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This morning's @standardnews cartoon pic.twitter.com/TfhyDGveoa
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Very few historic deaths in todays numbers, does also look like weekend effect as past 3 days are... 50, 162, 58
Awaiting Prof cricket to do his thing.
When is the lockdown to be lifted?
Why isn't it been lifted?
But we only had 300 deaths the past few days, surely we should be lifting the lockdown?
If we are past peak, surely we can allow people more freedom under the lockdown rules?
....
And finally we go to Maureen from Margate....my neighbour 3 doors down, Tracey, lovely lass, single mum with 3 kids, her ex-Dave, total bastard he was, she says that you can cure this by using a sunbed, why isn't the government providing free sunbed sessions for everybody?
For anyone interested - https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/covid-19?mc_cid=cde0b857f2&mc_eid=703bb9e6b8.
You can hear from the Chief Scientist himself. Live-streamed naturally.
That's what the track and trace is being developed for, but we're not there yet.
Because he is not a man to make rash promises in public?
Uncanny.
I disagree - it would be most surprising if Johnson were to allow the emotion of his personal experience to influence policy-making, and I don`t think that he will. I would think less of him if he were to do so.
We need rationality not emotion.
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1254762902780706822?s=20
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/aon-to-cut-salaries-of-most-employees-suspends-stock-buybacks-2020-04-27
Just sticking all of the data into GCP and coming up with a script that will do it for me in the future.
https://twitter.com/jpscott1972/status/1254763191013384192/photo/1
We need to test the right people quickly. That is the most crucial thing.
Our in this case, no answers.
Instructions from today to test admissions from any cause for COVID-19.
GP calls for action after 125 of her care home patients die of Covid-19
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/22/without-a-plan-its-not-going-to-stop-care-homes-fear-worst-yet-to-come-covid-19
...“I am really angry about this,” said Dr Anna Down, scanning her computer for figures to show how coronavirus has ravaged her patients living in nursing homes.
“One home had 23 deaths, another lost 19, and another 13,” the Ealing GP said. “In two units 50% of residents died in the space of 10 days.”
Down is the clinical lead at a practice with 1,000 residents on its books in 15 privately run nursing homes in the area of west London hit harder than anywhere in Britain by Covid-19 deaths in the first weeks of the outbreak. In a normal month, she might expect to lose around 28 people. In the last month she has lost 125.
Down has a warning to the rest of the country informed by her practice’s experience: reform how social care handles Covid-19 or face rising deaths and a second devastating wave of infection.
Her anger goes beyond grief. Her early warnings to public health authorities about the risks to care residents were not acted on, she said; infected patients continue to be discharged into care homes from hospitals, spreading the virus; and staff shortages are blighting attempts to keep the virus isolated....
https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1254575445229441024?s=09
https://twitter.com/foxinsoxuk/status/1254741387595177985?s=19
Tracing where spread occurs is pretty vital to effective social distancing.
In one prison of 2,500, 2,300 were tested.
just over 2,000 were found to be positive. That's maybe not surprising considering the cramped conditions of prisons once the virus gets going.
The interesting bit is that 95% of the 2,000 positives had no symptoms. Yikes.
https://twitter.com/rosscolquhoun/status/1254763844175421442
Gradually getting there
Continued decreases in daily deaths figures looks promising.
I had a play with numbers over the weekend to try to get a curve to see how the deaths (in hospitals in England) will continue to decrease. Inputs to be R0, Rt (as it varies) and a distribution of death dates (deaths don't all occur on a specific date after infection; there's a distribution of deaths concentrated into a fortnightly period, with a peak in it), so when infections are increasing, deaths caused by infections on D1 will peak some time later, and deaths from the leading of infections on, say D+4 and from the trailing edge of D-4 (and, of course, other days) will all pile up.
Which makes the curve worse on the way up and less bad on the way down.
It's not remotely scientific, and just a way for me to visualise for myself how changing Rt numbers affect the curve. What Rt numbers would I need to plug in to get the curve to more-or-less fit what has happened, and what would it project?
I chose R0 as 3.0; Rt(1) for the week before announcement of any restrictions to be decreased from there (because transport and interactions were already diminishing), Rt(2) for the week between the announcement of "Avoid bars and restaurants, voluntary social distancing) and Rt(3) from lockdown onwards.
I aimed for figures close-ish to the ones estimated by Imperial College and wasn't miles off.
So - it's not imposing a "best fit line"; it's trying to tweak those Rt numbers to fit the curve. I ended up with:
R0=3
Rt(1)=2.1
Rt(2)=1.3
Rt(3)=0.75
... and it seemed to fit. The latest figures fit nicely without me changing the numbers (only numbers after the 5 day lag for details entered in, so April 21st is the last day on the actual figures. It remains to be seen how well they'll continue to fit, but bearing in mind that the next two or three weeks of projected decline should be already "baked in" thanks to incubation periods and time taken for the disease to progress, we should already be on target to get deaths in hospitals in England below 200 per day (before the first May Bank Holiday).
Doesn't mean "Yay, let's release lockdown!" - it means it's working, and we may have scope to start easing some restrictions in May, if this trend continues.
(Bear in mind that this curve could be total bollocks, of course. Just because it fits what's gone before and has done okay with two days-worth of predictions doesn't mean it's reliable. Anyone can get a curve to fit historical data - my attempt is to do so while only adjusting Rt)
You might say it's like having some of the benefits of lockdown, without lockdown.
If only somebody had pointed this out before...
Even if we go with this spin, where are they going to magic up another 47,000 test capacity in 3-4 days?
What about a fourth phase, fifth phase...FFS...it was clearly as turn of phrase to indicate that the situation is changing.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/support-for-the-uks-intent-to-accede-to-the-lugano-convention-2007
But we already know you can test positive for Covid without symptoms, there's been plenty of reporting of this, and I personally know of a few cases.
I believe that there is more chance of a false negative without (or before) symptoms, but I don't know if there are any stats on this?
Come off it, Mike. Boris Johnson would have committed to 200,000 tests a day, and with the same pathetic prospect of achieving his target.
But all the PB Tories would have come out, saying "Isn´t Boris wonderful! Such a card! What fun!" etc etc. As usual.
When we feel that way on a Wednesday or Thursday there will be true cause for it.
Personally I'm interested in:
"What are you doing to increase the UK's capacity to manufacture vaccine doses?"
But I accept this may not be of wider interest.
I cannot see in any of the reports, including on the Ohio Department of Corrections own materials, what type of testing - RT-PCR or antibody - was used. But if they have used antibody testing, it might explain the really high numbers. Ditto for the NYC, Santa Clara, and LA studies which did use antibody testing.
PS Which has got me wondering if having been exposed to multiple colds in the past might have conferred some degree of immunity to COVID, and hence the surprisingly high level of asymptomatic and paucisymptomatic cases in those under 60.
6 weeks ago tomorrow Boris Johnson said "We're massively increasing the testing to see whether you have it now and ramping up daily testing from 5,000 a day, to 10,000 to 25,000 and then up at 250,000,"
https://twitter.com/cricketwyvern/status/1254747319544807425?s=21
I like hostas, as do slugs. My many clumps and pots of inherited hostas are about to break through. How do I protect them from slugs? Is it as simple as a band of eggshells on the soil (of which I have also inherited a fair quantity)?
https://twitter.com/mattwardman/status/1254727694832590848
In the Korean call centre upthread all but 2% became symptomatic within 14 days.
https://twitter.com/phoenix4419/status/1254716723883900929?s=21
Yet we had a talking head on BBC24 commenting as if the reporting was for yesterday....
I think the govt should be setting out the what of its lockdown lifting strategy, even if it can't tell us the when.
Very interesting about the spread from desks. Would you agree that this does indeed point to droplets, as opposed to airborne aerosols, as the principal cause of spread? In that droplets will fall out of the air relatively quickly and hence in office settings onto the desk; whereas in elevators and corridors, because we are not touching surfaces (other than the floor button), we are not really exposed to settled droplets, rather mostly aerosols.
I did have some limited success with beer traps, but recharging the traps after rainfall was problematic.
This sort of tracing goes back to the sort of work John Snow did in Soho in the nineteenth century. Hopefully we can work out how to do this ourselves, thereby creating a low risk office space.
The Last of Us 2 has had massive spoilers leaked.
I'd heard some displeasing rumours, but if you want to avoid the leaks, be sure to keep away from comment sections/forums etc.
What a load of old bollox. Sillars is a nutjob, unionist go to nutter when they want to announce death of SNP. Oh how we laugh, deputy leader from 100 years ago.
HeraldScotland
✔
@heraldscotland
EXCLUSIVE: Jim Sillars says @theSNP may have to be replaced by new independence party https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/18406865.jim-sillars-says-snp-may-replaced-new-independence-party/ …
Sillars says SNP may have to be replaced by new independence party
THE SNP is so rotten it may have to be replaced by a new independence party, its former deputy leader has said.
heraldscotland.com
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And it says not adjusted for population.
https://twitter.com/halfon4harlowMP/status/1254763225314361347?s=20