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Oh god. That’s my tipping point. I'm laying him for the nomination. The Dems will field an alternative if he's like this. Key quality required to defeat Trump? Not yet senile. So they are spoilt for choice.Stereotomy said:0 -
On my bike ride I did find a car park taped off with Police do not enter tape, this was my access to a dedicated riverside cycle path, I decided this was to deter motorists parking and walking the river route, and not to stop cyclists exercising, so I went through and joined dozens of others on the cycle path.stodge said:
The return of decent weather and the onset of Easter are factors. I can hear motorbikes travelling at speed up and down the much quieter North Circular Road and A13 which is usually a late Saturday night phenomenon.jayfdee said:I did my ration of exercise today, OK 18 miles on a bike, maybe a bit long, but, my observations.
Staying at home is breaking down, significantly more cars and people about, cars parked in areas with no urgent need other than to walk the dog or walk in a nice area, groups of youths on illegal motorbikes, groups of cyclists who do not appear to be a Family group, groups of runners etc.
I have given up my short drive to my nearby hills where I used to run with friends, where you would never see anyone, and now have to run in a more congested area where there is a minute increase in danger.
Any way rant over, hope everyone is keeping safe, and hope BJ comes through.
It's been two weeks which has been for many two weeks of purgatory. Compared with catching the virus, I'll take purgatory all day every day.
I'm still far from convinced how we can begin to ease restrictions - those with the virus seem to be struggling to get over it and are presumably still infectious if they still have it.
Austria and Germany are talking bravely about a gradual return to normality but I'd rather not be at the cutting edge (or bleeding edge) of that - let's see how they fare before we try something similar.
I do wonder if the Police are a bit over zealous in the wrong areas.0 -
Key qualities required to defeat Trump, likeability and charisma and not too far left.kinabalu said:
Oh god. That’s my tipping point. I'm laying him for the nomination. The Dems will field an alternative if he's like this. Key quality required to defeat Trump? Not yet senile. So they are spoilt for choice.Stereotomy said:
Biden was the best of a poor field bar maybe Buttigieg who was an election too early0 -
For anyone wondering that's probably the research they have seen quoted before - here's a link to the pre-print, dated 13 March. And relevant part of the abstract:rottenborough said:
HCoV-19 (SARS-2) has caused >88,000 reported illnesses with a current case-fatality ratio of ~2%. Here, we investigate the stability of viable HCoV-19 on surfaces and in aerosols in comparison with SARS35 CoV-1. Overall, stability is very similar between HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1. We found that viable virus could be detected in aerosols up to 3 hours post aerosolization, up to 4 hours on copper, up to 24 hours on cardboard and up to 2-3 days on plastic and stainless steel. HCoV-19 and SARS-CoV-1 exhibited similar half-lives in aerosols, with median estimates around 2.7 hours. Both viruses show relatively long viability on stainless steel and polypropylene compared to copper or cardboard: the median half-life estimate for HCoV-19 is around 13 hours on steel and around 16 hours on polypropylene. Our results indicate that aerosol and fomite transmission of HCoV-19 is plausible, as the virus can remain viable in aerosols for multiple hours and on surfaces up to days.0 -
No sign of a letter here.NickPalmer said:
A world inhabited only by dogs and cats? You're tempting me.rcs1000 said:
That's not actually true, as @Charles will tell you.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
There are coronavirus vaccines, but they're for animals (both dogs and cats, I believe).
By the way, did everyone get that letter to every household from Boris? I never did, possibly because I moved last year.
If you're really bored you can catch me being interviewed on Facebook Live at 8 tonight, if it works I expect to be mainly doing strictly non-partisan things that you probably already know, and it's going to be mainly useful for Surrey residents..(I know how to work up your excitement.)
https://www.facebook.com/swsurreylabour/videos/653587312106562/?vh=e&d=n0 -
Yes I think that fails to address those that would have died anyway, but obviously I knew the fortnight after the original graph would be a lot higher than averageAndy_Cooke said:
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus.isam said:
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?Andy_Cooke said:
For @isamEndillion said:
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.isam said:Be interesting to see this again in a fortnight
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1247517450351964163?s=21
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last roundRobD said:
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.isam said:Be interesting to see this again in a fortnight
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1247517450351964163?s=21
I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars.
Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.0 -
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his fatherRichard_Tyndall said:
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.HYUFD said:
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twiceoxfordsimon said:
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.Stereotomy said:
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate0 -
99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
Those that would die anyway, on average, are represented by the green line.isam said:
Yes I think that fails to address those that would have died anyway, but obviously I knew the fortnight after the original graph would be a lot higher than averageAndy_Cooke said:
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus.isam said:
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?Andy_Cooke said:
For @isamEndillion said:
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.isam said:Be interesting to see this again in a fortnight
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1247517450351964163?s=21
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last roundRobD said:
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.isam said:Be interesting to see this again in a fortnight
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1247517450351964163?s=21 I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars.
Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.0 -
“WEAR A FUCKING MASK”eadric said:
Very good point. And I agree. Our best hope is probably treatments, not vaccinesDougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
Also
WEAR A FUCKING MASK
“If speaking and oral fluid viral load proves to be a major mechanism of Sars-CoV-2 [the official name of the virus] transmission, wearing any kind of cloth mouth cover in public by every person, as well as strict adherence to social distancing and handwashing, could significantly decrease the transmission rate and thereby contain the pandemic until a vaccine becomes available,” the researchers write.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/saliva-spray-during-speech-could-transmit-coronavirus-study?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
WHO have looked at it and say no.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/no-need-for-healthy-to-wear-face-masks-says-who-after-review
And if there’s a shortage a stash of them should be in hospital or care home not in our houses.
Remember the shelves were cleared without panic buying, cleared from just most households getting little more. We could do real damage stockpiling face masks at home.0 -
Anyone would be better than Trump, both Bushes, but obviously Obama or Clinton (Bill) would be better.HYUFD said:
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his fatherRichard_Tyndall said:
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.HYUFD said:
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twiceoxfordsimon said:
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.Stereotomy said:
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate0 -
I suppose it all depends on how one defines a pre-existing health condition? I was stung by a bee yesterday!HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
Everyone told me I was an idiot for suggesting Edinburgh West was going to be a safer seat for the LDs than Swinson's seat.rcs1000 said:
But isn't celebrating beating Jo Swinson a bit like celebrating scoring a goal against a kid with cerebral palsy?kle4 said:
I agree. Her side win and she celebrated, it wasn't even particularly gloating.Philip_Thompson said:
I couldn't disagree more. Sturgeon was entirely appropriate to celebrate winning a seat, let alone winning such a high profile scalp.kjh said:
Absolutely.RobD said:
That behaviour really isn't limited to one wing of politics. See Sturgeon's reaction, for example.kjh said:
I agree. I raised a similar point during the election when a minority of our more right wing posters were expressing excessive joy and pleasure if, as happened, some of their opponents lost. It wasn't the pleasure of winning (which of course one should enjoy) but it was the expressed pleasure of an opponent losing. Of course you celebrate your victory, but have sympathy for those that lose.ydoethur said:
I don’t like Johnson. Or Cummings. Or Corbyn. Or Drakeford. Or Raab. Or Patel.Floater said:https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8195339/Left-wing-online-trolls-target-stricken-Boris-Johnson-saying-hope-dies.html
councillor Sheila Oakes, who is currently mayor of Heanor in Derbyshire, saying: 'Sorry he completely deserves this and he is one of the worst PM's we've ever had.'
Haters got to hate eh
But I don’t wish death on them. One of them is seriously ill. I hope he recovers. Similarly, although he’s been silent for some time, I hope Cummings is making progress towards a full recovery.
Maybe I would for real, utter, unredeemable scumbags like Xi, or Kim, or Mugabe.
But none of them are even remotely in that class. None of them are out trying to cause deaths, or seize power illegally, or enrich themselves at the expense of the British people.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is frankly not worth listening to.
I remember when Stephen Twigg won I was very pleased for him and simultaneously sorry for Michael Portillo, yet I supported neither.
Similarly in a sporting contest you enjoy your victory but feel for your opponent.
The only exception for me is, as you said a serious corrupt politician or a cheat in a sporting event.
I wasn't making a political biased point. It is just what happened and that I called out at the time. I would have done the same if the boot was on the other foot as it will be. It is the individuals (whether right left or centre) not the parties.
Agree re Sturgeon. It was unpleasant.
Suggesting it is inappropriate to celebrate gaining a seat because an opposition has lost it is as utterly facetious as claiming it is inappropriate for a striker to celebrate scoring a goal because an opposition has conceded it.0 -
I was never a great fan of Mayor Pete but his Iowa-first strategy died when the new voting system foul-up denied him the momentum he needed to stand out from the pack of half a dozen rent-a-centrists who had all given more thought to actual policy than Buttigieg had.HYUFD said:
Key qualities required to defeat Trump, likeability and charisma and not too far left.kinabalu said:
Oh god. That’s my tipping point. I'm laying him for the nomination. The Dems will field an alternative if he's like this. Key quality required to defeat Trump? Not yet senile. So they are spoilt for choice.Stereotomy said:
Biden was the best of a poor field bar maybe Buttigieg who was an election too early1 -
Mail is not 100% at the moment. Horsham has 35 guys off either sick or self isolating so the daily delivery is possibly not going to be guaranteed. We sd our letter from Boris today. Every address ought to get one.. its not a personal letterrottenborough said:
No sign of a letter here.NickPalmer said:
A world inhabited only by dogs and cats? You're tempting me.rcs1000 said:
That's not actually true, as @Charles will tell you.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
There are coronavirus vaccines, but they're for animals (both dogs and cats, I believe).
By the way, did everyone get that letter to every household from Boris? I never did, possibly because I moved last year.
If you're really bored you can catch me being interviewed on Facebook Live at 8 tonight, if it works I expect to be mainly doing strictly non-partisan things that you probably already know, and it's going to be mainly useful for Surrey residents..(I know how to work up your excitement.)
https://www.facebook.com/swsurreylabour/videos/653587312106562/?vh=e&d=n0 -
H.W. was a shrewd operator. W. relied on patronage from his father's networks.HYUFD said:
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his fatherRichard_Tyndall said:
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.HYUFD said:
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twiceoxfordsimon said:
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.Stereotomy said:
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate
Trump just beggars belief.1 -
Actually my favourite President was Bush Snrlogical_song said:
Anyone would be better than Trump, both Bushes, but obviously Obama or Clinton (Bill) would be better.HYUFD said:
I agree on that, we all misunderestimated George W, though I still preferred his fatherRichard_Tyndall said:
Bush was a genius compared to Trump. He also had the huge advantage of recognising his limitations. Given the revelations the other day about his recognition of the dangers of a pandemic back in 2005, it is a great shame we haven't had GW Bush in charge the last few years. The US - and perhaps the world - would be far better prepared if we had.HYUFD said:
Did not stop George W Bush getting elected, twiceoxfordsimon said:
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.Stereotomy said:
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate0 -
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."DougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/0 -
And here’s ‘Ed Miliband’s back!’Theuniondivvie said:What the fucking fuck?
https://twitter.com/Adamstoon1/status/1247558328852643842?s=20
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The BBC Six O'Clock News covered comments by the Chief Medical Officer on coronavirus testing. It seems to me that coronavirus could be beaten by a massive expansion in testing using existing technology. If everyone in the UK had a coronavirus test once every week (yes, 10 million tests a day) and the results were available in 24 hours, then people would find out if they have the virus. They would self-isolate and transmission would be greatly reduced. Within weeks the number of cases would fall, and the virus would soon be eliminated. This will be possible within one to two years, regardless of all other developments. This would require 3.5 billion tests a year. Surely this is a price worth paying?0
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It'll probably be the same everywhere else.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE1 -
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.1 -
A little more profane than necessary.eadric said:
Very good point. And I agree. Our best hope is probably treatments, not vaccinesDougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
Also
WEAR A FUCKING MASK
“If speaking and oral fluid viral load proves to be a major mechanism of Sars-CoV-2 [the official name of the virus] transmission, wearing any kind of cloth mouth cover in public by every person, as well as strict adherence to social distancing and handwashing, could significantly decrease the transmission rate and thereby contain the pandemic until a vaccine becomes available,” the researchers write.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/07/saliva-spray-during-speech-could-transmit-coronavirus-study?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other1 -
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
0 -
That was written when the death toll was below 3000.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
It counts for a lot. Trump is not just useless he's actively on the wrong side of every issue that matters.matthiasfromhamburg said:
He's probably not much more useful than Trump but at least he's not as actively malicious and vindictive. That should count for someting, shouldn't it?oxfordsimon said:
That is scary. Is it as scary as more Trump? It isn't as scary as the possibility of President Pence though.Stereotomy said:
But he is clearly struggling to string more than a few words together. And that should worry everyone around him - let alone the electorate1 -
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.logical_song said:
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."DougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/0 -
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.0 -
No, you need to be able to instantly contact trace. That requires the ability to spy on your population like South Korea or China.fox327 said:The BBC Six O'Clock News covered comments by the Chief Medical Officer on coronavirus testing. It seems to me that coronavirus could be beaten by a massive expansion in testing using existing technology. If everyone in the UK had a coronavirus test once every week (yes, 10 million tests a day) and the results were available in 24 hours, then people would find out if they have the virus. They would self-isolate and transmission would be greatly reduced. Within weeks the number of cases would fall, and the virus would soon be eliminated. This will be possible within one to two years, regardless of all other developments. This would require 3.5 billion tests a year. Surely this is a price worth paying?
Also, where are all the reagents for 3.5 billion tests going to come from? And all the PCR machines you need? And the trained lab staff? You can't just magic up this stuff.
It was clear that Peston was a gotcha question and Witty fell right into it.0 -
.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.0 -
A global conspiracy to cover up pedophilia?Nigel_Foremain said:
Philip Thompson reveals another of his pathetic prejudices and populist standpoints. You really are a sad little hate filled pipsqueak with little to say of importance on anything. There is a lot to criticise the Roman Catholic church for, and the paedophilia scandal was and is very shocking, but I guess you would still take the same type of prejudicial position even if it had never happened. It is just another excuse for people of your unthinking mindset. As a lapsed Catholic of Irish decent I can smell your two brain celled anti-Catholicism in the same way a Jew can tell a racist trying to justify their anti-Semitism. Your nasty inherited hatred has been a feature in this country for far too long. Right minded people need to call it out for what it is.0 -
I doubt the data has changed that much percentage wise.williamglenn said:
That was written when the death toll was below 3000.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE
The median age of those who died of Covid 19 in Italy was 79.5 and all of those who died under 40 had a serious pre existing health condition0 -
On today's court verdict maybe notAlistair said:
A global conspiracy to cover up pedophilia?Nigel_Foremain said:
Philip Thompson reveals another of his pathetic prejudices and populist standpoints. You really are a sad little hate filled pipsqueak with little to say of importance on anything. There is a lot to criticise the Roman Catholic church for, and the paedophilia scandal was and is very shocking, but I guess you would still take the same type of prejudicial position even if it had never happened. It is just another excuse for people of your unthinking mindset. As a lapsed Catholic of Irish decent I can smell your two brain celled anti-Catholicism in the same way a Jew can tell a racist trying to justify their anti-Semitism. Your nasty inherited hatred has been a feature in this country for far too long. Right minded people need to call it out for what it is.0 -
Re younger people without underlying health conditions dying.
There does seem to be a very small percentage of people, who for whatever reason, their immune system over-reacts. That is different to the oldies, whose immune systems aren't strong enough to fight it.0 -
Yes there isMaxPB said:
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.logical_song said:
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."DougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RVSV-ZEBOV_vaccine0 -
that's a lot of zerosfox327 said:The BBC Six O'Clock News covered comments by the Chief Medical Officer on coronavirus testing. It seems to me that coronavirus could be beaten by a massive expansion in testing using existing technology. If everyone in the UK had a coronavirus test once every week (yes, 10 million tests a day) and the results were available in 24 hours, then people would find out if they have the virus. They would self-isolate and transmission would be greatly reduced. Within weeks the number of cases would fall, and the virus would soon be eliminated. This will be possible within one to two years, regardless of all other developments. This would require 3.5 billion tests a year. Surely this is a price worth paying?
0 -
Correct. That's why it might not be advisable to call it "spying". The wider public needs to be persuaded to give up a considerable amount of privacy to make that tool work. And it might be the single most important tool required to be able to responsibly loosen the lockdown.FrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.0 -
No. They could have one now without knowing it, but testing to prove that takes time no matter what lolly is thrown at it. At least 12 months imoMaxPB said:
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.logical_song said:
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."DougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/0 -
I don't think it matters what you call it, any government will have to be honest with the public that we will be able to flick a switch and then be able to see everywhere you have been, all payments you have made and every person you have met.matthiasfromhamburg said:
Correct. That's why it might not be advisable to call it "spying". The wider public needs to be persuaded to give up a considerable amount of privacy to make that tool work. And it might be the single most important tool required to be able to responsibly loosen the lockdown.FrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
South Koreans are happy to allow this under special circumstances. They trust their government not to abuse it and will only be used for good.
You only have to look at the reaction to ID cards in the UK, to think it will be a much harder sell.0 -
No. But the true figure is nearly ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.0 -
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.1 -
The most common coronavirus is called the common cold. We spent 50 years trying to find a cure for it before giving up.GIN1138 said:
Surely that's more because we've never needed one?eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.0 -
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
Huh? Yes there is....MaxPB said:
Yes and there still isn't an Ebola vaccine. None of that makes a difference. Neither of those got anywhere near the resources that this is getting. I don't think it needs explaining why either.logical_song said:
"It took seven years after HIV was first discovered before the first drug to fight it was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)."DougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
https://time.com/4705809/first-aids-drug-azt/
https://www.statnews.com/2020/01/07/inside-story-scientists-produced-world-first-ebola-vaccine/0 -
Well, I think strategic communication matters. The Hitchens, Hannan and Young brigade will put up resistance, if only for the sake of being contrarian, and it's important to get everybody on board for this.FrancisUrquhart said:
I don't think it matters what you call it, any government will have to be honest with the public that we will be able to flick a switch and then be able to see everywhere you have been, all payments you have made and every person you have met.matthiasfromhamburg said:
Correct. That's why it might not be advisable to call it "spying". The wider public needs to be persuaded to give up a considerable amount of privacy to make that tool work. And it might be the single most important tool required to be able to responsibly loosen the lockdown.FrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
South Koreans are happy to allow this under special circumstances. They trust their government not to abuse it and will only be used for good.
You only have to look at the reaction to ID cards in the UK, to think it will be a much harder sell.0 -
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.egg said:
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.0 -
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine eraDougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=210 -
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient1 -
Yes and those strains of conronavirus are always changing which makes it impossible to create a vaccine.eek said:
The most common coronavirus is called the common cold. We spent 50 years trying to find a cure for it before giving up.GIN1138 said:
Surely that's more because we've never needed one?eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
Covid-19 seems to be quite stable from what I've heard.0 -
Someone earlier said that the vaccine for SARS was "well on it's way" until a proper rat trial was done. Then they found out that yes it was effective agains SARS but it had a very bad effect on the whole immune system.GIN1138 said:
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
0 -
It didn't sweep across the country infecting 60-80% in one go though, so herd immunity clearly did something.not_on_fire said:
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine eraDougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=210 -
The summary I can see says:Endillion said:
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).MyBurningEars said:
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?Endillion said:On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title:
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Here's that group's earlier piece on whether the famous Imperial College modelling was "fit for purpose". (PDF link)
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.0 -
Yes, and the covid-19 deaths may make up a large part of those, so you can’t just add the total covid deaths to that there lineRobD said:
Those that would die anyway, on average, are represented by the green line.isam said:
Yes I think that fails to address those that would have died anyway, but obviously I knew the fortnight after the original graph would be a lot higher than averageAndy_Cooke said:
No - the black bars, from top to bottom of the bar in question, show the extra deaths due to coronavirus.isam said:
Have to admit I don’t understand. The black bar on the right is 16,000 and the smaller is 11,000?Andy_Cooke said:
For @isamEndillion said:
The other team equalised in the last minute. There's a replay. We're going to be massively below full strength for the replay.isam said:Be interesting to see this again in a fortnight
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1247517450351964163?s=21
I wouldn’t say so, because he is using the latest data we have. What it does tell us is we are well under par so far this year, going into the hazardous last roundRobD said:
Him posting it now when it's so out of date almost seems irresponsible. Trying to propagate a view that it is nothing to worry about.isam said:Be interesting to see this again in a fortnight
https://twitter.com/alistairhaimes/status/1247517450351964163?s=21 I've added details of the declared covid-19 deaths to date for the various weeks in that graph - and for today's date over to the right. They're in the black bars.
Prior to the 20th, they're not visible. On the 20th of March one, it's just discernible. The effects of the 27th of March are pretty vivid. The ones for now (over to the right) are pretty bad.
Hope that helps.
The ones where we already have the total deaths are attached to the line in question - showing where they have “pushed up” the line. The one from today is out on its own due to the deaths for the week ending this week not being available. The bottom of it is just placed approximately where the arc of the average 5 year deaths would be; the top is where it would push up that average to.0 -
Scenes from the Wisconsin election day
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1247581715511627776?s=090 -
That’s exactly why it will take so long, testing to spot side effectseristdoof said:
Someone earlier said that the vaccine for SARS was "well on it's way" until a proper rat trial was done. Then they found out that yes it was effective agains SARS but it had a very bad effect on the whole immune system.GIN1138 said:
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
0 -
@Endillion
For what it's worth (very little as I haven't read their detailed argument) I'm not sure the actuaries have got this right, because I'm dubious about how granular their risk categories are. You might be able to say statistically that a 65 year-old male smoker who is obese with diabetes is expected live for another X years, but you can't say that COVID-19 robbed him of X years if he had a buggered immune system and was already in hospital receiving respiratory care for bacterial double pneumonia before he caught COVID-19 from the patient next-door. I don't think their "worst-case scenario" is necessarily "worst-case" enough.
It would be interesting to look at victims' medical records and consider how their health status compares to other people in the same actuarial risk group that was used to calculate their remaining life expectancy. I have a strong suspicion a disproportionate number of COVID-19 deaths will come from the poorlier end of their risk group. While it's true older people have a high rate of multimorbidity and that despite the challenges this poses to their care, plenty can live for many years with these conditions, it seems likely to me that COVID-related deaths will be especially common among those with the most serious conditions. Which is why blanket descriptions like "Y percent of victims had a pre-existing condition" are not especially helpful, something I suspect I would find myself in strong agreement with your esteemed colleagues on.
Similarly, I don't buy the argument that "COVID is killing people who would have died off in the flu season anyway". How do you know they'd even have caught the flu this year (not everyone does, even asymptomatically), or that whatever strain they caught wasn't one they had a sufficiently protective degree of immunity to due to previous exposure? But I can see that someone dying from COVID-19 due to a particularly weak immune system may not have great odds of getting through, say, the next three flu seasons unscathed.
I get the feeling that "how many COVID deaths were there, really?" is one of those questions that's only going to be answered by a careful regression analysis after the event, as happens with flu figures.2 -
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.bigjohnowls said:
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.0 -
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
Possibly. I'm not sure?eristdoof said:
Someone earlier said that the vaccine for SARS was "well on it's way" until a proper rat trial was done. Then they found out that yes it was effective agains SARS but it had a very bad effect on the whole immune system.GIN1138 said:
Surely that's more because we've never needed one as most coronaviruses are relatively mild?eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
I believe they were well on their way to getting a vaccine together for SARS but when it burned itself out at the end of 2003 authorities foolisly decided to pull the the plug on funding for it.
Imagine if we'd already got a vaccine for SARS (which is 95% similar to COVID-19) to work from.
I know that by the end of 2003 world governments decided it wasn't worth funding the research because I remember thinking at the time that just because that particular epidemic burned itself out didn't necessarily mean we wouldn't need a vaccine at some point...0 -
As so often, the question is causation or correlation. People die "with coronavirus" and people die "with pre-existing medical conditions". Determining what they "died of" requires procedures which can be applied to a single individual but not to the large numbers of cases.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plagueFrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Are you still working on this or have you finished?0 -
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.RobD said:
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.egg said:
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.0 -
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
I was suppose to start this week, but unfortunately am having to self isolate away from home for next 7 days. Hence why I have dropped in here.bigjohnowls said:
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plagueFrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Are you still working on this or have you finished?0 -
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:egg said:
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.RobD said:
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.egg said:
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "0 -
...0
-
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.FrancisUrquhart said:
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.bigjohnowls said:
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.0 -
Oh sorry to hear that.FrancisUrquhart said:
I was suppose to start this week, but unfortunately am having to self isolate away from home for next 7 days. Hence why I have dropped in here.bigjohnowls said:
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plagueFrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
Hope you and your closest recover quickly0 -
Fuck c4 its fake leftist news.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.-1 -
So your proposingHYUFD said:
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpEHYUFD said:
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE
working till 67 then have three years to enjoy your retirement then lockdown till there is a vaccine?HYUFD said:
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
Not so fantastic news. Porton Down have "ground truth" data for 700+ individuals, and when evaluating all these antibody kits that every manufacturer claims are 98-99% accurate, they are all crap.bigjohnowls said:
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.FrancisUrquhart said:
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.bigjohnowls said:
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.0 -
Easy. It’s how the story is presented.RobD said:
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:egg said:
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.RobD said:
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.egg said:
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Did you actually see it?0 -
Thanks. It is just precautionary. Had to leave my house for family emergency situation a few days ago, during which came into close-ish contact with individual who presented some of the mild symptoms.bigjohnowls said:
Oh sorry to hear that.FrancisUrquhart said:
I was suppose to start this week, but unfortunately am having to self isolate away from home for next 7 days. Hence why I have dropped in here.bigjohnowls said:
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plagueFrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Are you still working on this or have you finished?
Hope you and your closest recover quickly
Not taking any risks returning to Chez Urquhart in the meantime.1 -
Of course she is. The most important thing may be to make sure it is temporary. But there is no alternative until a vaccine is available.eadric said:Re Korea.
My wife expressed the fear today that the end result of this virus would be hi-tech surveillance states, with the authorities monitoring everything we do and everyone we meet. Countries that don’t do this will be crippled by the bug.
I think she’s on to something.0 -
I am wondering how this will play out in Wisconsin (narrowly won by Trump in 2016) in November.Alistair said:Scenes from the Wisconsin election day
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1247581715511627776?s=09
The Democrat Governor, Tony Evers, sought to postpone it, but the Republican state legislature challenged it and was backed by the conservative majority on the state supreme court.
It feels like a really bad move by the Republicans there - easily characterised as putting voters at mortal risk in knee-jerk opposition to a Governor with whom they have terrible relations. Interesting to see whether it hurts Trump in the state.1 -
I should direct my question to C4 then, I suppose. My apologies.egg said:
Easy. It’s how the story is presented.RobD said:
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:egg said:
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.RobD said:
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.egg said:
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Did you actually see it?0 -
That doesn't make sense. Herd immunity is effective if enough people have had the disease (and if they thereby become immune). Measles is so incredible infectious that herd immunity requires about 95%, and that's why nearly everyone used to get it. Less infectious diseases may be controllable without the population acquiring herd immunity, but that means there is always a vulnerability to outbreaks.not_on_fire said:
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine eraDougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=210 -
Yeah, if the lad who painted that mural in the east end hadn't given Rothschild and Warburg big noses, that really would have been racist.Luckyguy1983 said:
I don't think there's really a debate to be had. What was he supposed to do, give him a different nose? That really would be racist.SirNorfolkPassmore said:
The context for that (which is important to explain, I think) is a Twitter storm over Adams depicting Miliband as having an aquiline nose, which some are construing as antisemitic because this is a stereotypical characteristic of Jewish people, and could be seen as "code" for Jewish.Theuniondivvie said:What the fucking fuck?
https://twitter.com/Adamstoon1/status/1247558328852643842?s=20
Adams argues that Miliband does indeed have an aquiline nose. I understand Miliband has Jewish parents but is himself an atheist.
It's a potentially interesting debate. Caricaturists choose which features to highlight and he didn't need to emphasise that one. On the other hand, he is right that Miliband's nose is part of what makes him recognisable to the reader. As ever, however, Twitter has turned a potentially interesting debate into an unedifying pile-on.0 -
Measles is particularly interesting. There's seasonal variation in transmission across the year (not just school holidays, but even before wide-scale school attendance, seasonal migration patterns related to harvest-time etc), yet also much longer-term cycles.RobD said:
It didn't sweep across the country infecting 60-80% in one go though, so herd immunity clearly did something.not_on_fire said:
If herd immunity was effective on its own then diseases like measles, typhoid, TB etc. would not have been so prevalent in the pre-vaccine eraDougSeal said:
There will be never be a vaccine, or, if there is one, it will not be available for at least 12-months. However in 12-months time we will (1) have developed better treatments for Covid-19 so that it is no longer as fatal, (2) have reached or be approaching herd immunity or (3) both. Vaccines are not the only game in town. As I said the other day, we have never found an HIV vaccine, but treatments have been becoming more and more effective.eadric said:Have a gin before reading
https://twitter.com/alexwagner/status/1247580961329594375?s=21
In the pre-vaccination era, a bout of measles in a city tops up the number of immune people (the so-called "depletion of the susceptible") until transmission ceases and the disease largely fizzles out. But as people are born into the population without immunity (and immune people die off), the proportion of susceptibles rises again, until it's big enough to trigger exponential growth and a new epidemic. In smaller towns, the number of infected people is so low during periods of herd immunity that, particularly during periods of low seasonal transmission, it can by chance fall to zero and you get a local extinction event. In large cities, that's unlikely to happen, and due to migration and trade it's possible for measles from the big city to then re-seed smaller towns where measles had gone extinct. For that reason, measles outbreaks in smaller towns tend to "sync up" with those of their nearest large city.
Fascinating (and free) paper on how chaotic the dynamics of this can get here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4741526/
0 -
Well said!Alistair said:
A global conspiracy to cover up pedophilia?Nigel_Foremain said:
Philip Thompson reveals another of his pathetic prejudices and populist standpoints. You really are a sad little hate filled pipsqueak with little to say of importance on anything. There is a lot to criticise the Roman Catholic church for, and the paedophilia scandal was and is very shocking, but I guess you would still take the same type of prejudicial position even if it had never happened. It is just another excuse for people of your unthinking mindset. As a lapsed Catholic of Irish decent I can smell your two brain celled anti-Catholicism in the same way a Jew can tell a racist trying to justify their anti-Semitism. Your nasty inherited hatred has been a feature in this country for far too long. Right minded people need to call it out for what it is.
On this issue we agree it seems.0 -
Yes I heard that.FrancisUrquhart said:
Not so fantastic news. Porton Down have "ground truth" data for 700+ individuals, and when evaluating all these antibody kits that every manufacturer claims are 98-99% accurate, they are all crap.bigjohnowls said:
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.FrancisUrquhart said:
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.bigjohnowls said:
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.
No quick way out of this for me and Mrs BJ by the looks of it.0 -
As someone who once spent a long time getting completely lost walking around the Excel Centre, this doesn't surprise me. It's a massive area.FrancisUrquhart said:
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.bigjohnowls said:
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.0 -
Go see the whole show, I dislike well spun, so full of itself journalism. I stand with the posters who feel the media are getting pretty out of order in pursuit of a headline.RobD said:
I should direct my question to C4 then, I suppose. My apologies.egg said:
Easy. It’s how the story is presented.RobD said:
Yeah - I don't understand how you got from that to this:egg said:
The story is, the actual figure is nearly 10K now, but there really isn’t the ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for an accurate daily figure.RobD said:
No? You just said they were. The figures published daily are from hospitals only. The ONS includes deaths outside hospitals. That isn't fiddling figures, those are simply different statistics.egg said:
No. But the true figure is nearer ten thousand not what was published by government today. According to Channel 4RobD said:.
They are not fiddling the figures.egg said:
They moved on from that story to “NHS has failed us”egg said:
If you think that is bad, don’t watch today’s channel 4 news.Floater said:
Unfucking real......is what I thought on hearing him speakTGOHF666 said:
Mark Austin now blaming Boris and Gove's family for catching the virus.CarlottaVance said:Lots of whataboutery from Kuenssberg & Pesto....
U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing.
"U.K. government fiddling death figures in a way that would make a Chinese party official blush is the story they are pushing. "
A. There isn’t the clerical ability in place to count every covid death quickly enough for accurate daily figure, but the accurate figures will catch up and we will know the truth.
B. There are other ways of finding out the truth than trusting a government, count the urns.
You have made a mistake, I wasn’t Claiming that I was complaining about slanted journalism bigging up a story giving impression we are denied the truth.
Did you actually see it?0 -
I suspect you are right. This is a tremendous and moronic own goal.SirNorfolkPassmore said:
I am wondering how this will play out in Wisconsin (narrowly won by Trump in 2016) in November.Alistair said:Scenes from the Wisconsin election day
https://twitter.com/donmoyn/status/1247581715511627776?s=09
The Democrat Governor, Tony Evers, sought to postpone it, but the Republican state legislature challenged it and was backed by the conservative majority on the state supreme court.
It feels like a really bad move by the Republicans there - easily characterised as putting voters at mortal risk in knee-jerk opposition to a Governor with whom they have terrible relations. Interesting to see whether it hurts Trump in the state.0 -
Clap for Boris about to start0
-
I presume twitter have organized a boo for Boris or a clap for ANTIFA.HYUFD said:Clap for Boris about to start
1 -
Your choice outside of lockdown at the peak, if you go out and are over 70 and especially over 80 you just are more likely to die if you get it than othersnichomar said:So your proposing
HYUFD said:
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpEHYUFD said:
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE
working till 67 then have three years to enjoy your retirement then lockdown till there is a vaccine?HYUFD said:
So keep them indoors until we find a vaccine or treatments improved and outside the peak everyone else ie at least 2/3 of the population, can get back to normalukpaul said:
At least a third of the population has an underlying condition recognised as a significamt co-morbidity. That’s a lot of people that are potentially at that level of heightened risk.HYUFD said:
So that is less than 5%maaarsh said:
UK number today was 20 odd out of 786 that didn't.HYUFD said:99% of those who have died from coronavirus in Italy had a pre existing health condition
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says?fbclid=IwAR0Brz0oVmqUrA1dteq-rYzvRFTr_4fsZBuhav43ktWo6Ekk0xy9k6PEQpE0 -
The link I posted before should show that summary, and then some sort of embedded file below with the full report - reposted again for convenience:MyBurningEars said:
The summary I can see says:Endillion said:
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).MyBurningEars said:
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?Endillion said:On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title:
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Here's that group's earlier piece on whether the famous Imperial College modelling was "fit for purpose". (PDF link)
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY/
So you should be able to read it on screen but I can't figure out how to get it into a usable file format.0 -
An accurate real time test would probably enable us not to have to do that.eadric said:Re Korea.
My wife expressed the fear today that the end result of this virus would be hi-tech surveillance states, with the authorities monitoring everything we do and everyone we meet. Countries that don’t do this will be crippled by the bug.
I think she’s on to something.0 -
No clapping on my street at 8pm (and I'm not doing it, though I did last Thursday, I find it weird and mawkish tonight) but someone set off a firework on the dot of 8pm.0
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The only way to avoid it completely is to stay locked inside your residence for the next 18 months.bigjohnowls said:
Dont agree. Peter Hitchens might, but the rest of us are prepared for anything short term to avoid the plagueFrancisUrquhart said:
Funny how the media also love to go on about how great South Korea have done (and they have), but less keen to inform everybody that means giving the government the power to spy on any individual citizen.MyBurningEars said:
Thanks. For avoidance of doubt, I'm mostly narked at the way the UK media is reporting the German testing programme as if it were as simple as "more tests is better". It's about how you use them, too, and whether the situation is sustainable - even very large-scale testing will struggle to cope once enough people want a test. I don't doubt that the German public health people have worked hard and got a lot right.matthiasfromhamburg said:
As far as I understand the sightly different testing regimes that exist in different parts of the country are constantly under review. Our authorities have also taken up efforts to get a better picture of transmission patterns by random testing schemes.MyBurningEars said:
Probably time to stop quoting the 135 number...kinabalu said:
There IS quite a difference. Germany, UK, respectively -CarlottaVance said:
Confirmed: 105,519
Deaths: 1,854
Recovered: 36,081
Active: 67,584
Confirmed: 55,242
Deaths: 6,159
Recovered: 135
Active: 48,948
Vorsprung Durch Technik?
If you check the UK COVID-19 Dashboard from PHE, you'll find a document about the data that explains the following:
Recovered patients data
Previous updates of the dashboard included a number of patients recovered. This figure was the number of people discharged from NHS clinical services in England following a positive test result for COVID-19 and was provided by NHS services. This statistic has proved difficult to assemble and a replacement indicator is being developed.
So the "Recovered" figure is wrong which means that the "Active" figure is also wrong. Finally, the "Confirmed" figures mean completely different things for different countries because they perform the testing on different groups of people (some with more focus on healthcare staff, some more on strongly suspected patients, some more on contacts etc) and indeed these criteria for testing are changing over time in each country too.
On that basis, three out of the four numbers you're comparing are utterly unsuitable for comparison. And even deaths data from different countries has to be interpreted cautiously due to issues with eg which deaths are included, and what stage of the epidemic curve the country is at.
On Germany's testing programme, highly recommend reading this article in the Spiegel. I'm not sure the UK reporting on what's going on in Germany has been terribly good, other than an excitement at sheer numbers - there's been less interest in how the tests, on whom, and to what extent they form part of a sensible overall strategy.
To manage the looming shortage, lab operators have called for an even stricter decision-making process for who gets tested and who doesn't. Only people who are at risk or showing symptoms should be tested, they argue. "At the moment, we're still testing way too many healthy people," says Borucki. Well over 90 percent of the tests evaluated by Bioscientia come back negative. "We're wasting valuable reagents."
The Robert Koch Institute now feels the same way. "We don't have enough tests to be able to use them senselessly," the institute's director, Lothar Wieler, warned last week. At the same time, though, the institute has loosened the recommendation that has thus far been in place - namely that patients with symptoms should only be tested if they had contact with an infected person or had been in a region with a high number of confirmed cases. Given that the pathogen is now essentially everywhere, the focus on at-risk regions no longer makes sense, an institute spokeswoman said.
According to the Spiegel piece at least, there's plenty of German experts who think the right model to follow is South Korea (not just number of tests per head, but how those tests are used and on whom) and that the German testing system needs a really significant rethink.
This has been done in Gangelt, a subsection of the Kreis Heinsberg, our second recognised cluster:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/31/virologists-to-turn-germany-worst-hit-district-into-coronavirus-laboratory
Results and conclusions are yet to be released.
On Sunday a second, larger testing program has been started in Munich:
https://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/bayern/Bayern-startet-eigene-Antikoerper-Studie-mit-Massentests-in-Muenchen-id57178731.html (sorry, only in german)
Similar programs are in preparation in Baden-Württemberg (north of Feiburg im Breisgau), in Hesse (between Frankfurt and Hanau) and here in Hamburg.
Hopefully these will provide some additional insight.
Similarly there's some testing going on in Britain that is probably going under-reported including some "fourth pillar" surveillance testing at Porton Down:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/coronavirus-tests-never-heard-hold-key-exit-lockdown/
Realistically, this is the only way to effectively contact trace at any sort of scale and pace that enables one to keep the virus from spreading.
And if the UK had proposed doing this, they would be screaming what about my civil liberties.
Are you still working on this or have you finished?0 -
Checked into my Facebook account for the first time in a week or two. Seems to be full of friends and vague acquaintances posting Spring walks photos (each mentioning the 2ms rule).
Hmmm...
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https://twitter.com/actuarybyday/status/1246866119597621248?s=21Endillion said:
The link I posted before should show that summary, and then some sort of embedded file below with the full report - reposted again for convenience:MyBurningEars said:
The summary I can see says:Endillion said:
I can't find a direct link, but I guess keep watching Actuarial Post? If I see a link I'll PM it to you (if I remember).MyBurningEars said:
Nice find! Is there a direct link to the paper somewhere?Endillion said:On the theory (much discussed here) that many or most of the Covid-19 victims would have died this year or shortly afterwards from other or natural causes, the Covid-19 Actuaries Response Group has just published a four page note that may be of interest:
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY
In short, they do not agree with the implied hypothesis in the title:
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
Here's that group's earlier piece on whether the famous Imperial College modelling was "fit for purpose". (PDF link)
Interestingly, @rcs posted up a counterpiece to the Impedial Model by Nassim "Black Swan" Taleb and friends a while back which I really dissed as I didn't think the critique had any force at all. I was reassured to see the actuaries agree with me!! ("We also considered criticisms raised by Chen, Taleb, et al, and do not consider any of these to be material"...)
I know a few people on the group, and may get involved myself if the day job clears up a bit (albeit it's not really my primary field). In the meantime, happy to continue to post links to stuff they publish if it looks to be of interest.
There has been a great deal of comment and doubt, but little real debate, as to whether many of the COVID-19 deaths are really caused by COVID-19. Were they already ‘on death row’? Did they die ‘with’ but not ‘from’ COVID-19? The argument has been that many of the COVID-19 deaths are people of high age with existing medical conditions, and they would have died soon anyway.
We disagree. We think that the majority of COVID-19 deaths are deaths of people who would not have died anytime soon. We put forward our rationale in this bulletin. The data-driven argument is essentially:
(a) The COVID-19 deaths are concentrated at high ages, where existing conditions are common;
(b) Life expectancy of such people, even with ‘worst case’ profiles (eg obese smokers), are of the order of five years or more – these people would probably not have died (without COVID-19) anytime soon.
Finally, assuming these deaths are not really due to COVID-19 sends the wrong message – that the social distancing measures to protect our elderly are not important, or that their lives are unimportant.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/covid-19-actuaries-response-group_covid-19-arg-death-row-bulletin-activity-6653226206785347584-SQnY/
So you should be able to read it on screen but I can't figure out how to get it into a usable file format.2 -
I think the Thursday night clap for NHS, carers, front line staff and for Boris would have been fine.Philip_Thompson said:No clapping on my street at 8pm (and I'm not doing it, though I did last Thursday, I find it weird and mawkish tonight) but someone set off a firework on the dot of 8pm.
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No clapping around my way.HYUFD said:Clap for Boris about to start
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Jeremy Cliffe wrote an article saying the same thing a couple of weeks ago.eadric said:Re Korea.
My wife expressed the fear today that the end result of this virus would be hi-tech surveillance states, with the authorities monitoring everything we do and everyone we meet. Countries that don’t do this will be crippled by the bug.
I think she’s on to something.
https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2020/03/rise-bio-surveillance-state0 -
But they are working hard to scale up. I think that will be a few weeks away though, but not many months. The problem with the previous statements was that they did not (I think) assume the purchased antibody tests would be so poor.bigjohnowls said:
Yes I heard that.FrancisUrquhart said:
Not so fantastic news. Porton Down have "ground truth" data for 700+ individuals, and when evaluating all these antibody kits that every manufacturer claims are 98-99% accurate, they are all crap.bigjohnowls said:
That is fantastic news if it turns out to be correct.FrancisUrquhart said:
Vallance stated at the press conference today that he didn't think it would be now be an issue. Individual hospitals might end up at max capacity, but that the system should have enough.bigjohnowls said:
Hopefully the rumblings are correct. Nobody in Government should get criticised for providing over capacity if thats the way it turns out.FrancisUrquhart said:
Well seeing the BBC report from a London ICU, one thing that really struck me, nowhere near the chaos we have seen in the likes of Italy or NY.eadric said:
Yes. That’s (hopefully) the flaw in their data
It was clearly very busy, clearly very stressful, but no signs of 100s of patients rammed absolutely into every corner of the corridors etc.
And now there is a lot of rumblings that the Excel centre may never really be needed and certainly unlikely to need the full 4,000 bed capacity.
I am still concerned we will have insufficient
The scientists are normally very conservative with making claims like that, unlike politicians.
It seems like they have a test, but not one that is able to be scaled to mass market.
No quick way out of this for me and Mrs BJ by the looks of it.0
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