They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
According to Ferguson's model.
Others seem to be available.
'Us' is a complete misnomer. NHS England figures show that if you are healthy and under 60 the risks really are extremely small. 250 people with no other conditions have died between 0 and 60.
even for healthy people up to 80 its under 1000.
We may think we are in this together but the virus absolutely doesn't.
Do we have statistics as to how many younger people who catch the virus need hospital treatment, intensive care, and ventilators? Despite their mostly recovering, there might be a significant burden on health services to achieve that.
I had a quick root around and managed to find a paper published in The Lancet at the end of March, which summarised various data obtained from the Chinese outbreak. It included these statistical estimates for the proportion of all Covid patients hospitalised, broken down by age group:
These don't offer us a breakdown of the severity of the condition of those hospitalised; nonetheless, given that both hospitalisation and mortality drop quite precipitously with age, it seems to me that it's probably also fair to assume that the bulk of demand for critical care comes from the older age cohorts.
A lot less than 100% in that sample
I think percentage of each band that needed hospitalisation outside isolation units.
"Proportions of infected individuals hospitalised are presented as posterior mode (95% credible interval) and are adjusted for under-ascertainment and corrected for demography. Estimates are shown to three signficant figures. "
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
Foxy, whilst you're here I don't suppose you could jog my memory on something? It may be out of your area but I had an angiogram a couple of years ago and it took ages because my heart is apparently the wrong way around or something. For the life of me, I can't remember what they called it (and I was paying more attention to my feeling distinctly woozy). Apologies if it's outside your area but any idea what it is? I tried Googling but couldn't really get anything out of it.
Confirms what anyone sane knew which is the UK has performed much, much better than Italy and the idea that the UK was "worst in Europe" was completely preposterous bullshit.
Given the scenes of devastation in Italy with hospitals collapsing haven't been seen in this country it should have been obvious to anyone who doesn't hate this country and its government and want us to do badly.
For comparison, here's the preposterous bullshit. Updated figures for England coming out tomorrow, I think.
Edit. Italy figures are partial, so not comparable.
I don't really understand how these baselines are possible:
- Italy has a population basically the same as the UK and similar demographics - yet it usually has less than half as many weekly deaths? - Germany is 20% bigger than France/UK but has nearly twice as many weekly deaths?
Depends upon seasonality. Eventually 100% of people die but rate deaths are not the same all year round.
Italy has 17k flu deaths per annum compared to us getting about 6k, despite comparable levels of population. If Italian oldies die more in flu season then that leaves fewer to die later in the year.
Just a hypothesis.
We've solved Italy - I missed a footnote.
You can see the strength of the flu season by how "straight" or otherwise the annual profile is. Portugal for example looks to be very pronounced. S Africa is out of phase. because southern hemisphere. Belgium and the Netherlands look to almost not have one at all, which is surprising.
I'd guess there are some huge differences in reporting standards. The author has commented that Germany, for example, lags by almost a month.
They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
According to Ferguson's model.
Others seem to be available.
'Us' is a complete misnomer. NHS England figures show that if you are healthy and under 60 the risks really are extremely small. 250 people with no other conditions have died between 0 and 60.
even for healthy people up to 80 its under 1000.
We may think we are in this together but the virus absolutely doesn't.
Do we have statistics as to how many younger people who catch the virus need hospital treatment, intensive care, and ventilators? Despite their mostly recovering, there might be a significant burden on health services to achieve that.
I had a quick root around and managed to find a paper published in The Lancet at the end of March, which summarised various data obtained from the Chinese outbreak. It included these statistical estimates for the proportion of all Covid patients hospitalised, broken down by age group:
These don't offer us a breakdown of the severity of the condition of those hospitalised; nonetheless, given that both hospitalisation and mortality drop quite precipitously with age, it seems to me that it's probably also fair to assume that the bulk of demand for critical care comes from the older age cohorts.
A lot less than 100% in that sample
I think percentage of each band that needed hospitalisation outside isolation units.
"Proportions of infected individuals hospitalised are presented as posterior mode (95% credible interval) and are adjusted for under-ascertainment and corrected for demography. Estimates are shown to three signficant figures. "
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
Foxy, whilst you're here I don't suppose you could jog my memory on something? It may be out of your area but I had an angiogram a couple of years ago and it took ages because my heart is apparently the wrong way around or something. For the life of me, I can't remember what they called it (and I was paying more attention to my feeling distinctly woozy). Apologies if it's outside your area but any idea what it is? I tried Googling but couldn't really get anything out of it.
Dextrocardia?
I know that because there was a great stir about one of my sons having it; it transpired that someone had processed an x ray photograph the wrong way round.
It's worth remembering that most students don't bother with student politics - so it gets taken over by nutters.
At my uni it was thus - every now and then they would do something stupid enough to trigger the sleeping majority. Who would turn up at a meeting in a few hundreds to overwhelm the usual 25 voting clowns.....
Even more so at Oxford as the Students' Union has a fringe role - it has no traditional students union building (the unrelated Oxford Union and college JCRs play that role) and very limited involvement in coordinating sports, social etc. Most students barely interact with it at all. I am sure with many universities it attracts a "type" but at Oxford perhaps even more so as there is almost nothing at stake for anyone normal.
They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
According to Ferguson's model.
Others seem to be available.
'Us' is a complete misnomer. NHS England figures show that if you are healthy and under 60 the risks really are extremely small. 250 people with no other conditions have died between 0 and 60.
even for healthy people up to 80 its under 1000.
We may think we are in this together but the virus absolutely doesn't.
Do we have statistics as to how many younger people who catch the virus need hospital treatment, intensive care, and ventilators? Despite their mostly recovering, there might be a significant burden on health services to achieve that.
I had a quick root around and managed to find a paper published in The Lancet at the end of March, which summarised various data obtained from the Chinese outbreak. It included these statistical estimates for the proportion of all Covid patients hospitalised, broken down by age group:
These don't offer us a breakdown of the severity of the condition of those hospitalised; nonetheless, given that both hospitalisation and mortality drop quite precipitously with age, it seems to me that it's probably also fair to assume that the bulk of demand for critical care comes from the older age cohorts.
A lot less than 100% in that sample
I think percentage of each band that needed hospitalisation outside isolation units.
"Proportions of infected individuals hospitalised are presented as posterior mode (95% credible interval) and are adjusted for under-ascertainment and corrected for demography. Estimates are shown to three signficant figures. "
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
Foxy, whilst you're here I don't suppose you could jog my memory on something? It may be out of your area but I had an angiogram a couple of years ago and it took ages because my heart is apparently the wrong way around or something. For the life of me, I can't remember what they called it (and I was paying more attention to my feeling distinctly woozy). Apologies if it's outside your area but any idea what it is? I tried Googling but couldn't really get anything out of it.
Dextrocardia?
I know that because there was a great stir about one of my sons having it; it transpired that someone had processed an x ray photograph the wrong way round.
Probably funnier after the event rather than at the time!
Maybe, it could be Mesocardia. All I remember is them faffing around for ages because they couldn't get a good look. They didn't seem overly concerned, just that they rarely ever saw it.
It's worth remembering that most students don't bother with student politics - so it gets taken over by nutters.
At my uni it was thus - every now and then they would do something stupid enough to trigger the sleeping majority. Who would turn up at a meeting in a few hundreds to overwhelm the usual 25 voting clowns.....
Even more so at Oxford as the Students' Union has a fringe role - it has no traditional students union building (the unrelated Oxford Union and college JCRs play that role) and very limited involvement in coordinating sports, social etc. Most students barely interact with it at all. I am sure with many universities it attracts a "type" but at Oxford perhaps even more so as there is almost nothing at stake for anyone normal.
Student politics isn’t so different from ‘grown up’ politics.
Confirms what anyone sane knew which is the UK has performed much, much better than Italy and the idea that the UK was "worst in Europe" was completely preposterous bullshit.
Given the scenes of devastation in Italy with hospitals collapsing haven't been seen in this country it should have been obvious to anyone who doesn't hate this country and its government and want us to do badly.
For comparison, here's the preposterous bullshit. Updated figures for England coming out tomorrow, I think.
Edit. Italy figures are partial, so not comparable.
I don't really understand how these baselines are possible:
- Italy has a population basically the same as the UK and similar demographics - yet it usually has less than half as many weekly deaths? - Germany is 20% bigger than France/UK but has nearly twice as many weekly deaths?
Depends upon seasonality. Eventually 100% of people die but rate deaths are not the same all year round.
Italy has 17k flu deaths per annum compared to us getting about 6k, despite comparable levels of population. If Italian oldies die more in flu season then that leaves fewer to die later in the year.
Just a hypothesis.
We've solved Italy - I missed a footnote.
You can see the strength of the flu season by how "straight" or otherwise the annual profile is. Portugal for example looks to be very pronounced. S Africa is out of phase. because southern hemisphere. Belgium and the Netherlands look to almost not have one at all, which is surprising.
I'd guess there are some huge differences in reporting standards. The author has commented that Germany, for example, lags by almost a month.
South African deaths are down markedly on normal because lockdown means they are not only not having virus deaths but with everyone at home they're not getting murdered either. https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256311925278982145
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
I'm not one for twitter, but sometimes it just nails it - the account judging people's bookcase arrangements from tv appearances is exactly what I knew we needed.
Confirms what anyone sane knew which is the UK has performed much, much better than Italy and the idea that the UK was "worst in Europe" was completely preposterous bullshit.
Given the scenes of devastation in Italy with hospitals collapsing haven't been seen in this country it should have been obvious to anyone who doesn't hate this country and its government and want us to do badly.
For comparison, here's the preposterous bullshit. Updated figures for England coming out tomorrow, I think.
Edit. Italy figures are partial, so not comparable.
I don't really understand how these baselines are possible:
- Italy has a population basically the same as the UK and similar demographics - yet it usually has less than half as many weekly deaths? - Germany is 20% bigger than France/UK but has nearly twice as many weekly deaths?
Depends upon seasonality. Eventually 100% of people die but rate deaths are not the same all year round.
Italy has 17k flu deaths per annum compared to us getting about 6k, despite comparable levels of population. If Italian oldies die more in flu season then that leaves fewer to die later in the year.
Just a hypothesis.
We've solved Italy - I missed a footnote.
You can see the strength of the flu season by how "straight" or otherwise the annual profile is. Portugal for example looks to be very pronounced. S Africa is out of phase. because southern hemisphere. Belgium and the Netherlands look to almost not have one at all, which is surprising.
I'd guess there are some huge differences in reporting standards. The author has commented that Germany, for example, lags by almost a month.
South African deaths are down markedly on normal because lockdown means they are not only not having virus deaths but with everyone at home they're not getting murdered either. ttps://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256311925278982145
Great use of statistics there. Has anyone yet seen breakdown of causes of death in the UK over the past few weeks?
Anecdotally, most of the murders reported in the British press seem to be domestic rather than gang-related, and a drop in industrial production and transport use will most likely have reduced accidents in these sectors too - albeit from very low bases compared to SA. Suicides may well have gone up though, and a few natural deaths as people avoided hospitals even when they were seriously sick.
... French hospital discovers Covid-19 case from December. The hospital retested old samples from pneumonia patients and discovered that it treated a man who had Covid-19 as early as 27 December, nearly a month before the French government confirmed its first cases....
Same as the US. I wonder when the earliest non-China cases were around the globe? (Not that we are ever likely to find out now.)
I agree entirely with the sentiment and almost all of the underlying facts expressed in Robert's piece. The people who know these things have been very clear and educational about why this is not a biological weapon.
I would however disagree on one point though. The lesson that the Viet Cong learnt against the US is that the best way to defeat an enemy is to use their own weaknesses against them. In the case of the US Army it was their inability to leave injured soldiers behind. The VC quickly learnt that if you injured soldiers in the jungle you could rapidly make a whole platoon combat ineffective where simply killing a few would not have had the same effect.
In the case of this virus, it has been amazingly effective at shutting down the whole Western world even though its actual danger to life is relatively slight compared to other historic plagues.
If I were someone mad enough and evil enough to want to bring the West to its knees and had the resources to produce a nasty bug with the minimum amount of danger to my own people then I would now be looking at our reaction to this disease and making plans accordingly.
Thankfully I believe such people only really exist in comic books.
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
I don't know where you got that 1 in 10 number form, but I ahve seen lots of estimations, and frankly, I think they are all over the place, one by change could be right, but that it, considering the inconsistency in testing over time and location, and who has been tested, it makes no sense to use that as the base line.
I would suggest that a quick estanmat of number of cases would be deaths multiplied by 250, i.e. an overall case fatality rate of 0.4%
Deaths is a slitly more 'hard' number but is still not standard, that is do you include 'died with' as well as 'died of' or should you look at the deaths above 'normal'
I'm suggesting the 0.4% CFR because its a rounding to 1SF the fairly comprehensive German antibody test of 0.36% CFR and is in the middal of the range of other anti body tests which seem to go form 0.1% to 0.7% conducted in the US.
Confirms what anyone sane knew which is the UK has performed much, much better than Italy and the idea that the UK was "worst in Europe" was completely preposterous bullshit.
Given the scenes of devastation in Italy with hospitals collapsing haven't been seen in this country it should have been obvious to anyone who doesn't hate this country and its government and want us to do badly.
Too early to say, given that our figures are now rising faster than theirs.
We did however avoid the Italian crisis by having our cases spread more evenly across the country and through time.
I din't think its too early to tell, the damage has been done in Italy. Those April figures when they get published are going to be awful.
We are entering our tail now and they are further along with theirs but our tail being slightly higher day for day than theirs isn't going to make up the damage they had already.
I like Bill Gates' comment that you have to wait until it's all over before you can assess how each country did, but it is unlikely any will get an A+.
Maybe he might have qualified that if he'd known about NZ but even so I think he's got it about right. My guess is we'll feature in the mid-range, Italy likewise.
South Africa is another nation doing surprisingly well. They've not been getting much attention or credit. People I know from South Africa are uncharacteristically impressed with SA's response.
South Africa has an average life expectancy of just 64 which probably helps, given the death rate from Covid only rises significantly once you get over 70 and is highest amongst over 80s
This really is bollocks from Hitchens. Sweden's number of deaths is massively up on those of its neighbours as a percentage of the population. They should have been very low as a result of their population density but they are way ahead of Norway, Finland and Denmark even though the latter is far more densely populated.
World Rugby kinda indicates where professional sport is headed towards until there's a vaccine.
Elite rugby matches are likely to be played behind closed doors until an effective coronavirus vaccine is freely available, according to guidelines released by World Rugby.
The document, compiled by World Rugby’s leading medical experts, raises the possibility of the autumn Tests, next year’s Six Nations and even the British & Irish Lions tour of South Africa being played in empty stadiums or in front of radically reduced attendances.
The guidelines also advise that no competitive matches should even take place until governments allow gatherings of 250 people, casting major doubt on the completion of the 2019-20 Premiership season.
The Premier League reckons 300-350 in attendance for a behind closed doors football match (plus any police outside), F1 think it's 1,000-1,500 required for a closed race - including around a hundred doctors.
Looks increasingly like Liverpool might have to wait a few months longer for the season to play out - but hey, we've waited 30 years for it!
What's the point of having a few 100 attending?
That's the numbers required to actually put on the event to the required standard, with no spectators present.
Will include the competitors and their support staff, officials and their technical teams, medics, sanctioning body overseers, television and radio production teams, other media, ground staff (ballboys, marshals), cleaners and other clerical workers etc. It all adds up quickly!
Oh i thought they meant in addition to that.
Sadly not, it just takes a lot of people to put on modern sporting events.
Was trying to wonder what we might be watching (on TV and Betfair, obviously!) over the summer, if the major team sports and professional touring sports are all shut down - table tennis, badminton, darts, with maybe some local snooker, tennis and golf?
An attempt by the US Indycar series to have their actual teams and drivers compete in computer e-racing ended in a demolition derby on live TV over the weekend, which didn't impress the fans and sponsors - so there's a fine line to draw about the quality and integrity of replacement competitions.
They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
According to Ferguson's model.
Others seem to be available.
'Us' is a complete misnomer. NHS England figures show that if you are healthy and under 60 the risks really are extremely small. 250 people with no other conditions have died between 0 and 60.
even for healthy people up to 80 its under 1000.
We may think we are in this together but the virus absolutely doesn't.
Do we have statistics as to how many younger people who catch the virus need hospital treatment, intensive care, and ventilators? Despite their mostly recovering, there might be a significant burden on health services to achieve that.
I had a quick root around and managed to find a paper published in The Lancet at the end of March, which summarised various data obtained from the Chinese outbreak. It included these statistical estimates for the proportion of all Covid patients hospitalised, broken down by age group:
These don't offer us a breakdown of the severity of the condition of those hospitalised; nonetheless, given that both hospitalisation and mortality drop quite precipitously with age, it seems to me that it's probably also fair to assume that the bulk of demand for critical care comes from the older age cohorts.
A lot less than 100% in that sample
I think percentage of each band that needed hospitalisation outside isolation units.
"Proportions of infected individuals hospitalised are presented as posterior mode (95% credible interval) and are adjusted for under-ascertainment and corrected for demography. Estimates are shown to three signficant figures. "
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
Foxy, whilst you're here I don't suppose you could jog my memory on something? It may be out of your area but I had an angiogram a couple of years ago and it took ages because my heart is apparently the wrong way around or something. For the life of me, I can't remember what they called it (and I was paying more attention to my feeling distinctly woozy). Apologies if it's outside your area but any idea what it is? I tried Googling but couldn't really get anything out of it.
Dextrocardia?
I know that because there was a great stir about one of my sons having it; it transpired that someone had processed an x ray photograph the wrong way round.
Probably funnier after the event rather than at the time!
Maybe, it could be Mesocardia. All I remember is them faffing around for ages because they couldn't get a good look. They didn't seem overly concerned, just that they rarely ever saw it.
World Rugby kinda indicates where professional sport is headed towards until there's a vaccine.
Elite rugby matches are likely to be played behind closed doors until an effective coronavirus vaccine is freely available, according to guidelines released by World Rugby.
The document, compiled by World Rugby’s leading medical experts, raises the possibility of the autumn Tests, next year’s Six Nations and even the British & Irish Lions tour of South Africa being played in empty stadiums or in front of radically reduced attendances.
The guidelines also advise that no competitive matches should even take place until governments allow gatherings of 250 people, casting major doubt on the completion of the 2019-20 Premiership season.
The Premier League reckons 300-350 in attendance for a behind closed doors football match (plus any police outside), F1 think it's 1,000-1,500 required for a closed race - including around a hundred doctors.
Looks increasingly like Liverpool might have to wait a few months longer for the season to play out - but hey, we've waited 30 years for it!
What's the point of having a few 100 attending?
That's the numbers required to actually put on the event to the required standard, with no spectators present.
Will include the competitors and their support staff, officials and their technical teams, medics, sanctioning body overseers, television and radio production teams, other media, ground staff (ballboys, marshals), cleaners and other clerical workers etc. It all adds up quickly!
Oh i thought they meant in addition to that.
Sadly not, it just takes a lot of people to put on modern sporting events.
Was trying to wonder what we might be watching (on TV and Betfair, obviously!) over the summer, if the major team sports and professional touring sports are all shut down - table tennis, badminton, darts, with maybe some local snooker, tennis and golf?
An attempt by the US Indycar series to have their actual teams and drivers compete in computer e-racing ended in a demolition derby on live TV over the weekend, which didn't impress the fans and sponsors - so there's a fine line to draw about the quality and integrity of replacement competitions.
It is why this idea of top secret neutral grounds isn't a goer, as too many people are involved to put a televised match on.
This really is bollocks from Hitchens. Sweden's number of deaths is massively up on those of its neighbours as a percentage of the population. They should have been very low as a result of their population density but they are way ahead of Norway, Finland and Denmark even though the latter is far more densely populated.
Do you think the article Hitchens refers to is "bollocks"?
Most national population density statistics reflect the amount of largely unpopulated areas like mountain ranges, forests and deserts, and of less-populated spaces like arable farmland. Australia has 3 people per sq km but almost everyone lives in a city.
They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
According to Ferguson's model.
Others seem to be available.
'Us' is a complete misnomer. NHS England figures show that if you are healthy and under 60 the risks really are extremely small. 250 people with no other conditions have died between 0 and 60.
even for healthy people up to 80 its under 1000.
We may think we are in this together but the virus absolutely doesn't.
Do we have statistics as to how many younger people who catch the virus need hospital treatment, intensive care, and ventilators? Despite their mostly recovering, there might be a significant burden on health services to achieve that.
I had a quick root around and managed to find a paper published in The Lancet at the end of March, which summarised various data obtained from the Chinese outbreak. It included these statistical estimates for the proportion of all Covid patients hospitalised, broken down by age group:
These don't offer us a breakdown of the severity of the condition of those hospitalised; nonetheless, given that both hospitalisation and mortality drop quite precipitously with age, it seems to me that it's probably also fair to assume that the bulk of demand for critical care comes from the older age cohorts.
A lot less than 100% in that sample
I think percentage of each band that needed hospitalisation outside isolation units.
"Proportions of infected individuals hospitalised are presented as posterior mode (95% credible interval) and are adjusted for under-ascertainment and corrected for demography. Estimates are shown to three signficant figures. "
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
Foxy, whilst you're here I don't suppose you could jog my memory on something? It may be out of your area but I had an angiogram a couple of years ago and it took ages because my heart is apparently the wrong way around or something. For the life of me, I can't remember what they called it (and I was paying more attention to my feeling distinctly woozy). Apologies if it's outside your area but any idea what it is? I tried Googling but couldn't really get anything out of it.
Dextrocardia?
I know that because there was a great stir about one of my sons having it; it transpired that someone had processed an x ray photograph the wrong way round.
Probably funnier after the event rather than at the time!
Maybe, it could be Mesocardia. All I remember is them faffing around for ages because they couldn't get a good look. They didn't seem overly concerned, just that they rarely ever saw it.
Could be. Would it be on medical notes that my doctor can see? Like I say, it's not a problem, I don't think, but knowing would enable me to point it out to them if they are examining that sort of thing.
Case 5: (By far the most likely) Wuhan lab has absolutely nothing to do with Covid-19.
How do you know?
Western virologists and epidemiologists, who know far more about this than I do, appear to be almost unanimous that Covid-19 has the characteristics of a naturally occurring virus epidemic. There's no specific reason to believe the virus originated in the Wuhan lab over other causes. It's not precluded but it has to be unlikely.
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
Hence the problem with the "herd immunity by infection" theory. To get enough infections to generate herd immunity causes enough deaths to- at the very least- give us pause for thought.
Whilst it may be that society has no choice in the matter, in which case may [deity of choice] have mercy on us all (even Boris) for the choices about to be made. But to leap at that, as some would, seems foolish.
Not only were all those supposed PPE providers a load of Arthur Daley's and Delboy Trotters, looks like they are also total bullshitters about even contacting the government...
World Rugby kinda indicates where professional sport is headed towards until there's a vaccine.
Elite rugby matches are likely to be played behind closed doors until an effective coronavirus vaccine is freely available, according to guidelines released by World Rugby.
The document, compiled by World Rugby’s leading medical experts, raises the possibility of the autumn Tests, next year’s Six Nations and even the British & Irish Lions tour of South Africa being played in empty stadiums or in front of radically reduced attendances.
The guidelines also advise that no competitive matches should even take place until governments allow gatherings of 250 people, casting major doubt on the completion of the 2019-20 Premiership season.
The Premier League reckons 300-350 in attendance for a behind closed doors football match (plus any police outside), F1 think it's 1,000-1,500 required for a closed race - including around a hundred doctors.
Looks increasingly like Liverpool might have to wait a few months longer for the season to play out - but hey, we've waited 30 years for it!
What's the point of having a few 100 attending?
That's the numbers required to actually put on the event to the required standard, with no spectators present.
Will include the competitors and their support staff, officials and their technical teams, medics, sanctioning body overseers, television and radio production teams, other media, ground staff (ballboys, marshals), cleaners and other clerical workers etc. It all adds up quickly!
Oh i thought they meant in addition to that.
Sadly not, it just takes a lot of people to put on modern sporting events.
Was trying to wonder what we might be watching (on TV and Betfair, obviously!) over the summer, if the major team sports and professional touring sports are all shut down - table tennis, badminton, darts, with maybe some local snooker, tennis and golf?
An attempt by the US Indycar series to have their actual teams and drivers compete in computer e-racing ended in a demolition derby on live TV over the weekend, which didn't impress the fans and sponsors - so there's a fine line to draw about the quality and integrity of replacement competitions.
It is why this idea of top secret neutral grounds isn't a goer, as too many people are involved to put a televised match on.
For football, I would have thought that the risk of fans turning up at far-away neutral grounds would be a secondary consideration, large impromptu parties and gatherings during matches and after key results would be more of a worry - doubly so if matches are restricted to pay-TV stations and everyone piles in with friends to watch. There will also be huge temptation for small local pubs to open illegally, if it helps them avoid bankruptcy.
There's also going to be very little the police can do to stop street parties around home grounds and in city centres, as the season concludes with champions crowned and teams promoted - good luck shutting down Liverpool as half a million people want to celebrate their first title in three decades!
Not only were all those supposed PPE providers a load of Arthur Daley's and Delboy Trotters, looks like they are also total bullshitters about even contacting the government...
They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
Hence the problem with the "herd immunity by infection" theory. To get enough infections to generate herd immunity causes enough deaths to- at the very least- give us pause for thought.
Whilst it may be that society has no choice in the matter, in which case may [deity of choice] have mercy on us all (even Boris) for the choices about to be made. But to leap at that, as some would, seems foolish.
We're misusing the phrase "herd immunity". It's only sensible in the context of a vaccine. ie you vaccinate a population that is totally or largely free of the disease and as long as you vaccinate more than herd immunity amount that population will be substantially protected.
This really is bollocks from Hitchens. Sweden's number of deaths is massively up on those of its neighbours as a percentage of the population. They should have been very low as a result of their population density but they are way ahead of Norway, Finland and Denmark even though the latter is far more densely populated.
Do you think the article Hitchens refers to is "bollocks"?
Used as justification for their actions, yes. Just compare Swedish rates of death per million with their neighbours.
Sweden 274 per million Denmark 85 per million Finland 43 per million Norway 39 per million . And that is in spite of Denmark having a population density over 5 times that of Sweden.
Sweden has indeed got its R number under control. But a lot more people than necessary had to die for them to do it.
As an aside, I just looked at the Italian numbers for the first time in ages. Total new cases today are around 1,250 and the positive test rate is down at around 1.4%, from a peak of 56%. I suspect than half the country will be functionally CV-19 free (i.e. provinces with fewer than 20 new cases a day).
It's quite unjust that government treats association football teams more harshly than other sectors, because of their popularity among people they can't control, rather than own ability to socially distance, while at the same time, those teams are also being pressurised to refrain from use of the government's supports for employers affected by COVID-19.
I don't know where you got that 1 in 10 number form, but I have seen lots of estimations, and frankly, I think they are all over the place, one by change could be right, but that it, considering the inconsistency in testing over time and location, and who has been tested, it makes no sense to use that as the base line.
I would suggest that a quick estimate of number of cases would be deaths multiplied by 250, i.e. an overall case fatality rate of 0.4%
Roughly 9 million live in Greater London and there have been 5,200 deaths approximately so applying the multiple would mean 1.3 million cases in Greater London so that would be 14.5% of the population infected or roughly 1 in 7.
That would include those who have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.
I agree entirely with the sentiment and almost all of the underlying facts expressed in Robert's piece. The people who know these things have been very clear and educational about why this is not a biological weapon.
I would however disagree on one point though. The lesson that the Viet Cong learnt against the US is that the best way to defeat an enemy is to use their own weaknesses against them. In the case of the US Army it was their inability to leave injured soldiers behind. The VC quickly learnt that if you injured soldiers in the jungle you could rapidly make a whole platoon combat ineffective where simply killing a few would not have had the same effect.
In the case of this virus, it has been amazingly effective at shutting down the whole Western world even though its actual danger to life is relatively slight compared to other historic plagues.
If I were someone mad enough and evil enough to want to bring the West to its knees and had the resources to produce a nasty bug with the minimum amount of danger to my own people then I would now be looking at our reaction to this disease and making plans accordingly.
Thankfully I believe such people only really exist in comic books.
And North Korea.
The mad bastards have seen what they need to do now.
As an aside, I just looked at the Italian numbers for the first time in ages. Total new cases today are around 1,250 and the positive test rate is down at around 1.4%, from a peak of 56%. I suspect than half the country will be functionally CV-19 free (i.e. provinces with fewer than 20 new cases a day).
One of my clients has a vessel being built in Italy. The shipyard has been shut down for the last 2 months but they have been told to expect it to reopen next week.
It's worth remembering that most students don't bother with student politics - so it gets taken over by nutters.
At my uni it was thus - every now and then they would do something stupid enough to trigger the sleeping majority. Who would turn up at a meeting in a few hundreds to overwhelm the usual 25 voting clowns.....
Even more so at Oxford as the Students' Union has a fringe role - it has no traditional students union building (the unrelated Oxford Union and college JCRs play that role) and very limited involvement in coordinating sports, social etc. Most students barely interact with it at all. I am sure with many universities it attracts a "type" but at Oxford perhaps even more so as there is almost nothing at stake for anyone normal.
oh very much this. Plus the Union is a far better social and debating club.
In the last days of my DPhil, a lot of MCRs (graduate common rooms) were trying to disaffiliate from OUSU as it was just not worth the time nor money
Hence the problem with the "herd immunity by infection" theory. To get enough infections to generate herd immunity causes enough deaths to- at the very least- give us pause for thought.
Whilst it may be that society has no choice in the matter, in which case may [deity of choice] have mercy on us all (even Boris) for the choices about to be made. But to leap at that, as some would, seems foolish.
As @BigRich has suggested and I don't demur, we simply don't know how many unreported cases there are out there and how many are asymptomatic.
That's the risk - it may be akin to pouring petrol on a perfectly good fire.
The issue I had this morning with the track and trace app is the issue I have with identity cards. It's easy to justify extending State control in the name of safety and security but at what point does the emergency end and the State relinquish its control?
The National Registration Act of 1939 was repealed in 1952, seven years after the end of the War. We still have anti-terror measures first introduced in the 1970s because terror has never gone away and in the name of security and crime prevention we have networks of surveillance cameras here, there and everywhere.
Most national population density statistics reflect the amount of largely unpopulated areas like mountain ranges, forests and deserts, and of less-populated spaces like arable farmland. Australia has 3 people per sq km but almost everyone lives in a city.
Correct but Copenhagen is a denser city than Stockholm and Stockholm has been smashed by Coronavirus. I think it has had more than triple the deaths of all of Denmark.
This really is bollocks from Hitchens. Sweden's number of deaths is massively up on those of its neighbours as a percentage of the population. They should have been very low as a result of their population density but they are way ahead of Norway, Finland and Denmark even though the latter is far more densely populated.
Do you think the article Hitchens refers to is "bollocks"?
Used as justification for their actions, yes. Just compare Swedish rates of death per million with their neighbours.
Sweden 274 per million Denmark 85 per million Finland 43 per million Norway 39 per million . And that is in spite of Denmark having a population density over 5 times that of Sweden.
Sweden has indeed got its R number under control. But a lot more people than necessary had to die for them to do it.
I think you can only come to a reasoned conclusion about that when we're all past any second and subsequent waves. The Swedish epidemiologists have admitted that their care home old folk were not adequately insulated.
Sweden is shaping up to be bad but not necessarily disastrous. Not sure what we can learn from them, as a country that has done even worse. Not lock down and face a catastrophic death toll? Why would we want to learn from a country that has handled the epidemic poorly, albeit not as badly as us, when we can look to successful examples including next door Denmark?
Most national population density statistics reflect the amount of largely unpopulated areas like mountain ranges, forests and deserts, and of less-populated spaces like arable farmland. Australia has 3 people per sq km but almost everyone lives in a city.
Someone calculated the effective population density a few weeks ago - broke the country into contiguous 1 km2 blocks and calculated which were populated.
Most national population density statistics reflect the amount of largely unpopulated areas like mountain ranges, forests and deserts, and of less-populated spaces like arable farmland. Australia has 3 people per sq km but almost everyone lives in a city.
Someone calculated the effective population density a few weeks ago - broke the country into contiguous 1 km2 blocks and calculated which were populated.
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
Hence the problem with the "herd immunity by infection" theory. To get enough infections to generate herd immunity causes enough deaths to- at the very least- give us pause for thought.
Whilst it may be that society has no choice in the matter, in which case may [deity of choice] have mercy on us all (even Boris) for the choices about to be made. But to leap at that, as some would, seems foolish.
We're misusing the phrase "herd immunity". It's only sensible in the context of a vaccine. ie you vaccinate a population that is totally or largely free of the disease and as long as you vaccinate more than herd immunity amount that population will be substantially protected.
Up to a point. If it were to turn out that this virus is untreatable and impervious to vaccination, then *eventually* it would die out because enough people were immune to it. And there's a conceivable dystopia where that's the question Nature has thrown at humanity.
What I find bizarre is the slice of opinion that says "hey let that wash over us now" rather than taking some time (albeit at substantial cost) to see if we can come up with something smarter.
Most national population density statistics reflect the amount of largely unpopulated areas like mountain ranges, forests and deserts, and of less-populated spaces like arable farmland. Australia has 3 people per sq km but almost everyone lives in a city.
Someone calculated the effective population density a few weeks ago - broke the country into contiguous 1 km2 blocks and calculated which were populated.
I don't know where you got that 1 in 10 number form, but I have seen lots of estimations, and frankly, I think they are all over the place, one by change could be right, but that it, considering the inconsistency in testing over time and location, and who has been tested, it makes no sense to use that as the base line.
I would suggest that a quick estimate of number of cases would be deaths multiplied by 250, i.e. an overall case fatality rate of 0.4%
Roughly 9 million live in Greater London and there have been 5,200 deaths approximately so applying the multiple would mean 1.3 million cases in Greater London so that would be 14.5% of the population infected or roughly 1 in 7.
That would include those who have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.
I think if you add the deaths in care homes then the London death finger rises by a few thousand,
i'm guesstimating in London 25% nationally 15% .
Hence the more recent sharper falls in deaths in London
This really is bollocks from Hitchens. Sweden's number of deaths is massively up on those of its neighbours as a percentage of the population. They should have been very low as a result of their population density but they are way ahead of Norway, Finland and Denmark even though the latter is far more densely populated.
Do you think the article Hitchens refers to is "bollocks"?
Used as justification for their actions, yes. Just compare Swedish rates of death per million with their neighbours.
Sweden 274 per million Denmark 85 per million Finland 43 per million Norway 39 per million . And that is in spite of Denmark having a population density over 5 times that of Sweden.
Sweden has indeed got its R number under control. But a lot more people than necessary had to die for them to do it.
I think you can only come to a reasoned conclusion about that when we're all past any second and subsequent waves. The Swedish epidemiologists have admitted that their care home old folk were not adequately insulated.
But Hitchens is using the current wave as an excuse for why we should have followed the Swedish model. It has been his argument for weeks. And yet based on the comparisons with neighbouring Denmark we could reasonably expect to have had at least 3 times as many deaths as we have had if we had followed the Swedish model and, given our massively more dense population - 424 people per square Km compared to Denmark at 135 people per square KM - probably many times more than that.
As FF43 has said. If you want to learn lessons then learn them from countries that have managed to buck the trend by keeping deaths to a minimum, not those like Sweden who have become outliers in completely the wrong direction.
Sweden is shaping up to be bad but not necessarily disastrous. Not sure what we can learn from them, as a country that has done even worse. Not lock down and face a catastrophic death toll? Why would we want to learn from a country that has handled the epidemic poorly, albeit not as badly as us, when we can look to successful examples including next door Denmark?
The key word is "Folkvett" - a kind of collective responsibility. This happened here as well - the lock down was beginning the week before the official announcement and people were waiting for the Government to catch up with the reality of people going home and staying there.
There's another aspect - capitalism can be brutally exploitative. There are those who need to work because they need the money to survive and for those people coronavirus was an irrelevance. They needed the work and they would risk their health to keep working because they needed the money.
Some, mercifully only a few, employers show no mercy. They expect their workers to come to work and work - no sick pay, no concerns about their health. Sunak has helped with his various payments but hoping people would voluntarily have embraced social distancing or carried on trading without customers (as we are seeing in parts of the US) - I'm not convinced.
We can question the timing but the final decision was probably the right one.
It's worth remembering that most students don't bother with student politics - so it gets taken over by nutters.
At my uni it was thus - every now and then they would do something stupid enough to trigger the sleeping majority. Who would turn up at a meeting in a few hundreds to overwhelm the usual 25 voting clowns.....
Also worth remembering that a lot of BBC and broadsheet journalists went to Oxbridge which is why they imagine the rest of us give a damn what these students get up to.
Sweden is shaping up to be bad but not necessarily disastrous. Not sure what we can learn from them, as a country that has done even worse. Not lock down and face a catastrophic death toll? Why would we want to learn from a country that has handled the epidemic poorly, albeit not as badly as us, when we can look to successful examples including next door Denmark?
I think you are missing the point of Hitshens argument.
take norway, looks to be doing well now with only 250 deaths, so far. and some damage to personall freedom and there econamy.
But what happens when they end the lock-down?
If they (unlikely) go back to 'normal' then R increases to 3 or whatever it was before, and loots of people get it very quickly.
If they go to a Sweden approach, then they will have to go though the same number (well proportion) of deaths as Sweden, but by then they will have damaged the econamy anyway.
Obviously there is the cavidat that a Vaccine may come along to save the day. or some for of advanced track and trace 'app' but we don't know when a Vaccine will be developed or haw effective track and trace will be.
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
Hence the problem with the "herd immunity by infection" theory. To get enough infections to generate herd immunity causes enough deaths to- at the very least- give us pause for thought.
Whilst it may be that society has no choice in the matter, in which case may [deity of choice] have mercy on us all (even Boris) for the choices about to be made. But to leap at that, as some would, seems foolish.
We're misusing the phrase "herd immunity". It's only sensible in the context of a vaccine. ie you vaccinate a population that is totally or largely free of the disease and as long as you vaccinate more than herd immunity amount that population will be substantially protected.
Up to a point. If it were to turn out that this virus is untreatable and impervious to vaccination, then *eventually* it would die out because enough people were immune to it. And there's a conceivable dystopia where that's the question Nature has thrown at humanity.
What I find bizarre is the slice of opinion that says "hey let that wash over us now" rather than taking some time (albeit at substantial cost) to see if we can come up with something smarter.
The epidemic doesn't die out at herd immunity (I got this wrong earlier). It comes off its natural peak at herd immunity. This epidemic will actually grind to a halt at more than 80% of the population being infected. Herd Immunity only makes sense in the context of a vaccination programme where most people are immune before the infections start.
I don't know where you got that 1 in 10 number form, but I have seen lots of estimations, and frankly, I think they are all over the place, one by change could be right, but that it, considering the inconsistency in testing over time and location, and who has been tested, it makes no sense to use that as the base line.
I would suggest that a quick estimate of number of cases would be deaths multiplied by 250, i.e. an overall case fatality rate of 0.4%
Roughly 9 million live in Greater London and there have been 5,200 deaths approximately so applying the multiple would mean 1.3 million cases in Greater London so that would be 14.5% of the population infected or roughly 1 in 7.
That would include those who have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.
I think if you add the deaths in care homes then the London death finger rises by a few thousand,
i'm guesstimating in London 25% nationally 15% .
Hence the more recent sharper falls in deaths in London
15% nationally seems too high. I would reckon the prevalence in London will be at least 2x, and probably 3x, the number for the rest of the UK.
Sweden is shaping up to be bad but not necessarily disastrous. Not sure what we can learn from them, as a country that has done even worse. Not lock down and face a catastrophic death toll? Why would we want to learn from a country that has handled the epidemic poorly, albeit not as badly as us, when we can look to successful examples including next door Denmark?
I think you are missing the point of Hitshens argument.
take norway, looks to be doing well now with only 250 deaths, so far. and some damage to personall freedom and there econamy.
But what happens when they end the lock-down?
If they (unlikely) go back to 'normal' then R increases to 3 or whatever it was before, and loots of people get it very quickly.
If they go to a Sweden approach, then they will have to go though the same number (well proportion) of deaths as Sweden, but by then they will have damaged the econamy anyway.
Obviously there is the cavidat that a Vaccine may come along to save the day. or some for of advanced track and trace 'app' but we don't know when a Vaccine will be developed or haw effective track and trace will be.
That's the flaw though. Going back to an earlier conversation in this header, Norway won't go back to 3. Low key stuff (handwashing, not having massive sporting events) is enough to keep R to 1.something small.
Now any R greater than 1 is bad news, because it's still exponential growth which eventually goes huge. But if you must have that, you're better off doing it from a low baseline and with fewer deaths on the scorecard already. And the longer you delay the reckoning, the more likely it is that science will be able to save you.
Not only were all those supposed PPE providers a load of Arthur Daley's and Delboy Trotters, looks like they are also total bullshitters about even contacting the government...
Or they contacted other parts of the government. We know from the five seconds I've spent googling that some of these two bob outfits did sell PPE overseas and others supplied to individual hospitals, and here are some complete amateurs knocking out visors. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52411459
The problem with a lot of these would-be suppliers is they are too small scale for the NHS which is looking to buy enough kits for every hospital in the country in one hand. A factory that can supply one medium-sized general hospital is useful only for that hospital, not nationally. They've probably also not got the IP or the certification for high grade items.
None of which should distract us from the point that there was a shortage of PPE, and that the government knew about this and did nothing about it.
Which brings us back to Exercise Cygnus and I remind you of the key point which is that it pre-dates Boris, and confirms what Cummings has long been telling us, so I expect to see this front and centre in any future public inquiry. It cements Boris's position by weakening his enemies.
They really aren't mind-blowing, Laura. They are the consequence of a pandemic that risked killing at least 500,000 of us if we just shrugged and said "Meh - I'm off down the pub...."
According to Ferguson's model.
Others seem to be available.
'Us' is a complete misnomer. NHS England figures show that if you are healthy and under 60 the risks really are extremely small. 250 people with no other conditions have died between 0 and 60.
even for healthy people up to 80 its under 1000.
We may think we are in this together but the virus absolutely doesn't.
Do we have statistics as to how many younger people who catch the virus need hospital treatment, intensive care, and ventilators? Despite their mostly recovering, there might be a significant burden on health services to achieve that.
I had a quick root around and managed to find a paper published in The Lancet at the end of March, which summarised various data obtained from the Chinese outbreak. It included these statistical estimates for the proportion of all Covid patients hospitalised, broken down by age group:
These don't offer us a breakdown of the severity of the condition of those hospitalised; nonetheless, given that both hospitalisation and mortality drop quite precipitously with age, it seems to me that it's probably also fair to assume that the bulk of demand for critical care comes from the older age cohorts.
A lot less than 100% in that sample
I think percentage of each band that needed hospitalisation outside isolation units.
"Proportions of infected individuals hospitalised are presented as posterior mode (95% credible interval) and are adjusted for under-ascertainment and corrected for demography. Estimates are shown to three signficant figures. "
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
... to the rescue. I think that someone has fallen for the prosecutor's fallacy here. The numbers should not add up to 100%. Instead of taking all hopsiltaizations and tabulating the frequency in each age band, it takes each age band and tabulates the percentage of hospitalisations in that band.
Lets put it this way, if you had one row for each year, then all the precentages would add up to well over 100.
Not only were all those supposed PPE providers a load of Arthur Daley's and Delboy Trotters, looks like they are also total bullshitters about even contacting the government...
Or they contacted other parts of the government. We know from the five seconds I've spent googling that some of these two bob outfits did sell PPE overseas and others supplied to individual hospitals, and here are some complete amateurs knocking out visors. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52411459
The problem with a lot of these would-be suppliers is they are too small scale for the NHS which is looking to buy enough kits for every hospital in the country in one hand. A factory that can supply one medium-sized general hospital is useful only for that hospital, not nationally. They've probably also not got the IP or the certification for high grade items.
None of which should distract us from the point that there was a shortage of PPE, and that the government knew about this and did nothing about it.
Which brings us back to Exercise Cygnus and I remind you of the key point which is that it pre-dates Boris, and confirms what Cummings has long been telling us, so I expect to see this front and centre in any future public inquiry. It cements Boris's position by weakening his enemies.
On that last point, the installation of Jeremy Hunt as chair of the Commons Health select committee was a truly fortuitous event for the Government. He isn't in a particularly strong position to criticise...
I suppose on a basic level you have to admire their scientific acumen. They are conducting a large scale experiment using themselves as guinea pigs.
It is for people like this that the Darwin Awards were invented.
They are too widely spaced and for too short a time for there to be much cantagion going on. Shame, because it would have been a good way of significantly reducing the cretinous segment of the population of Boston.
Sweden is shaping up to be bad but not necessarily disastrous. Not sure what we can learn from them, as a country that has done even worse. Not lock down and face a catastrophic death toll? Why would we want to learn from a country that has handled the epidemic poorly, albeit not as badly as us, when we can look to successful examples including next door Denmark?
I think you are missing the point of Hitshens argument.
take norway, looks to be doing well now with only 250 deaths, so far. and some damage to personall freedom and there econamy.
But what happens when they end the lock-down?
If they (unlikely) go back to 'normal' then R increases to 3 or whatever it was before, and loots of people get it very quickly.
If they go to a Sweden approach, then they will have to go though the same number (well proportion) of deaths as Sweden, but by then they will have damaged the econamy anyway.
Obviously there is the cavidat that a Vaccine may come along to save the day. or some for of advanced track and trace 'app' but we don't know when a Vaccine will be developed or haw effective track and trace will be.
That's the flaw though. Going back to an earlier conversation in this header, Norway won't go back to 3. Low key stuff (handwashing, not having massive sporting events) is enough to keep R to 1.something small.
Now any R greater than 1 is bad news, because it's still exponential growth which eventually goes huge. But if you must have that, you're better off doing it from a low baseline and with fewer deaths on the scorecard already. And the longer you delay the reckoning, the more likely it is that science will be able to save you.
The nub of Sweden versus the rest is a gamble on the date of an effective vaccine appearing. If one appears soon (i.e. before 2021) then the Swedes will have lost the gamble in terms of fatalities. But they would still have a less damaged economy. OTOH if a vaccine is a long time, or even never, to arrive then the Swedes will be seen to have made the right judgement as their overall health damage will not be much different from that of the others while they still have much less damage to their economy.
Confirms what anyone sane knew which is the UK has performed much, much better than Italy and the idea that the UK was "worst in Europe" was completely preposterous bullshit.
Given the scenes of devastation in Italy with hospitals collapsing haven't been seen in this country it should have been obvious to anyone who doesn't hate this country and its government and want us to do badly.
Too early to say, given that our figures are now rising faster than theirs.
We did however avoid the Italian crisis by having our cases spread more evenly across the country and through time.
I din't think its too early to tell, the damage has been done in Italy. Those April figures when they get published are going to be awful.
We are entering our tail now and they are further along with theirs but our tail being slightly higher day for day than theirs isn't going to make up the damage they had already.
I like Bill Gates' comment that you have to wait until it's all over before you can assess how each country did, but it is unlikely any will get an A+.
Maybe he might have qualified that if he'd known about NZ but even so I think he's got it about right. My guess is we'll feature in the mid-range, Italy likewise.
South Africa is another nation doing surprisingly well. They've not been getting much attention or credit. People I know from South Africa are uncharacteristically impressed with SA's response.
South Africa has an average life expectancy of just 64 which probably helps, given the death rate from Covid only rises significantly once you get over 70 and is highest amongst over 80s
Why I think that Swedens no-Lock-down' approach will probably have less overall deaths.
Im going to try to make this sort ish, There are lots of caviats, and so on im going to skip over in the quest for brevaty but will reply if people are intested.
Two roads to heard immunity.
I'm starting with the premise that a vacssien is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.
Swedish is split at the movement the viruse is retreating in Stockholm and the surrounding county, but growing in most of the rest of the nation. theses two combine to give a overall R of below but very close to 1. The althoratys in Sweden think that 25% of the city has had the virus.
In NYC a recent anti virus study suggested that 24.7% of NYC have also been infected,
On the day that the anti virus test was done in NYC 0.11% of the population had died. by contrast in Stockholm it was 0.06% roughly half.
Looking at the death fingers from any contrary, but Ill use the UK, 157 people under 20 have died but over 10,000 of the over 80 cohort. How many people die is as strongly related to who (by age) gets the virus as any mesher. if you could work out how to get to 'heard immunity' levels by only young and healthy people getting the virus you could get though this with only a limited number of deaths.
There is no magick bullet that will do that for you, but by doing things like keeping bars open, where lots of young people go. and recommending old and sick people stay at home as much as possible, you can shift the dynamic sufficiently to make a big difference. if you confine everybody equally then it will spread equally in all demographics, there for lots of old people will get it and die.
I'm going to predict that Sweden will when this is all over have less deaths and not have trashed its economy. but facts will only be truly comparable in perhaps 12-18 months.
I'm going with the premise that a vacssien is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. and track and trace apps will be a delaying factor not a game changer. Therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.
Comments
Maybe a statistician could translate.....
Foxy, whilst you're here I don't suppose you could jog my memory on something? It may be out of your area but I had an angiogram a couple of years ago and it took ages because my heart is apparently the wrong way around or something. For the life of me, I can't remember what they called it (and I was paying more attention to my feeling distinctly woozy). Apologies if it's outside your area but any idea what it is? I tried Googling but couldn't really get anything out of it.
You can see the strength of the flu season by how "straight" or otherwise the annual profile is. Portugal for example looks to be very pronounced. S Africa is out of phase. because southern hemisphere. Belgium and the Netherlands look to almost not have one at all, which is surprising.
I'd guess there are some huge differences in reporting standards. The author has commented that Germany, for example, lags by almost a month.
I know that because there was a great stir about one of my sons having it; it transpired that someone had processed an x ray photograph the wrong way round.
Maybe, it could be Mesocardia. All I remember is them faffing around for ages because they couldn't get a good look. They didn't seem overly concerned, just that they rarely ever saw it.
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1256311925278982145
The Services PMI figure for April out tomorrow morning may well concentrate minds. It's likely to be around 12 which is staggering.
On a slight tangent, did I read somewhere the latest thinking is 10 unreported cases for every case? That means here in Death Central, or Newham as it is also known, 953 reported cases would mean just shy of 10,000 actual cases in a population of 350,000 so that's one person in 35 or less than 3% so some way from herd immunity.
https://twitter.com/BCredibility
https://twitter.com/BCredibility/status/1257261780079988736
https://twitter.com/BCredibility/status/1257082397994221573
Anecdotally, most of the murders reported in the British press seem to be domestic rather than gang-related, and a drop in industrial production and transport use will most likely have reduced accidents in these sectors too - albeit from very low bases compared to SA. Suicides may well have gone up though, and a few natural deaths as people avoided hospitals even when they were seriously sick.
I would however disagree on one point though. The lesson that the Viet Cong learnt against the US is that the best way to defeat an enemy is to use their own weaknesses against them. In the case of the US Army it was their inability to leave injured soldiers behind. The VC quickly learnt that if you injured soldiers in the jungle you could rapidly make a whole platoon combat ineffective where simply killing a few would not have had the same effect.
In the case of this virus, it has been amazingly effective at shutting down the whole Western world even though its actual danger to life is relatively slight compared to other historic plagues.
If I were someone mad enough and evil enough to want to bring the West to its knees and had the resources to produce a nasty bug with the minimum amount of danger to my own people then I would now be looking at our reaction to this disease and making plans accordingly.
Thankfully I believe such people only really exist in comic books.
I would suggest that a quick estanmat of number of cases would be deaths multiplied by 250, i.e. an overall case fatality rate of 0.4%
Deaths is a slitly more 'hard' number but is still not standard, that is do you include 'died with' as well as 'died of' or should you look at the deaths above 'normal'
I'm suggesting the 0.4% CFR because its a rounding to 1SF the fairly comprehensive German antibody test of 0.36% CFR and is in the middal of the range of other anti body tests which seem to go form 0.1% to 0.7% conducted in the US.
https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/
Was trying to wonder what we might be watching (on TV and Betfair, obviously!) over the summer, if the major team sports and professional touring sports are all shut down - table tennis, badminton, darts, with maybe some local snooker, tennis and golf?
An attempt by the US Indycar series to have their actual teams and drivers compete in computer e-racing ended in a demolition derby on live TV over the weekend, which didn't impress the fans and sponsors - so there's a fine line to draw about the quality and integrity of replacement competitions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situs_inversus
Whilst it may be that society has no choice in the matter, in which case may [deity of choice] have mercy on us all (even Boris) for the choices about to be made. But to leap at that, as some would, seems foolish.
https://order-order.com/2020/05/04/reeves-del-boy-ppe-suppliers-not-contact-government/
There's also going to be very little the police can do to stop street parties around home grounds and in city centres, as the season concludes with champions crowned and teams promoted - good luck shutting down Liverpool as half a million people want to celebrate their first title in three decades!
Sweden 274 per million
Denmark 85 per million
Finland 43 per million
Norway 39 per million
.
And that is in spite of Denmark having a population density over 5 times that of Sweden.
Sweden has indeed got its R number under control. But a lot more people than necessary had to die for them to do it.
That would include those who have very mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.
The mad bastards have seen what they need to do now.
1. Get some bats...
In the last days of my DPhil, a lot of MCRs (graduate common rooms) were trying to disaffiliate from OUSU as it was just not worth the time nor money
That's the risk - it may be akin to pouring petrol on a perfectly good fire.
The issue I had this morning with the track and trace app is the issue I have with identity cards. It's easy to justify extending State control in the name of safety and security but at what point does the emergency end and the State relinquish its control?
The National Registration Act of 1939 was repealed in 1952, seven years after the end of the War. We still have anti-terror measures first introduced in the 1970s because terror has never gone away and in the name of security and crime prevention we have networks of surveillance cameras here, there and everywhere.
https://hotair.com/archives/john-s-2/2020/05/04/three-russian-doctors-complained-ppe-shortages-recently-fallen-windows/
What I find bizarre is the slice of opinion that says "hey let that wash over us now" rather than taking some time (albeit at substantial cost) to see if we can come up with something smarter.
i'm guesstimating in London 25% nationally 15% .
Hence the more recent sharper falls in deaths in London
As FF43 has said. If you want to learn lessons then learn them from countries that have managed to buck the trend by keeping deaths to a minimum, not those like Sweden who have become outliers in completely the wrong direction.
There's another aspect - capitalism can be brutally exploitative. There are those who need to work because they need the money to survive and for those people coronavirus was an irrelevance. They needed the work and they would risk their health to keep working because they needed the money.
Some, mercifully only a few, employers show no mercy. They expect their workers to come to work and work - no sick pay, no concerns about their health. Sunak has helped with his various payments but hoping people would voluntarily have embraced social distancing or carried on trading without customers (as we are seeing in parts of the US) - I'm not convinced.
We can question the timing but the final decision was probably the right one.
The world No 1 will partner Dustin Johnson in a charity match against Rickie Fowler and Matthew Wolff in Florida.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/golf/2020/05/04/rory-mcilroy-feature-first-professional-golf-event-televised/
I wish they would resurrect the old skins format.
take norway, looks to be doing well now with only 250 deaths, so far. and some damage to personall freedom and there econamy.
But what happens when they end the lock-down?
If they (unlikely) go back to 'normal' then R increases to 3 or whatever it was before, and loots of people get it very quickly.
If they go to a Sweden approach, then they will have to go though the same number (well proportion) of deaths as Sweden, but by then they will have damaged the econamy anyway.
Obviously there is the cavidat that a Vaccine may come along to save the day. or some for of advanced track and trace 'app' but we don't know when a Vaccine will be developed or haw effective track and trace will be.
It is for people like this that the Darwin Awards were invented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C98FmoZVbjs
Now any R greater than 1 is bad news, because it's still exponential growth which eventually goes huge. But if you must have that, you're better off doing it from a low baseline and with fewer deaths on the scorecard already. And the longer you delay the reckoning, the more likely it is that science will be able to save you.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-52411459
The problem with a lot of these would-be suppliers is they are too small scale for the NHS which is looking to buy enough kits for every hospital in the country in one hand. A factory that can supply one medium-sized general hospital is useful only for that hospital, not nationally. They've probably also not got the IP or the certification for high grade items.
None of which should distract us from the point that there was a shortage of PPE, and that the government knew about this and did nothing about it.
Which brings us back to Exercise Cygnus and I remind you of the key point which is that it pre-dates Boris, and confirms what Cummings has long been telling us, so I expect to see this front and centre in any future public inquiry. It cements Boris's position by weakening his enemies.
The numbers should not add up to 100%. Instead of taking all hopsiltaizations and tabulating the frequency in each age band, it takes each age band and tabulates the percentage of hospitalisations in that band.
Lets put it this way, if you had one row for each year, then all the precentages would add up to well over 100.
Im going to try to make this sort ish, There are lots of caviats, and so on im going to skip over in the quest for brevaty but will reply if people are intested.
Two roads to heard immunity.
I'm starting with the premise that a vacssien is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.
Swedish is split at the movement the viruse is retreating in Stockholm and the surrounding county, but growing in most of the rest of the nation. theses two combine to give a overall R of below but very close to 1. The althoratys in Sweden think that 25% of the city has had the virus.
In NYC a recent anti virus study suggested that 24.7% of NYC have also been infected,
On the day that the anti virus test was done in NYC 0.11% of the population had died. by contrast in Stockholm it was 0.06% roughly half.
Looking at the death fingers from any contrary, but Ill use the UK, 157 people under 20 have died but over 10,000 of the over 80 cohort. How many people die is as strongly related to who (by age) gets the virus as any mesher. if you could work out how to get to 'heard immunity' levels by only young and healthy people getting the virus you could get though this with only a limited number of deaths.
There is no magick bullet that will do that for you, but by doing things like keeping bars open, where lots of young people go. and recommending old and sick people stay at home as much as possible, you can shift the dynamic sufficiently to make a big difference. if you confine everybody equally then it will spread equally in all demographics, there for lots of old people will get it and die.
I'm going to predict that Sweden will when this is all over have less deaths and not have trashed its economy. but facts will only be truly comparable in perhaps 12-18 months.
I'm going with the premise that a vacssien is over 6 months away and that lock-downs can not be sustained that long. and track and trace apps will be a delaying factor not a game changer. Therefor I suspect that heard immunity is going to have to be the thing that ultimately beets the virus, not all will agree and yes New Zealand looks to have done it without but is now stuck unable to open its boarders.