COVID-19

Discussions about serious topics, for serious people
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TopBadger
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Re: COVID-19

Post by TopBadger » 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?
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Re: COVID-19

Post by plodder » Wed May 13, 2020 1:23 pm

Because people like Hancock and Johnson are actually as cynical as they appear to be?

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Re: COVID-19

Post by lpm » Wed May 13, 2020 1:32 pm

Because there's no need for masks if you stay alert.
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raven
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Re: COVID-19

Post by raven » Wed May 13, 2020 2:13 pm

They'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,
  • and you can order it by those too
Plus there's a pretty colour-coded map.

I must be being thick today though. I can't work out Tuesday's cases. Total for the UK is given as 3403. If I scroll over the graph of daily cases in England by specimen date, those are spread over the last six columns and those numbers (98+205+167+302+239+71) give a total of only 1082.

So Scotland, NI and Wales must have the remaining 2,321 cases then?

Wales seems to be reporting a new daily positve test number of 133. Huh?

I looked at the Scottish data pages but they don't seem to report by daily cases. I can download the data here, https://www.gov.scot/publications/coron ... aily-data/ and get cumulative positive test results, which for the last few days are given as:
11/05 -13,627
12/05 -13,763
13/05 -13,929

Not sure how they've got figures for today, so I assume the change between the last two would be Tuesday's figures. That's only 166. So that must be just the in-house NHSScotland testing, and I'm guessing it doesn't include data from national testing. Or something.

Ah, it is. Good old NI has figures for 11th broken down into 44 tested by HSC labs and 564 from national testing. So I'm guessing Scotland and Wales are reporting their in-house tests, and there's a similar chunk of extra cases from teh national test.

Geez. Having everything fragmented like that makes it a nightmare to collate data.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by raven » Wed May 13, 2020 2:23 pm

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.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 13, 2020 2:42 pm

TopBadger wrote:
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'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.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Opti » Wed May 13, 2020 2:53 pm

It certainly does appear to be the case that other European countries care, just a bit more, about their citizenry.
Just my subjective opinion, mind.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed May 13, 2020 2:56 pm

I think there's a time and a place for a "nanny state" type approach, and it's probably about now.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Wed May 13, 2020 3:19 pm

Opti wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 2:53 pm
It certainly does appear to be the case that other European countries care, just a bit more, about their citizenry.
Just my subjective opinion, mind.
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.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by JQH » Wed May 13, 2020 4:04 pm

Johnson didn't seem capable of sorting out his personal life AND dealing with the pandemic.

And as for Brexit ...
And remember that if you botch the exit, the carnival of reaction may be coming to a town near you.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by tom p » Wed May 13, 2020 4:18 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 2:42 pm
TopBadger wrote:
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'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.
They are mandatory in the Netherlands

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Re: COVID-19

Post by tom p » Wed May 13, 2020 4:18 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 3:19 pm
Opti wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 2:53 pm
It certainly does appear to be the case that other European countries care, just a bit more, about their citizenry.
Just my subjective opinion, mind.
I’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.
FIFY

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Re: COVID-19

Post by shpalman » Wed May 13, 2020 4:57 pm

raven wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 2:13 pm
They'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,
  • and you can order it by those too
Plus there's a pretty colour-coded map.

I must be being thick today though. I can't work out Tuesday's cases.
I found it easiest to go through DHSCgovuk's twitter feed.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by Stephanie » Wed May 13, 2020 5:07 pm

Bit of housekeeping. Thread is in Admin helpdesk, but thought this would be the best place to point it out.

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1239
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.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by sTeamTraen » Wed May 13, 2020 6:16 pm

Woodchopper wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 1:10 pm
If 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.
How? Please don't say we're going to start doing multiple regression.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by shpalman » Wed May 13, 2020 7:50 pm

Important epidemiological news, the French have discovered that covid is female.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by PeteB » Thu May 14, 2020 7:51 am

Starting to worry that IFR is at the high end

https://twitter.com/jamesannan/status/1 ... 7318436864

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Re: COVID-19

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Thu May 14, 2020 8:36 am

shpalman wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 7:50 pm
Important epidemiological news, the French have discovered that covid is female.
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.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by El Pollo Diablo » Thu May 14, 2020 8:42 am

I 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 :)
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Re: COVID-19

Post by bjn » Thu May 14, 2020 8:58 am

El Pollo Diablo wrote:
Thu May 14, 2020 8:42 am
I 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 :)
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.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 14, 2020 9:59 am

PeteB wrote:
Thu May 14, 2020 7:51 am
Starting to worry that IFR is at the high end

https://twitter.com/jamesannan/status/1 ... 7318436864
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.

So some places are going to be higher then others.

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Woodchopper » Thu May 14, 2020 7:27 pm

Only 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.”
https://www.bmj.com/content/369/bmj.m1931

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Re: COVID-19

Post by Little waster » Thu May 14, 2020 10:43 pm

Brexiteer rent-a-numpty Luke Johnson is on QT right now.

He seems a bit annoyed that a forum for politicians to debate current events in the midst of a global pandemic, where the public health system is front and centre, only has 20% of its guests who are private sector entrepreneurs. Because having 4 of the 5 guests just like him would be a lot more informative.

Unsurprisingly he is of the opinion that half a million COVID deaths in a matter of weeks would be a price worth paying to keep Patisserie Valerie* open something something Sweden.

Unlike him I’m no economic expert so I imagine there is no economic downside to having millions of people deathly ill at the same time and people dying faster than we can bury them.

*what’s that you say. Collapsed due to massive fraudulent accountancy practices. Oh dear.
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Re: COVID-19

Post by PeteB » Fri May 15, 2020 7:18 am


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Re: COVID-19

Post by Vertigowooyay » Fri May 15, 2020 7:30 am

Absolutely raging at the front page of the Mail this morning.
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E9D0E70C-7266-4F1A-8713-0CC4733A05E5.jpeg (151.27 KiB) Viewed 3762 times
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