am

lpm wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 9:19 pm
bob sterman wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:41 pm
Woodchopper wrote:
Sun Oct 17, 2021 7:10 pm
John Burn-Murdoch thread on why UK cases and deaths are so much higher than other parts of Europe.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status ... 39176?s=20

tl;dr much more indoor mixing in the UK, and the UK's speedier vaccination programme means that immunity is waning sooner.
As an AstraZeneca recipient this offers me no comfort - but it could also be partly due to the vaccine mix used for different age groups (as John Burn-Murdoch also suggests).
This Burn-Murdoch thing is surely 100% wrong.

Looking down at the entire population there's a huge variation in types and timing. And it's applied to vastly different ages and DNA types.

It's basically flat as a result. There's no curves or slopes in any VE chart.

And the case load is very heavily skewed to unvaccinated children, plus young people with recent doses, where waning is irrelevant.

I don't think the question "UK cases and deaths are so much higher than other parts of Europe" needs any other answer apart from we unlocked fully at 50,000 and we plateaued pretty much there (apart from the weird drop to 30,000 and minor ups and downs since).
I don't think you read the thread, as it doesn't call for a new lockdown.

Waning will though increase, so if not countered by booster vaccines we can expect the case numbers to grow. Which they have been for a while now. So as you write the most important thing is to speed up the booster programmes. Burn-Murdoch also mentions wearing masks in crowded indoor areas.

Burn-Murdoch also mentions long-term structural things like better sick leave so people can afford to self isolate, and reducing poverty among the elderly. Which would be good things anyway.

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lpm
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by lpm » Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:51 am

I read the thread. I think you misunderstood it.

The UK experience vs other countries can be entirely explained by starting point case load at unlockdown.

As BoaF said, Portugal continued with some lockdown even while their cases carried on falling well below ours. We have plateaued at our level, they will plateau at theirs (both with oscillations and minor waves).

We don't need to go off hunting for alternative explanations. It's not early vaccination plus waning thats the UK problem.
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bob sterman
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by bob sterman » Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:35 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:51 am
The UK experience vs other countries can be entirely explained by starting point case load at unlockdown.
Consistent with this is the fact that - yes UK case numbers are higher, and UK death numbers are higher (both per million people).

But if you look at the CFR for the UK, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain & Italy (as in confirmed deaths / confirmed cases) it is the lowest of the group...

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co ... RT~ESP~ITA

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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by sTeamTraen » Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:49 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:51 am
We don't need to go off hunting for alternative explanations. It's not early vaccination plus waning thats the UK problem.
JBM's chart compared the UK with Germany, Italy, France, and Spain.

All of those have higher vaccination rates than the UK, and the effect of subtracting from 100 means that their unvaccinated percentages are substantially lower than the UK's.

Three of those countries have a Covid passport certificate requirement for many activities, including indoor dining (or even outdoor dining, in France). Spain mostly doesn't require a certificate to go out in public, apart from nightclubs, but it has close to 100% indoor mask adherence, including in schools.

So I don't think it's waning vaccine effectiveness either. Nor do I think it's the UK's greater use of the AZ vaccine, although here I will declare a motivated reasoning conflict of interest as I am one of the relatively small proportion of Spanish residents who had AZ.
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by Woodchopper » Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:58 am

sTeamTraen wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:49 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:51 am
We don't need to go off hunting for alternative explanations. It's not early vaccination plus waning thats the UK problem.
JBM's chart compared the UK with Germany, Italy, France, and Spain.

All of those have higher vaccination rates than the UK, and the effect of subtracting from 100 means that their unvaccinated percentages are substantially lower than the UK's.

Three of those countries have a Covid passport certificate requirement for many activities, including indoor dining (or even outdoor dining, in France). Spain mostly doesn't require a certificate to go out in public, apart from nightclubs, but it has close to 100% indoor mask adherence, including in schools.

So I don't think it's waning vaccine effectiveness either. Nor do I think it's the UK's greater use of the AZ vaccine, although here I will declare a motivated reasoning conflict of interest as I am one of the relatively small proportion of Spanish residents who had AZ.
You can add Italy to places where a green pass and mask are needed to go into any indoor public space.

On the other hand, Norway removed all restrictions, almost no one wears masks and cases carried on falling. But maybe its an outlier.

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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by lpm » Mon Oct 18, 2021 11:51 am

bob sterman wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:35 am
lpm wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 9:51 am
The UK experience vs other countries can be entirely explained by starting point case load at unlockdown.
Consistent with this is the fact that - yes UK case numbers are higher, and UK death numbers are higher (both per million people).

But if you look at the CFR for the UK, Germany, France, Portugal, Spain & Italy (as in confirmed deaths / confirmed cases) it is the lowest of the group...

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co ... RT~ESP~ITA
That must be IFR to CFR ratio. The UK is still frantically testing for no good reason. We should return to testing at any touch point with health services.
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by Herainestold » Mon Oct 18, 2021 6:55 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Mon Oct 18, 2021 10:58 am
On the other hand, Norway removed all restrictions, almost no one wears masks and cases carried on falling. But maybe its an outlier.
Or maybe it hasn't had enough time yet. Wait till a few Brits have visited and seeded a new wave.
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by shpalman » Fri Nov 12, 2021 6:48 pm

There's a covid outbreak amongst the Milan municipal police, set off at a dinner celebrating the retirement of a colleague. 12 infected (all vaccinated) with no severe symptoms, 60 in self-isolation.

It's a bit like when people would catch it at funerals, setting off a kind of chain reaction. But not.
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by Herainestold » Mon Nov 15, 2021 8:18 pm

PM refuses to rule out a Christmas lockdown.
In a briefing at Downing Street on Monday, the Prime Minister spoke about rumours that tighter measures would be put in place across the country in the lead up to Christmas and the colder winter months ahead.

Although he said that he "doesn't see anything in the current data" to suggest that the country needs to go to 'Plan B', he added that the government "clearly cannot rule anything out".

When asked by the BBC's Fergus Walsh about the possibility of further restrictions or even a Christmas lockdown, Johnson explained that the government "don't see anything in the current data that leads us to think that we need to go to Plan B, which is several steps short of a lockdown but nonetheless would require further restrictions.

"We don't see anything in the data that says we have to go now to Plan B, but clearly we cannot rule anything out."
https://www.joe.co.uk/news/boris-johnso ... ars-300204
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by sTeamTraen » Sat Nov 20, 2021 8:31 pm

I've been and gone and done some numbers.

1. The 14-day moving average of UK Covid cases since 22 July, when the first spike of the current wave peaked, which I think we can regard as the start of what the government would probably argue is a steady-state situation. The regression line corresponds to an additional 113.6 new cases per day since that peak.

c.png
c.png (8.36 KiB) Viewed 1624 times
2. The same but for deaths. I didn't adjust for the delay between cases and deaths by adding 14 days or whatever to 22 July. Here the regression line shows a mean of 0.7 new deaths-per-day, per day.

d.png
d.png (12.2 KiB) Viewed 1624 times

So while the growth is not exponential, there seems to be a solid upward trend. And daily cases per head in the UK are still above quite a few of the "spike" values in many European countries that the media are getting all excited about, never mind the area under the curve for a "wave" that has lasted more than 4 months now. "Things are getting bad" is a headline; "Things are still sh.t" isn't. (To be fair, things are getting very sh.t in Austria and the Netherlands, and have been extremely sh.t in Bulgaria and Romania for some time.)

However, I must acknowledge that I have been a little bit skeptical of previous attempts, both on this forum and elsewhere, to apply linear modelling to Covid statistics (notably because of the non-independence of time-series observations), so caveat lector etc.
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by shpalman » Mon Nov 29, 2021 6:01 pm

Javid claims many European countries wish they had followed England in abandoning most Covid rules in summer

Why, so that we could have had 10,000 extra deaths? Countries with decent vaccination coverage are maybe peaking now at similar case rates to the UK.
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Re: cOVID_19 the unreunrelockdown

Post by nezumi » Mon Nov 29, 2021 6:07 pm

shpalman wrote:
Mon Nov 29, 2021 6:01 pm
Javid claims many European countries wish they had followed England in abandoning most Covid rules in summer

Why, so that we could have had 10,000 extra deaths? Countries with decent vaccination coverage are maybe peaking now at similar case rates to the UK.
Which SPECIFIC ONES JAVID? EH? Eh? Which ones? Name one. Go on. I bet you can't. Just one, Javid. Fiver says you can't.

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