Oh god. That’s my tipping point. I'm laying him for the nomination. The Dems will field an alternative if he's like this. Key quality required to defeat Trump? Not yet senile. So they are spoilt for choice.
I did my ration of exercise today, OK 18 miles on a bike, maybe a bit long, but, my observations. Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger. Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
The return of decent weather and the onset of Easter are factors. I can hear motorbikes travelling at speed up and down the much quieter North Circular Road and A13 which is usually a late Saturday night phenomenon.
It's been two weeks which has been for many two weeks of purgatory. Compared with catching the virus, I'll take purgatory all day every day.
I'm still far from convinced how we can begin to ease restrictions - those with the virus seem to be struggling to get over it and are presumably still infectious if they still have it.
Austria and Germany are talking bravely about a gradual return to normality but I'd rather not be at the cutting edge (or bleeding edge) of that - let's see how they fare before we try something similar.
On my bike ride I did find a car park taped off with Police do not enter tape, this was my access to a dedicated riverside cycle path, I decided this was to deter motorists parking and walking the river route, and not to stop cyclists exercising, so I went through and joined dozens of others on the cycle path. I do wonder if the Police are a bit over zealous in the wrong areas.
Oh god. That’s my tipping point. I'm laying him for the nomination. The Dems will field an alternative if he's like this. Key quality required to defeat Trump? Not yet senile. So they are spoilt for choice.
Key qualities required to defeat Trump, likeability and charisma and not too far left. Biden was the best of a poor field bar maybe Buttigieg who was an election too early
HCoV-19 (SARS-2) has caused >88,000 reported illnesses with a current case-fatality ratio of ~2%. Here, we investigate the stability of viable HCoV-19 on surfaces and in aerosols in comparison with SARS35 CoV-1. Overall, stability is very similar between HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1. We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. Both viruses show relatively long viability on stainless steel and polypropylene compared to copper or cardboard: the median half-life estimate for HCoV-19 is around 13 hours on steel and around 16 hours on polypropylene. Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days.
That's not actually true, as @Charles will tell you.
There are coronavirus vaccines, but they're for animals (both dogs and cats, I believe).
A world inhabited only by dogs and cats? You're tempting me.
By the way, did everyone get that letter to every household from Boris? I never did, possibly because I moved last year.
If you're really bored you can catch me being interviewed on Facebook Live at 8 tonight, if it works I expect to be mainly doing strictly non-partisan things that you probably already know, and it's going to be mainly useful for Surrey residents..(I know how to work up your excitement.)
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus. The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.
Yes I think that fails to address those that would have died anyway, but obviously I knew the fortnight after the original graph would be a lot higher than average
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twice
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his father
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus. The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.
Yes I think that fails to address those that would have died anyway, but obviously I knew the fortnight after the original graph would be a lot higher than average
Those that would die anyway, on average, are represented by the green line.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
Very good point. And I agree. Our best hope is probably treatments, not vaccines
Also
WEAR A FUCKING MASK
“If speaking and oral fluid viral load proves to be a major mechanism of Sars-CoV-2 [the official name of the virus] transmission, wearing any kind of cloth mouth cover in public by every person, as well as strict adherence to social distancing and handwashing, could significantly decrease the transmission rate and thereby contain the pandemic until a vaccine becomes available,” the researchers write.
And if there’s a shortage a stash of them should be in hospital or care home not in our houses.
Remember the shelves were cleared without panic buying, cleared from just most households getting little more. We could do real damage stockpiling face masks at home.
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twice
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his father
Anyone would be better than Trump, both Bushes, but obviously Obama or Clinton (Bill) would be better.
councillor Sheila Oakes, who is currently mayor of Heanor in Derbyshire, saying: 'Sorry he completely deserves this and he is one of the worst PM's we've ever had.'
Haters got to hate eh
I don’t like Johnson. Or Cummings. Or Corbyn. Or Drakeford. Or Raab. Or Patel.
But I don’t wish death on them. One of them is seriously ill. I hope he recovers. Similarly, although he’s been silent for some time, I hope Cummings is making progress towards a full recovery.
Maybe I would for real, utter, unredeemable scumbags like Xi, or Kim, or Mugabe.
But none of them are even remotely in that class. None of them are out trying to cause deaths, or seize power illegally, or enrich themselves at the expense of the British people.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is frankly not worth listening to.
I agree. I raised a similar point during the election when a minority of our more right wing posters were expressing excessive joy and pleasure if, as happened, some of their opponents lost. It wasn't the pleasure of winning (which of course one should enjoy) but it was the expressed pleasure of an opponent losing. Of course you celebrate your victory, but have sympathy for those that lose.
I remember when Stephen Twigg won I was very pleased for him and simultaneously sorry for Michael Portillo, yet I supported neither.
Similarly in a sporting contest you enjoy your victory but feel for your opponent.
The only exception for me is, as you said a serious corrupt politician or a cheat in a sporting event.
That behaviour really isn't limited to one wing of politics. See Sturgeon's reaction, for example.
Absolutely.
I wasn't making a political biased point. It is just what happened and that I called out at the time. I would have done the same if the boot was on the other foot as it will be. It is the individuals (whether right left or centre) not the parties.
Agree re Sturgeon. It was unpleasant.
I couldn't disagree more. Sturgeon was entirely appropriate to celebrate winning a seat, let alone winning such a high profile scalp.
Suggesting it is inappropriate to celebrate gaining a seat because an opposition has lost it is as utterly facetious as claiming it is inappropriate for a striker to celebrate scoring a goal because an opposition has conceded it.
I agree. Her side win and she celebrated, it wasn't even particularly gloating.
But isn't celebrating beating Jo Swinson a bit like celebrating scoring a goal against a kid with cerebral palsy?
Everyone told me I was an idiot for suggesting Edinburgh West was going to be a safer seat for the LDs than Swinson's seat.
Oh god. That’s my tipping point. I'm laying him for the nomination. The Dems will field an alternative if he's like this. Key quality required to defeat Trump? Not yet senile. So they are spoilt for choice.
Key qualities required to defeat Trump, likeability and charisma and not too far left. Biden was the best of a poor field bar maybe Buttigieg who was an election too early
I was never a great fan of Mayor Pete but his Iowa-first strategy died when the new voting system foul-up denied him the momentum he needed to stand out from the pack of half a dozen rent-a-centrists who had all given more thought to actual policy than Buttigieg had.
That's not actually true, as @Charles will tell you.
There are coronavirus vaccines, but they're for animals (both dogs and cats, I believe).
A world inhabited only by dogs and cats? You're tempting me.
By the way, did everyone get that letter to every household from Boris? I never did, possibly because I moved last year.
If you're really bored you can catch me being interviewed on Facebook Live at 8 tonight, if it works I expect to be mainly doing strictly non-partisan things that you probably already know, and it's going to be mainly useful for Surrey residents..(I know how to work up your excitement.)
Mail is not 100% at the moment. Horsham has 35 guys off either sick or self isolating so the daily delivery is possibly not going to be guaranteed. We sd our letter from Boris today. Every address ought to get one.. its not a personal letter
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twice
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his father
H.W. was a shrewd operator. W. relied on patronage from his father's networks.
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twice
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his father
Anyone would be better than Trump, both Bushes, but obviously Obama or Clinton (Bill) would be better.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
The BBC Six O'Clock News covered comments by the Chief Medical Officer on coronavirus testing. It seems to me that coronavirus could be beaten by a massive expansion in testing using existing technology. If everyone in the UK had a coronavirus test once every week (yes, 10 million tests a day) and the results were available in 24 hours, then people would find out if they have the virus. They would self-isolate and transmission would be greatly reduced. Within weeks the number of cases would fall, and the virus would soon be eliminated. This will be possible within one to two years, regardless of all other developments. This would require 3.5 billion tests a year. Surely this is a price worth paying?
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
Very good point. And I agree. Our best hope is probably treatments, not vaccines
Also
WEAR A FUCKING MASK
“If speaking and oral fluid viral load proves to be a major mechanism of Sars-CoV-2 [the official name of the virus] transmission, wearing any kind of cloth mouth cover in public by every person, as well as strict adherence to social distancing and handwashing, could significantly decrease the transmission rate and thereby contain the pandemic until a vaccine becomes available,” the researchers write.
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
He's probably not much more useful than Trump but at least he's not as actively malicious and vindictive. That should count for someting, shouldn't it?
It counts for a lot. Trump is not just useless he's actively on the wrong side of every issue that matters.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.
The BBC Six O'Clock News covered comments by the Chief Medical Officer on coronavirus testing. It seems to me that coronavirus could be beaten by a massive expansion in testing using existing technology. If everyone in the UK had a coronavirus test once every week (yes, 10 million tests a day) and the results were available in 24 hours, then people would find out if they have the virus. They would self-isolate and transmission would be greatly reduced. Within weeks the number of cases would fall, and the virus would soon be eliminated. This will be possible within one to two years, regardless of all other developments. This would require 3.5 billion tests a year. Surely this is a price worth paying?
No, you need to be able to instantly contact trace. That requires the ability to spy on your population like South Korea or China.
Also, where are all the reagents for 3.5 billion tests going to come from? And all the PCR machines you need? And the trained lab staff? You can't just magic up this stuff.
It was clear that Peston was a gotcha question and Witty fell right into it.
Philip Thompson reveals another of his pathetic prejudices and populist standpoints. You really are a sad little hate filled pipsqueak with little to say of importance on anything. There is a lot to criticise the Roman Catholic church for, and the paedophilia scandal was and is very shocking, but I guess you would still take the same type of prejudicial position even if it had never happened. It is just another excuse for people of your unthinking mindset. As a lapsed Catholic of Irish decent I can smell your two brain celled anti-Catholicism in the same way a Jew can tell a racist trying to justify their anti-Semitism. Your nasty inherited hatred has been a feature in this country for far too long. Right minded people need to call it out for what it is.
Philip Thompson reveals another of his pathetic prejudices and populist standpoints. You really are a sad little hate filled pipsqueak with little to say of importance on anything. There is a lot to criticise the Roman Catholic church for, and the paedophilia scandal was and is very shocking, but I guess you would still take the same type of prejudicial position even if it had never happened. It is just another excuse for people of your unthinking mindset. As a lapsed Catholic of Irish decent I can smell your two brain celled anti-Catholicism in the same way a Jew can tell a racist trying to justify their anti-Semitism. Your nasty inherited hatred has been a feature in this country for far too long. Right minded people need to call it out for what it is.
Re younger people without underlying health conditions dying.
There does seem to be a very small percentage of people, who for whatever reason, their immune system over-reacts. That is different to the oldies, whose immune systems aren't strong enough to fight it.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.
The BBC Six O'Clock News covered comments by the Chief Medical Officer on coronavirus testing. It seems to me that coronavirus could be beaten by a massive expansion in testing using existing technology. If everyone in the UK had a coronavirus test once every week (yes, 10 million tests a day) and the results were available in 24 hours, then people would find out if they have the virus. They would self-isolate and transmission would be greatly reduced. Within weeks the number of cases would fall, and the virus would soon be eliminated. This will be possible within one to two years, regardless of all other developments. This would require 3.5 billion tests a year. Surely this is a price worth paying?
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Correct. That's why it might not be advisable to call it "spying". The wider public needs to be persuaded to give up a considerable amount of privacy to make that tool work. And it might be the single most important tool required to be able to responsibly loosen the lockdown.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.
No. They could have one now without knowing it, but testing to prove that takes time no matter what lolly is thrown at it. At least 12 months imo
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Correct. That's why it might not be advisable to call it "spying". The wider public needs to be persuaded to give up a considerable amount of privacy to make that tool work. And it might be the single most important tool required to be able to responsibly loosen the lockdown.
I don't think it matters what you call it, any government will have to be honest with the public that we will be able to flick a switch and then be able to see everywhere you have been, all payments you have made and every person you have met.
South Koreans are happy to allow this under special circumstances. They trust their government not to abuse it and will only be used for good.
You only have to look at the reaction to ID cards in the UK, to think it will be a much harder sell.
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
Surely that's more because we've never needed one?
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
The most common coronavirus is called the common cold. We spent 50 years trying to find a cure for it before giving up.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)." https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Correct. That's why it might not be advisable to call it "spying". The wider public needs to be persuaded to give up a considerable amount of privacy to make that tool work. And it might be the single most important tool required to be able to responsibly loosen the lockdown.
I don't think it matters what you call it, any government will have to be honest with the public that we will be able to flick a switch and then be able to see everywhere you have been, all payments you have made and every person you have met.
South Koreans are happy to allow this under special circumstances. They trust their government not to abuse it and will only be used for good.
You only have to look at the reaction to ID cards in the UK, to think it will be a much harder sell.
Well, I think strategic communication matters. The Hitchens, Hannan and Young brigade will put up resistance, if only for the sake of being contrarian, and it's important to get everybody on board for this.
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speak
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”
They are not fiddling the figures.
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine era
Surely that's more because we've never needed one?
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
The most common coronavirus is called the common cold. We spent 50 years trying to find a cure for it before giving up.
Yes and those strains of conronavirus are always changing which makes it impossible to create a vaccine.
Covid-19 seems to be quite stable from what I've heard.
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
Someone earlier said that the vaccine for SARS was "well on it's way" until a proper rat trial was done. Then they found out that yes it was effective agains SARS but it had a very bad effect on the whole immune system.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine era
It didn't sweep across the country infecting 60-80% in one go though, so herd immunity clearly did something.
On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title: We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
The summary I can see says:
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last round
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.
For @isam I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars. Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus. The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.
Yes I think that fails to address those that would have died anyway, but obviously I knew the fortnight after the original graph would be a lot higher than average
Those that would die anyway, on average, are represented by the green line.
Yes, and the covid-19 deaths may make up a large part of those, so you can’t just add the total covid deaths to that there line
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
Someone earlier said that the vaccine for SARS was "well on it's way" until a proper rat trial was done. Then they found out that yes it was effective agains SARS but it had a very bad effect on the whole immune system.
That’s exactly why it will take so long, testing to spot side effects
For what it's worth (very little as I haven't read their detailed argument) I'm not sure the actuaries have got this right, because I'm dubious about how granular their risk categories are. You might be able to say statistically that a 65 year-old male smoker who is obese with diabetes is expected live for another X years, but you can't say that COVID-19 robbed him of X years if he had a buggered immune system and was already in hospital receiving respiratory care for bacterial double pneumonia before he caught COVID-19 from the patient next-door. I don't think their "worst-case scenario" is necessarily "worst-case" enough.
It would be interesting to look at victims' medical records and consider how their health status compares to other people in the same actuarial risk group that was used to calculate their remaining life expectancy. I have a strong suspicion a disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths will come from the poorlier end of their risk group. While it's true older people have a high rate of multimorbidity and that despite the challenges this poses to their care, plenty can live for many years with these conditions, it seems likely to me that COVID-related deaths will be especially common among those with the most serious conditions. Which is why blanket descriptions like "Y percent of victims had a pre-existing condition" are not especially helpful, something I suspect I would find myself in strong agreement with your esteemed colleagues on.
Similarly, I don't buy the argument that "COVID is killing people who would have died off in the flu season anyway". How do you know they'd even have caught the flu this year (not everyone does, even asymptomatically), or that whatever strain they caught wasn't one they had a sufficiently protective degree of immunity to due to previous exposure? But I can see that someone dying from COVID-19 due to a particularly weak immune system may not have great odds of getting through, say, the next three flu seasons unscathed.
I get the feeling that "how many COVID deaths were there, really?" is one of those questions that's only going to be answered by a careful regression analysis after the event, as happens with flu figures.
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
Someone earlier said that the vaccine for SARS was "well on it's way" until a proper rat trial was done. Then they found out that yes it was effective agains SARS but it had a very bad effect on the whole immune system.
Possibly. I'm not sure?
I know that by the end of 2003 world governments decided it wasn't worth funding the research because I remember thinking at the time that just because that particular epidemic burned itself out didn't necessarily mean we wouldn't need a vaccine at some point...
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
As so often, the question is causation or correlation. People die "with coronavirus" and people die "with pre-existing medical conditions". Determining what they "died of" requires procedures which can be applied to a single individual but not to the large numbers of cases.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plague
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speak
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”
They are not fiddling the figures.
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plague
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
I was suppose to start this week, but unfortunately am having to self isolate away from home for next 7 days. Hence why I have dropped in here.
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speak
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”
They are not fiddling the figures.
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plague
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
I was suppose to start this week, but unfortunately am having to self isolate away from home for next 7 days. Hence why I have dropped in here.
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
working till 67 then have three years to enjoy your retirement then lockdown till there is a vaccine?
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.
Not so fantastic news. Porton Down have "ground truth" data for 700+ individuals, and when evaluating all these antibody kits that every manufacturer claims are 98-99% accurate, they are all crap.
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speak
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”
They are not fiddling the figures.
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
Easy. It’s how the story is presented.
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plague
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
I was suppose to start this week, but unfortunately am having to self isolate away from home for next 7 days. Hence why I have dropped in here.
Oh sorry to hear that.
Hope you and your closest recover quickly
Thanks. It is just precautionary. Had to leave my house for family emergency situation a few days ago, during which came into close-ish contact with individual who presented some of the mild symptoms.
Not taking any risks returning to Chez Urquhart in the meantime.
My wife expressed the fear today that the end result of this virus would be hi-tech surveillance states, with the authorities monitoring everything we do and everyone we meet. Countries that don’t do this will be crippled by the bug.
I think she’s on to something.
Of course she is. The most important thing may be to make sure it is temporary. But there is no alternative until a vaccine is available.
I am wondering how this will play out in Wisconsin (narrowly won by Trump in 2016) in November.
The Democrat Governor, Tony Evers, sought to postpone it, but the Republican state legislature challenged it and was backed by the conservative majority on the state supreme court.
It feels like a really bad move by the Republicans there - easily characterised as putting voters at mortal risk in knee-jerk opposition to a Governor with whom they have terrible relations. Interesting to see whether it hurts Trump in the state.
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speak
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”
They are not fiddling the figures.
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
Easy. It’s how the story is presented.
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Did you actually see it?
I should direct my question to C4 then, I suppose. My apologies.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine era
That doesn't make sense. Herd immunity is effective if enough people have had the disease (and if they thereby become immune). Measles is so incredible infectious that herd immunity requires about 95%, and that's why nearly everyone used to get it. Less infectious diseases may be controllable without the population acquiring herd immunity, but that means there is always a vulnerability to outbreaks.
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.
I don't think there's really a debate to be had. What was he supposed to do, give him a different nose? That really would be racist.
Yeah, if the lad who painted that mural in the east end hadn't given Rothschild and Warburg big noses, that really would have been racist.
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine era
It didn't sweep across the country infecting 60-80% in one go though, so herd immunity clearly did something.
Measles is particularly interesting. There's seasonal variation in transmission across the year (not just school holidays, but even before wide-scale school attendance, seasonal migration patterns related to harvest-time etc), yet also much longer-term cycles.
In the pre-vaccination era, a bout of measles in a city tops up the number of immune people (the so-called "depletion of the susceptible") until transmission ceases and the disease largely fizzles out. But as people are born into the population without immunity (and immune people die off), the proportion of susceptibles rises again, until it's big enough to trigger exponential growth and a new epidemic. In smaller towns, the number of infected people is so low during periods of herd immunity that, particularly during periods of low seasonal transmission, it can by chance fall to zero and you get a local extinction event. In large cities, that's unlikely to happen, and due to migration and trade it's possible for measles from the big city to then re-seed smaller towns where measles had gone extinct. For that reason, measles outbreaks in smaller towns tend to "sync up" with those of their nearest large city.
Philip Thompson reveals another of his pathetic prejudices and populist standpoints. You really are a sad little hate filled pipsqueak with little to say of importance on anything. There is a lot to criticise the Roman Catholic church for, and the paedophilia scandal was and is very shocking, but I guess you would still take the same type of prejudicial position even if it had never happened. It is just another excuse for people of your unthinking mindset. As a lapsed Catholic of Irish decent I can smell your two brain celled anti-Catholicism in the same way a Jew can tell a racist trying to justify their anti-Semitism. Your nasty inherited hatred has been a feature in this country for far too long. Right minded people need to call it out for what it is.
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.
Not so fantastic news. Porton Down have "ground truth" data for 700+ individuals, and when evaluating all these antibody kits that every manufacturer claims are 98-99% accurate, they are all crap.
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.
Yes I heard that.
No quick way out of this for me and Mrs BJ by the looks of it.
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
As someone who once spent a long time getting completely lost walking around the Excel Centre, this doesn't surprise me. It's a massive area.
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speak
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”
They are not fiddling the figures.
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
Easy. It’s how the story is presented.
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Did you actually see it?
I should direct my question to C4 then, I suppose. My apologies.
Go see the whole show, I dislike well spun, so full of itself journalism. I stand with the posters who feel the media are getting pretty out of order in pursuit of a headline.
I am wondering how this will play out in Wisconsin (narrowly won by Trump in 2016) in November.
The Democrat Governor, Tony Evers, sought to postpone it, but the Republican state legislature challenged it and was backed by the conservative majority on the state supreme court.
It feels like a really bad move by the Republicans there - easily characterised as putting voters at mortal risk in knee-jerk opposition to a Governor with whom they have terrible relations. Interesting to see whether it hurts Trump in the state.
I suspect you are right. This is a tremendous and moronic own goal.
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.
So that is less than 5%
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normal
working till 67 then have three years to enjoy your retirement then lockdown till there is a vaccine?
Your choice outside of lockdown at the peak, if you go out and are over 70 and especially over 80 you just are more likely to die if you get it than others
On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title: We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
The summary I can see says:
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
My wife expressed the fear today that the end result of this virus would be hi-tech surveillance states, with the authorities monitoring everything we do and everyone we meet. Countries that don’t do this will be crippled by the bug.
I think she’s on to something.
An accurate real time test would probably enable us not to have to do that.
No clapping on my street at 8pm (and I'm not doing it, though I did last Thursday, I find it weird and mawkish tonight) but someone set off a firework on the dot of 8pm.
Recovered patients data Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes. This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plague
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
The only way to avoid it completely is to stay locked inside your residence for the next 18 months.
Checked into my Facebook account for the first time in a week or two. Seems to be full of friends and vague acquaintances posting Spring walks photos (each mentioning the 2ms rule).
On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title: We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
The summary I can see says:
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common; (b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
No clapping on my street at 8pm (and I'm not doing it, though I did last Thursday, I find it weird and mawkish tonight) but someone set off a firework on the dot of 8pm.
I think the Thursday night clap for NHS, carers, front line staff and for Boris would have been fine.
My wife expressed the fear today that the end result of this virus would be hi-tech surveillance states, with the authorities monitoring everything we do and everyone we meet. Countries that don’t do this will be crippled by the bug.
I think she’s on to something.
Jeremy Cliffe wrote an article saying the same thing a couple of weeks ago.
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.
Not so fantastic news. Porton Down have "ground truth" data for 700+ individuals, and when evaluating all these antibody kits that every manufacturer claims are 98-99% accurate, they are all crap.
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.
Yes I heard that.
No quick way out of this for me and Mrs BJ by the looks of it.
But they are working hard to scale up. I think that will be a few weeks away though, but not many months. The problem with the previous statements was that they did not (I think) assume the purchased antibody tests would be so poor.
Comments
I do wonder if the Police are a bit over zealous in the wrong areas.
Biden was the best of a poor field bar maybe Buttigieg who was an election too early
HCoV-19 (SARS-2) has caused >88,000 reported illnesses with a current case-fatality ratio of ~2%. Here, we investigate the stability of viable HCoV-19 on surfaces and in aerosols in comparison with SARS35 CoV-1. Overall, stability is very similar between HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1. We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. Both viruses show relatively long viability on stainless steel and polypropylene compared to copper or cardboard: the median half-life estimate for HCoV-19 is around 13 hours on steel and around 16 hours on polypropylene. Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE
WHO have looked at it and say no.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/no-need-for-healthy-to-wear-face-masks-says-who-after-review
And if there’s a shortage a stash of them should be in hospital or care home not in our houses.
Remember the shelves were cleared without panic buying, cleared from just most households getting little more. We could do real damage stockpiling face masks at home.
Trump just beggars belief.
https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
Also, where are all the reagents for 3.5 billion tests going to come from? And all the PCR machines you need? And the trained lab staff? You can't just magic up this stuff.
It was clear that Peston was a gotcha question and Witty fell right into it.
The median age of those who died of Covid 19 in Italy was 79.5 and all of those who died under 40 had a serious pre existing health condition
There does seem to be a very small percentage of people, who for whatever reason, their immune system over-reacts. That is different to the oldies, whose immune systems aren't strong enough to fight it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RVSV-ZEBOV_vaccine
South Koreans are happy to allow this under special circumstances. They trust their government not to abuse it and will only be used for good.
You only have to look at the reaction to ID cards in the UK, to think it will be a much harder sell.
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists-produced-world-first-ebola-vaccine/
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
Covid-19 seems to be quite stable from what I've heard.
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1247581715511627776?s=09
For what it's worth (very little as I haven't read their detailed argument) I'm not sure the actuaries have got this right, because I'm dubious about how granular their risk categories are. You might be able to say statistically that a 65 year-old male smoker who is obese with diabetes is expected live for another X years, but you can't say that COVID-19 robbed him of X years if he had a buggered immune system and was already in hospital receiving respiratory care for bacterial double pneumonia before he caught COVID-19 from the patient next-door. I don't think their "worst-case scenario" is necessarily "worst-case" enough.
It would be interesting to look at victims' medical records and consider how their health status compares to other people in the same actuarial risk group that was used to calculate their remaining life expectancy. I have a strong suspicion a disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths will come from the poorlier end of their risk group. While it's true older people have a high rate of multimorbidity and that despite the challenges this poses to their care, plenty can live for many years with these conditions, it seems likely to me that COVID-related deaths will be especially common among those with the most serious conditions. Which is why blanket descriptions like "Y percent of victims had a pre-existing condition" are not especially helpful, something I suspect I would find myself in strong agreement with your esteemed colleagues on.
Similarly, I don't buy the argument that "COVID is killing people who would have died off in the flu season anyway". How do you know they'd even have caught the flu this year (not everyone does, even asymptomatically), or that whatever strain they caught wasn't one they had a sufficiently protective degree of immunity to due to previous exposure? But I can see that someone dying from COVID-19 due to a particularly weak immune system may not have great odds of getting through, say, the next three flu seasons unscathed.
I get the feeling that "how many COVID deaths were there, really?" is one of those questions that's only going to be answered by a careful regression analysis after the event, as happens with flu figures.
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
I know that by the end of 2003 world governments decided it wasn't worth funding the research because I remember thinking at the time that just because that particular epidemic burned itself out didn't necessarily mean we wouldn't need a vaccine at some point...
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
Hope you and your closest recover quickly
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Did you actually see it?
Not taking any risks returning to Chez Urquhart in the meantime.
The Democrat Governor, Tony Evers, sought to postpone it, but the Republican state legislature challenged it and was backed by the conservative majority on the state supreme court.
It feels like a really bad move by the Republicans there - easily characterised as putting voters at mortal risk in knee-jerk opposition to a Governor with whom they have terrible relations. Interesting to see whether it hurts Trump in the state.
In the pre-vaccination era, a bout of measles in a city tops up the number of immune people (the so-called "depletion of the susceptible") until transmission ceases and the disease largely fizzles out. But as people are born into the population without immunity (and immune people die off), the proportion of susceptibles rises again, until it's big enough to trigger exponential growth and a new epidemic. In smaller towns, the number of infected people is so low during periods of herd immunity that, particularly during periods of low seasonal transmission, it can by chance fall to zero and you get a local extinction event. In large cities, that's unlikely to happen, and due to migration and trade it's possible for measles from the big city to then re-seed smaller towns where measles had gone extinct. For that reason, measles outbreaks in smaller towns tend to "sync up" with those of their nearest large city.
Fascinating (and free) paper on how chaotic the dynamics of this can get here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4741526/
On this issue we agree it seems.
No quick way out of this for me and Mrs BJ by the looks of it.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY/
So you should be able to read it on screen but I can't figure out how to get it into a usable file format.
Hmmm...
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/03/rise-bio-surveillance-state