COVID-19

[Chris Preston]

If nothing else, the past 6 months has shown that ever tightening lock downs as numbers get large has taken a long time to drive down numbers. Sharp lock downs have been much more effective.

Absolutely. I think most of the "tier" stuff is what happens when you treat it like a marketing exercise. The "tiers explained" folders look like mobile phone packages (gold, platinum, etc), but nothing short of "stay the f.ck at home, sorry about your extended family dinners" seems to actually work.

It seems to have been a clear mistake to have a tier system you move up through slowly. The lessens from the 1918-20 influenza pandemic in US cities was that earlier, harder lockdowns resulted in fewer deaths and smaller second waves than alternative strategies.

The larger the numbers are allowed to grow, the harder it is to get them controlled. As seen in Europe earlier this year it will take months of restrictions to get 20,000 cases a day down to less than 1000 a day. Even a full lockdown will take time, as you still have essential workers moving through the community.

[Chris Preston]

Around early-mid summer I really started to question my own views about lockdown, because I had spent a good chunk of April and May talking to/working with a number of people who were spiralling into mental collapse because of it, to the point of suicidality in some cases, and I was worried that my pro-lockdown attitude was just a result of me sitting in my little privileged bubble with my nice house etc. Personally I'm more or less over that now because looking at e.g. Australia it seems fairly clear that the issue isn't lockdown itself, it's locking down too little and too late. It's not that I think people's mental health is a price worth paying, it's that we shouldn't have allowed ourselves to get into such sh.t in the first place and now we're left with little real choice. Obviously that's no huge revelation, but as the months pass it seems more and more obvious. However I can see that unless you are really looking at how other countries are faring (not just France, Spain, Germany etc - properly globally), then you might genuinely start to question the utility of lockdowns when they cause genuine suffering. I'm not defending people who just want to meet up with their friends and family out of a sense of entitlement, but I can certainly see how people would think that allowing a bit of relaxation here and there is a risk worth taking. I'm not even totally sure I 100% disagree with them seeing as we are so far in the sh.t it's not the same as e.g. Australia accidentally taking its eye off the ball for a couple of days (and I do think this is a UK issue here, or at least not just England, I haven't checked the situation in Wales and NI specifically).

I'm not advocating not locking down by the way. I haven't been on a bus since March ffs and I wash my hands more often than Lady Macbeth. Just trying to understand different perspectives and why - in the absence of lots and lots of information, which many people don't actually have access to - people might not be being completely illogical in questioning decisions to lock down.

Mental health is certainly an issue that arises from lockdowns. However, it is also an issue (for a different and overlapping group of people) from any significant disruption. In Australia at least there have been attempts to address this by providing additional resources to the mental health sector and providing income support for those who cannot work. The federal income support is due to wind down shortly and the uncertainty is playing havoc with people's mental health.

I am not sure the solution is don't lock down because mental health problems will worsen, because the alternative is a shitshow like the US. Despite all the commentary in recent months about COVID-19 not being as deadly, but I remain unconvinced it has changed markedly. Yes we have got better at treatment, but the average fatality to case ratio in Australia is still over 3%. The solution is to put resources towards managing those problems.

[jimbob]

If nothing else, the past 6 months has shown that ever tightening lock downs as numbers get large has taken a long time to drive down numbers. Sharp lock downs have been much more effective.

Absolutely. I think most of the "tier" stuff is what happens when you treat it like a marketing exercise. The "tiers explained" folders look like mobile phone packages (gold, platinum, etc), but nothing short of "stay the f.ck at home, sorry about your extended family dinners" seems to actually work.

It seems to have been a clear mistake to have a tier system you move up through slowly. The lessens from the 1918-20 influenza pandemic in US cities was that earlier, harder lockdowns resulted in fewer deaths and smaller second waves than alternative strategies.

The larger the numbers are allowed to grow, the harder it is to get them controlled. As seen in Europe earlier this year it will take months of restrictions to get 20,000 cases a day down to less than 1000 a day. Even a full lockdown will take time, as you still have essential workers moving through the community.

The lesson from virtually every highly-infectious disease is that. That's what Dad learned as a graduate working in the Ministry of Agriculture and just starting as the 1967 Foot and Mouth outbreak occurred. And they relearned the lessons from the 1920 outbreak - which the old-timer farmers reminded them during the outbreak, and of course, which was forgotten by the 2000-2001 outbreak (which I remember, because Dad and Mum were driving up to see us just as it was suspected and he was shocked to see livestock lorries still on the roads)

[Chris Preston]

In South Australia, at least, all the places that might do deliveries are closed for the week, so the no takeaways rule would totally cut them off. But the number of people there without access to at least a kitchenette would be extremely small, since Adelaide is a spread-out city with little in the way of high-density micro-apartments. There might be the occasional person stuck in a hotel, but even there, they'd at least have a little fridge and a kettle, even if the hotel kitchen is closed. A week of sandwiches, cous cous, and blanched vegies isn't an impossible situation.

For homeless people, kitchens are probably the least of their concerns right now but SA does seem to have made some reasonable efforts to put roofs over their heads, so I hope that most have got reasonable food access as part of those arrangements. However, I haven't seen anything specific this week yet.

Some people with certain disabilities find takeaways a godsend, so I hope there's been at least some thought as to how to cover for the (likely few) people affected this way.

I hope so too but I just don't know. It was only a couple of days from the first case to the announcement so it all came in a bit of a rush. Since then, they've been slowly finding workarounds/clarifications for the most urgent (or at least the most vocal) problems. I assume the formal meals on wheels program counts as essential but that's a very limited subset of people for whom cooking is problematic.

I think they have been. I haven't been able to find what the current plan is. In the last lock down, all the homeless were housed in one of the hotels, but I think they are being allowed more freedom this time. The Hutt St Centre is still running and there were shots of police giving masks to homeless people on the street to wear on the news last night, so I am sure they are aware of the problem.

As for the disabled, if they have a care plan that is still running. One of the exemptions to the stay at home rules is for carers. There are also opportunities to request help for special circumstances. I haven't looked into the details, but there are still probably some people falling through the cracks.

[discovolante]

Around early-mid summer I really started to question my own views about lockdown, because I had spent a good chunk of April and May talking to/working with a number of people who were spiralling into mental collapse because of it, to the point of suicidality in some cases, and I was worried that my pro-lockdown attitude was just a result of me sitting in my little privileged bubble with my nice house etc. Personally I'm more or less over that now because looking at e.g. Australia it seems fairly clear that the issue isn't lockdown itself, it's locking down too little and too late. It's not that I think people's mental health is a price worth paying, it's that we shouldn't have allowed ourselves to get into such sh.t in the first place and now we're left with little real choice. Obviously that's no huge revelation, but as the months pass it seems more and more obvious. However I can see that unless you are really looking at how other countries are faring (not just France, Spain, Germany etc - properly globally), then you might genuinely start to question the utility of lockdowns when they cause genuine suffering. I'm not defending people who just want to meet up with their friends and family out of a sense of entitlement, but I can certainly see how people would think that allowing a bit of relaxation here and there is a risk worth taking. I'm not even totally sure I 100% disagree with them seeing as we are so far in the sh.t it's not the same as e.g. Australia accidentally taking its eye off the ball for a couple of days (and I do think this is a UK issue here, or at least not just England, I haven't checked the situation in Wales and NI specifically).

I'm not advocating not locking down by the way. I haven't been on a bus since March ffs and I wash my hands more often than Lady Macbeth. Just trying to understand different perspectives and why - in the absence of lots and lots of information, which many people don't actually have access to - people might not be being completely illogical in questioning decisions to lock down.

Mental health is certainly an issue that arises from lockdowns. However, it is also an issue (for a different and overlapping group of people) from any significant disruption. In Australia at least there have been attempts to address this by providing additional resources to the mental health sector and providing income support for those who cannot work. The federal income support is due to wind down shortly and the uncertainty is playing havoc with people's mental health.

I am not sure the solution is don't lock down because mental health problems will worsen, because the alternative is a shitshow like the US. Despite all the commentary in recent months about COVID-19 not being as deadly, but I remain unconvinced it has changed markedly. Yes we have got better at treatment, but the average fatality to case ratio in Australia is still over 3%. The solution is to put resources towards managing those problems.

I'm not arguing against lockdown for mental health reasons. It was something I internally battled with for a while but now think that lockdown is needed. But unfortunately, in the UK, it isn't a solution any more either. So I understand people's desire to bend the rules when things get tough.

[Chris Preston]

I'm not arguing against lockdown for mental health reasons. It was something I internally battled with for a while but now think that lockdown is needed. But unfortunately, in the UK, it isn't a solution any more either. So I understand people's desire to bend the rules when things get tough.

I understand some people will always bend the rules. Perhaps I am mixing in the wrong circles, but the people I know with fragile mental health are all hunkering down at home, rather than trying to break the rules. One of them I am calling daily to check on how they are. It may not be the best for their mental health, but they are following the rules. The people in the earlier lockdown who broke the rules were for the most part entitled knobs who thought the rules should not apply to them. Currently, I have no patience with such people.

[Squeak]

Some people with certain disabilities find takeaways a godsend, so I hope there's been at least some thought as to how to cover for the (likely few) people affected this way.

I hope so too but I just don't know. It was only a couple of days from the first case to the announcement so it all came in a bit of a rush. Since then, they've been slowly finding workarounds/clarifications for the most urgent (or at least the most vocal) problems. I assume the formal meals on wheels program counts as essential but that's a very limited subset of people for whom cooking is problematic.

I think they have been. I haven't been able to find what the current plan is. In the last lock down, all the homeless were housed in one of the hotels, but I think they are being allowed more freedom this time. The Hutt St Centre is still running and there were shots of police giving masks to homeless people on the street to wear on the news last night, so I am sure they are aware of the problem.

As for the disabled, if they have a care plan that is still running. One of the exemptions to the stay at home rules is for carers. There are also opportunities to request help for special circumstances. I haven't looked into the details, but there are still probably some people falling through the cracks.

Thanks for the details.

I'm really pleased to see the public conversation now turning from "people who work in quarantine hotels shouldn't be allowed to have a second job" towards "people who work in quarantine hotels shouldn't *need* to have a second job". Of all the people who should be able to support themselves from a single job and have niceties like paid sick/quarantine leave, you'd think frontline quarantine workers would be at the top of the list, right next to nursing home care staff. :/

[Squeak]

I'm not arguing against lockdown for mental health reasons. It was something I internally battled with for a while but now think that lockdown is needed. But unfortunately, in the UK, it isn't a solution any more either. So I understand people's desire to bend the rules when things get tough.

I understand some people will always bend the rules. Perhaps I am mixing in the wrong circles, but the people I know with fragile mental health are all hunkering down at home, rather than trying to break the rules. One of them I am calling daily to check on how they are. It may not be the best for their mental health, but they are following the rules. The people in the earlier lockdown who broke the rules were for the most part entitled knobs who thought the rules should not apply to them. Currently, I have no patience with such people.

I suspect the mental health implications of Australian-style short, sharp, and actually effective lockdowns are quite different from the lackadaisical salami-slice lockdowns that Europe has seen. I have a lot of sympathy for people who are losing their social supports long-term and without getting an obvious compensatory increase in safety because their society has done it so badly.

Even in Melbourne's three month confinement, there was a sense of heroism, with Melbournians taking one for the Australian team, and, slowly, eventually, seeing the case numbers drop.

[Squeak]

Holy hell. South Australia locked down because one of the patients lied to contact tracers. This person seemed to be entirely unconnected from the other cases, apart from picking up a takeaway pizza from a place where one of the other patients worked. It turns out he worked several shifts over the past week, so counts as a very close contact. It isn't a super-infectious, scary new strain, just an idiot who lied.

Contact tracers were already chasing all the pizza shop's customers but that's a lot of people to track down and test.

[Chris Preston]

Holy hell. South Australia locked down because one of the patients lied to contact tracers. This person seemed to be entirely unconnected from the other cases, apart from picking up a takeaway pizza from a place where one of the other patients worked. It turns out he worked several shifts over the past week, so counts as a very close contact. It isn't a super-infectious, scary new strain, just an idiot who lied.

Contact tracers were already chasing all the pizza shop's customers but that's a lot of people to track down and test.

There are going to be a lot of very angry people.

[Squeak]

Holy hell. South Australia locked down because one of the patients lied to contact tracers. This person seemed to be entirely unconnected from the other cases, apart from picking up a takeaway pizza from a place where one of the other patients worked. It turns out he worked several shifts over the past week, so counts as a very close contact. It isn't a super-infectious, scary new strain, just an idiot who lied.

Contact tracers were already chasing all the pizza shop's customers but that's a lot of people to track down and test.

There are going to be a lot of very angry people.

This guy had better hope his identity doesn't get revealed. I can't imagine he'd be terribly safe if it were. I assume the lie was because he was working illegally at the pizza shop and didn't realise the impact his lie would have. He must be so scared now.

3 new cases today, all close contacts of existing cases and already in quarantine. Fingers crossed this means that the unnecessary lockdown has got well ahead of the outbreak.

[Chris Preston]

We are still locked down until Sunday - except exercise in family groups is allowed.

My guess is that he was working there while also receiving unemployment payments. There are few other reasons now why you cannot work a job. If I remember correctly, they have even allowed those on temporary protection visas to work during the pandemic.

[Squeak]

We are still locked down until Sunday - except exercise in family groups is allowed.

My guess is that he was working there while also receiving unemployment payments. There are few other reasons now why you cannot work a job. If I remember correctly, they have even allowed those on temporary protection visas to work during the pandemic.

I thought perhaps he was just working cash in hand and was trying to avoid trouble for his bosses. But yes, dole and visa issues would create similar problems.

Still, I can't help thinking that revealing his two employers is going to make it trivial for someone to doxx him. :/

[discovolante]

I'm not arguing against lockdown for mental health reasons. It was something I internally battled with for a while but now think that lockdown is needed. But unfortunately, in the UK, it isn't a solution any more either. So I understand people's desire to bend the rules when things get tough.

I understand some people will always bend the rules. Perhaps I am mixing in the wrong circles, but the people I know with fragile mental health are all hunkering down at home, rather than trying to break the rules. One of them I am calling daily to check on how they are. It may not be the best for their mental health, but they are following the rules. The people in the earlier lockdown who broke the rules were for the most part entitled knobs who thought the rules should not apply to them. Currently, I have no patience with such people.

I suspect the mental health implications of Australian-style short, sharp, and actually effective lockdowns are quite different from the lackadaisical salami-slice lockdowns that Europe has seen. I have a lot of sympathy for people who are losing their social supports long-term and without getting an obvious compensatory increase in safety because their society has done it so badly.

Even in Melbourne's three month confinement, there was a sense of heroism, with Melbournians taking one for the Australian team, and, slowly, eventually, seeing the case numbers drop.

Yes. If you get to see lockdown working, it's easier to judge isolated incidents. For what it's worth, the breaches I'm aware of generally relate to visiting sick family members, going to friends' houses to use their computer/internet connection, childcare etc (some of that might technically fall within the 'support bubble' rule but I haven't asked).

I'm not really trying to make a punchy point here. I know lots of people have made sacrifices where others haven't, and I'm probably displaying quite a lot of cognitive dissonance, but that's kind of my point - semi-lockdowns don't obviously achieve very much* so there seems to come a point where your decision to pop round to someone else's house, technically in breach of the rules, seems far less risky than the people who are legally sitting around in busy pubs - and lots of pubs were busy not all that long ago.

It's not really so much that I think everyone should just get a free pass, more that I can see how a situation has arisen where following the letter of the law doesn't really seem any more logical than carrying out an individual cost/benefit analysis. And again I'm talking fairly specifically about countries that haven't managed to keep things under control and are rumbling along with lots of half-arsed semi-lockdowns.

*yes I know there is a big difference between trundling along at the same number of cases per day v exponential rise, but they can still *feel* pretty much the same compared to no cases at all.

[Millennie Al]

It seems to me that a combination of a milder lockdown and a seasonal effect making Covid more contagious means that Rt is now at about 1.

W'll have to wait a while longer to be sure (because deaths are much more reliable than test numbers), but it does look that way.

Unfortunately the delay in introducing the lockdown means that it’s stabilized at about 400 deaths per day. It’ll probably stay like that until about May* unless the lockdown is tightened further or relaxed. If it does stabilize until then that’s about 60 000 to 70 000 more deaths.

ETA *When a combination of mass vaccination and the spring will kick in. Hopefully.

I expect that when a vaccine starts being rolled out, this will be used as an excuse to relax other measures, resulting in the numbers going up again.

[PeteB]

Just in case anyone meets one of those "They've had no deaths in Sweden since whenever" types.

Deaths in Sweden are now on the rise, as you'd expect from an increase in cases, like they have.

Andrew Neil keeps on tweeting the latest death figures for Sweden, but they seem to do it by date so it always looks like the deaths are falling over the last two weeks

https://twitter.com/ChrChristensen/stat ... 1976591363

[jimbob]

Israel looks as though the relaxations after its second lockdown has started to reverse its reduction in cases:



Although it looks as though the England lockdown is now leading to the deaths peaking:

[KAJ]

Although it looks as though the England lockdown is now leading to the deaths peaking:

Yes, even discounting the last few 'deaths by date of death' for reasons we've discussed there are clear signs of a plateau.

datedeaths.png (10.69 KiB) Viewed 4669 times

Code: Select all

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-0.13731 -0.03646 -0.01668  0.03424  0.19909 

Coefficients:
               Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)     5.76362    0.01283 449.354  < 2e-16 ***
poly(date, 2)1  1.07046    0.06787  15.772 1.68e-14 ***
poly(date, 2)2 -0.45034    0.06787  -6.635 5.94e-07 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.06787 on 25 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.9213,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.915 
F-statistic: 146.4 on 2 and 25 DF,  p-value: 1.576e-14

[jimbob]

Although it looks as though the England lockdown is now leading to the deaths peaking:

Yes, even discounting the last few 'deaths by date of death' for reasons we've discussed there are clear signs of a plateau.
datedeaths.png

Code: Select all

Residuals:
     Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max 
-0.13731 -0.03646 -0.01668  0.03424  0.19909 

Coefficients:
               Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)    
(Intercept)     5.76362    0.01283 449.354  < 2e-16 ***
poly(date, 2)1  1.07046    0.06787  15.772 1.68e-14 ***
poly(date, 2)2 -0.45034    0.06787  -6.635 5.94e-07 ***
---
Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1

Residual standard error: 0.06787 on 25 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared:  0.9213,	Adjusted R-squared:  0.915 
F-statistic: 146.4 on 2 and 25 DF,  p-value: 1.576e-14

Yes - this is by date reported and smoothed as I think that's the quickest vaguely-reliable measure (with the caveats discussed passim)

[sTeamTraen]

Andrew Neil keeps on tweeting the latest death figures for Sweden, but they seem to do it by date so it always looks like the deaths are falling over the last two weeks

https://twitter.com/ChrChristensen/stat ... 1976591363

The "skeptics" have been doing this Every. f.cking. Week since March. There is very little excuse any more.

[shpalman]

itcov.png (44.71 KiB) Viewed 4655 times

It does look like Italy has peaked - note that there's only "by date reported" data available.

lomcov.png (31.85 KiB) Viewed 4655 times

Lombardy, where the lockdown was stricter than average, may have already peaked a few days ago.

[sTeamTraen]

Holy hell. South Australia locked down because one of the patients lied to contact tracers. This person seemed to be entirely unconnected from the other cases, apart from picking up a takeaway pizza from a place where one of the other patients worked. It turns out he worked several shifts over the past week, so counts as a very close contact. It isn't a super-infectious, scary new strain, just an idiot who lied.

Contact tracers were already chasing all the pizza shop's customers but that's a lot of people to track down and test.

Thing is, this is going to happen a lot. Politicians have a model of the population in which mostly middle-class people lead mostly middle-class lives. The people who live on the margins usually get ignored because they don't vote much and if they push things too far, our populist interior minister will lock them up, so they don't threaten us. The virus is a great leveller in this regard.

I remember seeing a documentary some years ago about sex workers in Brazil who didn't use condoms because they could charge something like $5 or $10 extra per time. From their point of view this was entirely rational. Until we are at least able to understand why that might be, we aren't going to be able to get people to comply enough to knock the virus on the head. I'm now at the stage where I assume we will be in permanent yo-yo lockdown until we get 80-90% of the population vaccinated.

[Squeak]

Holy hell. South Australia locked down because one of the patients lied to contact tracers. This person seemed to be entirely unconnected from the other cases, apart from picking up a takeaway pizza from a place where one of the other patients worked. It turns out he worked several shifts over the past week, so counts as a very close contact. It isn't a super-infectious, scary new strain, just an idiot who lied.

Contact tracers were already chasing all the pizza shop's customers but that's a lot of people to track down and test.

Thing is, this is going to happen a lot. Politicians have a model of the population in which mostly middle-class people lead mostly middle-class lives. The people who live on the margins usually get ignored because they don't vote much and if they push things too far, our populist interior minister will lock them up, so they don't threaten us. The virus is a great leveller in this regard.

I remember seeing a documentary some years ago about sex workers in Brazil who didn't use condoms because they could charge something like $5 or $10 extra per time. From their point of view this was entirely rational. Until we are at least able to understand why that might be, we aren't going to be able to get people to comply enough to knock the virus on the head. I'm now at the stage where I assume we will be in permanent yo-yo lockdown until we get 80-90% of the population vaccinated.

If, by "this" you mean people lying to contact tracers, I think that goes without saying. But I don't think it was easily foreseeable by this man that a whole state would go into one of the strictest lockdowns the world has seen, all because of him lying about a job. That's a very big consequence and one that seems to have happened once in the pandemic so far. It's possible SE Asia had a few examples they I haven't heard of either, since they're pretty hot on squatting outbreaks too. With a vaccine on its way, hopefully it won't happen too many more times.

European and American contact tracers don't have the wherewithal to care about lies of this magnitude. And even in Australia, similar previous lies have not had anything like the same impact. He just got really unlucky with his circumstances and made a lie that created no plausible paths for infection other than mystery community transmission or a super sneaky strain that travels on pizza boxes and therefore could have ended up all over town.

Apparently they've set 20 detectives on the task of winkling out other lies to contact tracers and figuring out what they can charge this poor bloke with.

[sTeamTraen]

I hope that people don't get too angry. The last thing anyone needs now is a conspiracy theory involving a pizza restaurant.

[Squeak]

I hope that people don't get too angry. The last thing anyone needs now is a conspiracy theory involving a pizza restaurant.

Hah!
The pizza restaurant in question now has a police guard and, fortunately, assault rifles are less common in suburban Adelaide.

I haven't seen any reporting about the presence or absence of a basement, though...