Re: COVID-19
Posted: Wed May 13, 2020 1:18 pm
I feel for those poor folks having to crowd onto public transport... in news clips of other countries they're handing out masks at stations. Is that happening in the UK? If not then why not?
It would appear from the comments on that articale that they set up the national testing service without thinking too hard about who might need access to the results within the NHS.So Delloitte et al have corralled their data seperately in some sort of 'health data must be private' tower, instead of using the usual channels that funnel test results to GPs, public health officials and various other bits of the NHS that might actually need to know these things.
It's bizarre that masks aren't compulsory in so many of these situations where social distancing is impossible. You don't even need to hand them out for free, just mandate that everybody gets them and wears them.
I’m not disagreeing, but we are also looking at the limits of what the UK government is capable of doing. It seems to be unable to cope with more than a few things at once.
They are mandatory in the NetherlandsBird on a Fire wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 2:42 pmIt's bizarre that masks aren't compulsory in so many of these situations where social distancing is impossible. You don't even need to hand them out for free, just mandate that everybody gets them and wears them.
As well as making masks compulsory, Portugal made all public transport free to reduce close contacts with staff. That's what a country that gives a sh.t about workers would look like.
FIFYWoodchopper wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 3:19 pmI’m not disagreeing, but we are also looking at the limits of what this UK government is capable of doing. It seems to be unable to cope with more than a few things at once.
I found it easiest to go through DHSCgovuk's twitter feed.raven wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 2:13 pmThey've changed the format of the gov.uk data page again, here, so it
- includes smaller areas - Lower Tier Local Authorities
- gives both total cases (to date I assume) and rate per 100,000,
Plus there's a pretty colour-coded map.
- and you can order it by those too
I must be being thick today though. I can't work out Tuesday's cases.
Hey folks
We're going to create a temporary subforum just for various covid discussion threads. This will apply only to the threads in Nerd Lab/Weighty Matters, not Relaxation Station. This subforum will be indexed in the same way as NL/WM, and the aim is just to allow folk who want to discuss other stuff to do so without seeing 20 covid threads.
How? Please don't say we're going to start doing multiple regression.Woodchopper wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 1:10 pmIf if someone is trying to work out the best means to deal with infection it might be useful to compare two or more countries. It would be easy to control for things like population density.
They should just take the EPD approach to the silliness of gendered nouns and pick one at random each time it's used. It's faster, has less memory requirement and has the excellent secondary effect of irritating the French.shpalman wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2020 7:50 pmImportant epidemiological news, the French have discovered that covid is female.
Tx. We are seeing if we can expose a dashboard with a range of pivotable Covid metrics, but it's probably a bit clunky still for that.El Pollo Diablo wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2020 8:42 amI should say, bjn - and sorry for not saying sooner - that it's great that you're trying to make the data/analysis etc available, I was just picking at one particular aspect that chimed with something I'd just written. But the overall aims are good though
It looks like lots of things affect the IFR - eg whether healthcare services are overwhelmed (not just ventilators but also whether people in care homes get treated), proportion of over 70s in the population, proportion of people with chronic conditions.PeteB wrote: ↑Thu May 14, 2020 7:51 amStarting to worry that IFR is at the high end
https://twitter.com/jamesannan/status/1 ... 7318436864
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931Only a third of the excess deaths seen in the community in England and Wales can be explained by covid-19, new data have shown.
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) data,1 which cover deaths in hospitals, care homes, private homes, hospices, and elsewhere, show that 6035 people died as a result of suspected or confirmed covid-19 infection in England and Wales in the week ending 1 May 2020 (where deaths were registered up to 9 May), a decline of 2202 from the previous week.
Although the number of deaths in care homes has fallen for the second week in a row, more covid related deaths are being reported in care homes than in hospitals and are tailing off more slowly.
However, David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge, said that covid-19 did not explain the high number of deaths taking place in the community.
At a briefing hosted by the Science Media Centre on 12 May he explained that, over the past five weeks, care homes and other community settings had had to deal with a “staggering burden” of 30 000 more deaths than would normally be expected, as patients were moved out of hospitals that were anticipating high demand for beds.
Of those 30 000, only 10 000 have had covid-19 specified on the death certificate. While Spiegelhalter acknowledged that some of these “excess deaths” might be the result of underdiagnosis, “the huge number of unexplained extra deaths in homes and care homes is extraordinary. When we look back . . . this rise in non-covid extra deaths outside the hospital is something I hope will be given really severe attention.”
He added that many of these deaths would be among people “who may well have lived longer if they had managed to get to hospital.”