Covid-19 the unlockdown

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AMS
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by AMS » Sun Jun 28, 2020 5:06 pm

So the government are talking about maybe, possibly, at some point, potentially imposing a local lockdown in Leicester. Haven't we learnt yet that if it needs doing, you act quickly? And don't give people loads of notice so that everyone drives out of town.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by raven » Sun Jun 28, 2020 5:45 pm

Talking about Leicester....

I've just spent an hour faffing about with the Covid data you can download of the gov.uk site, looking at cases in Leicester and Leicestershire. The numbers do not match all the news reports of 650 odd cases in Leicester in the first two weeks of June. There's only been an increase of 143 in the whole of June.

Where the hell do the press get those figures? I assume their numbers are right and it's just that the nice public facing gov.uk dashboard isn't showing cases under the right areas...

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Woodchopper » Sun Jun 28, 2020 6:18 pm

Big increase in Texas Covid hospital admissions.
https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates ... lizations/
Texas Medical Center hospitals have stopped reporting key metrics showing the stress rising numbers of COVID-19 patients are placing on their facilities, undermining data that policy makers and the public have relied upon during the pandemic to gauge the spread of the coronavirus.

The change came one day after the hospitals reported their base intensive care capacity had hit 100 percent for the first time during the pandemic, with projections showing the institutions — which together comprise the world’s largest medical complex — were on pace to exceed their “unsustainable surge capacity” by July 6.
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/h ... 372256.php

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:37 pm

Build the wall!
Build the wall!
Build the wall!
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by EllyCat » Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:47 pm

raven wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 5:45 pm
Talking about Leicester....

I've just spent an hour faffing about with the Covid data you can download of the gov.uk site, looking at cases in Leicester and Leicestershire. The numbers do not match all the news reports of 650 odd cases in Leicester in the first two weeks of June. There's only been an increase of 143 in the whole of June.

Where the hell do the press get those figures? I assume their numbers are right and it's just that the nice public facing gov.uk dashboard isn't showing cases under the right areas...
News today mentioning specific areas and schools affected gives places in the South-South West of the city rather than the East initially mentioned. It’s a different demographic in the new area (although still poor and high proportion BAME it’s a bit more ethnically diverse). So perhaps they have access to ward-level data rather than council-level data, and the spike only shows at higher data resolution?

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by discovolante » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:26 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:37 pm
Build the wall!
Build the wall!
Build the wall!
Rebuild...we can take some stragglers ;)
To defy the laws of tradition is a crusade only of the brave.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by raven » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:42 pm

EllyCat wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 7:47 pm
raven wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 5:45 pm
Talking about Leicester....

I've just spent an hour faffing about with the Covid data you can download of the gov.uk site, looking at cases in Leicester and Leicestershire. The numbers do not match all the news reports of 650 odd cases in Leicester in the first two weeks of June. There's only been an increase of 143 in the whole of June.

Where the hell do the press get those figures? I assume their numbers are right and it's just that the nice public facing gov.uk dashboard isn't showing cases under the right areas...
News today mentioning specific areas and schools affected gives places in the South-South West of the city rather than the East initially mentioned. It’s a different demographic in the new area (although still poor and high proportion BAME it’s a bit more ethnically diverse). So perhaps they have access to ward-level data rather than council-level data, and the spike only shows at higher data resolution?
I dunno.

The gov.uk data is sorted by Local Authority, both upper and lower tiers. Page is here, but it just shows cumulative cases,deaths and rates. (What use a cumulative rate is, I'm not sure. Current rate would be more useful) You have to download a csv file to see the daily numbers.

Afaics, the relevant areas would be Leicester and Leicestershire. Unless people are commuting long distances & live a county over? Or, y'know, the tests have been done at one of the national testing centres being run by Serco et all, and so haven't been assigned to a Local Authority.

I think it's that last one because daily UK cases are still running at 800-900ish, but the graph for England is only showing a 7-day average of about 300 new cases a day. So either Scotland/N.Ireland/Wales are being disproportionately hit, or a big wodge of cases haven't been assigned to an area.

I'm finding it slightly worrying that the gov.uk data is so unclear at a local level. I see they're about to change the data they put out AGAIN, but by the looks of it with less local data than there is now. And even the NHSEngland data page now redirects to the gov.uk one. It's like they don't want us to know what's going on...

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by EllyCat » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:17 pm

raven wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:42 pm
Afaics, the relevant areas would be Leicester and Leicestershire. Unless people are commuting long distances & live a county over? Or, y'know, the tests have been done at one of the national testing centres being run by Serco et all, and so haven't been assigned to a Local Authority.
Both “East Leicester” originally reported and “North Evington” (ie SW Leicester) reported today would be in the Leicester Local Authority. The switch to Leicestershire LA is more or less where the houses get bigger and more expensive, although there’s plenty of commuting between the two there’s far less commuting from another county. So yeah, Serco.
raven wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:42 pm
It's like they don't want us to know what's going on...
It’d be really embarrassing if a bunch of nerds with spreadsheets were better at mapping pandemics than the government again, wouldn’t it...

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by AMS » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:23 pm

The publicly accessible data on location is likely to be much lower resolution than what the health authorities are working from, not least because there are confidentiality issues involved, and anonymising to local authority level sounds like a reasonable choice on how to release numbers to a website in a GDPR-friendly way.

But for tracking outbreaks, they surely must know the home address for every case, and it doesn't make sense to throw away this data when looking for emerging clusters.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by jimbob » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:49 pm

Nice tweet with links to lots of data - here because of the Sweden map:

https://twitter.com/ECDC_EU/status/1276 ... 83209?s=20
Have you considered stupidity as an explanation

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by shpalman » Mon Jun 29, 2020 6:23 am

raven wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:42 pm
... the tests have been done at one of the national testing centres being run by Serco et all, and so haven't been assigned to a Local Authority.

I think it's that last one because daily UK cases are still running at 800-900ish, but the graph for England is only showing a 7-day average of about 300 new cases a day. So either Scotland/N.Ireland/Wales are being disproportionately hit, or a big wodge of cases haven't been assigned to an area...
Wales is running at about 50 cases per day, Scotland less than 20, NI less than 5.

So, yeah... Serco. If you add together the numbers for England/Scotland/N.Ireland/Wales you get about 100,000 less than the official number for the UK.
having that swing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it meaning a thing
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by shpalman » Mon Jun 29, 2020 6:26 am

having that swing is a necessary but not sufficient condition for it meaning a thing
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Gentleman Jim » Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:10 pm

If Crown Estates owns a majority of the seashore, why not just get Betty to rescind the right of the public to use it ;)
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by raven » Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:58 pm

EllyCat wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:17 pm
raven wrote:
Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:42 pm
It's like they don't want us to know what's going on...
It’d be really embarrassing if a bunch of nerds with spreadsheets were better at mapping pandemics than the government again, wouldn’t it...
Oh, you mean the Taiwanese approach. Where the government actually invites a bunch of nerds to come up with solutions because open communication and collaboration between private citizens and government shows said government trusts its own people.

(I love Audrey Tang. Just watched an interview with her & she has the right idea about this stuff.)

ETA: Blooming heck, they're reporting 866 case now. Thanks for those links shpalman.

ETA2: Of course, if the Serco tests haven't been counted in the publicly available LA level data, then I can't tell if that 866 cases (over 3 or 4 weeks I guess?) is actually a huge increase for Leicester or not.

I just hope that Serco is collecting enough address data PHE is getting a clear picture of where the cases are. Because they weren't at first.
Last edited by raven on Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by AMS » Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:05 pm

Gentleman Jim wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:10 pm
If Crown Estates owns a majority of the seashore, why not just get Betty to rescind the right of the public to use it ;)
That doesn't stop people using beaches - the bit the Crown Estate owns is the sliver of land between the high and low tide levels.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Gentleman Jim » Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:07 pm

AMS wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:05 pm
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:10 pm
If Crown Estates owns a majority of the seashore, why not just get Betty to rescind the right of the public to use it ;)
That doesn't stop people using beaches - the bit the Crown Estate owns is the sliver of land between the high and low tide levels.
Which is the bit most people use? At least, it seems to be where there is a large expanse of sand exposed when tide goes out

eta It was meant "tongue-in-cheek" hence the ;)
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by shpalman » Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:07 pm

The problem is that 'weirdos and misfits' aren't automatically nerds with the right skills. And nerds/geeks aren't necessarily "weirdos and misfits" except that most of the population, who are ignorant and fearful of things they don't understand, think that intelligent people must have something wrong with them.
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by raven » Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:20 pm

shpalman wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:07 pm
The problem is that 'weirdos and misfits' aren't automatically nerds with the right skills. And nerds/geeks aren't necessarily "weirdos and misfits" except that most of the population, who are ignorant and fearful of things they don't understand, think that intelligent people must have something wrong with them.
Yes, I very much doubt Dom's 'misfiits and weirdos' covers the kind of civic hacker Audrey Tang works with. Afaik, no-one makes money out of what they do, for a start.

Tbf, I think Taiwan has quite different cultural attitudes to us on things like co-operation, privacy and data collection, not to mention on treating epidemics seriously right off the bat after SARS so it's probably not really possible to lift their solutions and apply them to the UK.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by raven » Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:58 pm

This Reuters article that shpalman posted in the main thread is rather alarming. Relevant to what I was saying about the Serco tests and local health officials not knowing what's going on in their areas:
Secrecy was pervasive. Dr Helen Carter, Public Health England’s deputy director in the Midlands, revealed in a May 15 memo to Birmingham councillors that the government had initially ordered the agency not to share with local councils its surveillance reports containing data about notified cases from local hospital emergency rooms and general practitioners.

Until April 2020 PHE was not permitted to share the surveillance reports with local partners by the Cabinet Office,” she wrote in the memo, which is reported here for the first time. After April, information was shared with public health directors, but the reports remained official secrets and were “marked as official sensitive and not in the public domain,” said the memo, which was reviewed by Reuters.
Blimey. Must've thought we'd all panic or something.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by EllyCat » Mon Jun 29, 2020 3:44 pm

raven wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:58 pm
Blimey. Must've thought we'd all panic or something.
Whereas it’d be better to?
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Gfamily » Mon Jun 29, 2020 3:54 pm

Gentleman Jim wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:10 pm
If Crown Estates owns a majority of the seashore, why not just get Betty to rescind the right of the public to use it ;)
She can't.
The Crown granted people the right to piscary* under Magna Carta


*Fishing and gathering shellfish on the foreshore.
My avatar was a scientific result that was later found to be 'mistaken' - I rarely claim to be 100% correct
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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by AMS » Mon Jun 29, 2020 4:58 pm

Gentleman Jim wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:07 pm
AMS wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 2:05 pm
Gentleman Jim wrote:
Mon Jun 29, 2020 1:10 pm
If Crown Estates owns a majority of the seashore, why not just get Betty to rescind the right of the public to use it ;)
That doesn't stop people using beaches - the bit the Crown Estate owns is the sliver of land between the high and low tide levels.
Which is the bit most people use? At least, it seems to be where there is a large expanse of sand exposed when tide goes out

eta It was meant "tongue-in-cheek" hence the ;)
Yep, I figured it wasn't a serious suggestion, but still a chance for a bit of trivia.

(Extra trivia - in Cornwall, this bit is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall estate, not the crown.)

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Martin Y » Mon Jun 29, 2020 8:18 pm

I thought the National Trust were quietly taking over the entire coastline, in the manner of a devious Monopoly player collecting sets without anyone noticing.

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Re: Covid-19 the unlockdown

Post by Martin Y » Mon Jun 29, 2020 8:22 pm

Anyway, Leicester. Niece-in-law and her family live there and they recently started to come down with you-know-what. Her MIL is concerning; off to hospital with breathing difficulties, FIL has symptoms, rest of them getting tested.

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