Coronavirus

[BillyStubbsTears]

Ldr.

That's precisely my concern.

My wife's uncle in Italy has been a leading amateur cyclist all him life. Even in his 60s now, he competes in seniors events and does several 50km+ training rides per week.

He hasn't been out on his bike for a month. He would rip the heads off those bell ends from Scunny and shove them up their arses.

The Govt were absolutely right in the daily briefing yesterday as well. Anyone who decides it's ok to go off on a jolly in the nice weather this weekend WILL be responsible for lots more people dying.

[Ldr]

I'm climbing the walls having been in this house 2 weeks already, cant see my son (hes 19 so cant shift between houses) and idiots who are too arrogant or stupid to follow simple advice are potentially going to prolong this? Boils my piss

[Filo]

It’s simple, deploy army check points at entrance to coastal towns and other places where people go out for the day, and turn them around in their vehicles, tel them to go back hime and give them a great big fine for their stupidity, and if they don’t want to comply point a gun at them, tell them it’s not a request, its an order

[ravenrover]

Just to bring a little light relief in what is a very serious subject

[foxbat]

talking of dying ,
 here's another one of this circus clown car government doing sweet f.a.
( or is it herd immunity ? )

Home Secretary Priti Patel has been challenged to explain why travellers from coronavirus hotspots like New York are not being made to self-isolate after arriving in the UK.

Self-isolation guidance for people arriving from the Chinese city of Wuhan and Hubei province, Italy, Iran or hard-hit parts of South Korea was withdrawn by the government on 13 March and has not been replaced.

[roversdude]

My brother in law has disappeared to a house party to sniff coke and blatantly stuck 2 fingers up at the lockdown. My thoughts on his actions could not be written on here - the to55er. If I knew where it was I’d inform the police. It was however arranged through FB in Sheffield somewhere.
My betting is there are loads of underground events happening

[BillyStubbsTears]

Good news from Italy.

681 deaths today. Lowest number for 12 days and more clear evidence that they are getting over the peak.

[wilts rover]

BST given the thread I started last night, I suspect as a nation we are a lot more cavalier about the lockdown

You are correct but it's wrong to blame the public for confusing government 'advice'.

In Italy its the law not to go out (so Billy's uncle would be arrested if he were found out on his bike) here it's only guidance.

In contrast we are encouraged to go out for a bike ride, both Johnson and Gove have said this at press conferences and Gove in his interviews last Sunday said - a reasonable distance for your fitness. How far is that supposed to be then?

Also the guidance is to go out and exercise once a day - however the law allows you to go out as many times as you wish. In contrast to Wales where it is the law you can only go out for exercise once a day.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-lockdown-laws-rules-what-can-you-do-uk-a9441091.html

Still that is irrelevant for today's figures. The average time for a covid-19 patient to pass away after declaring symptoms is 23 days. The lockdown was announced on 23rd March - 12 days ago.

[Copps is Magic]

Surely any decline in the rate of deaths will have a couple of weeks lag at least to any reduction in rate of increase of infections.?

Yes but the worry is that we locked down two weeks after Italy, but their death rate started slowing more than two weeks ago and ours has barely changed.

That means one of two things.

1) We were being more careless than them before we locked down.
2) We as a country have not been as sensible as them during the lockdown.


At the moment, we are not even close to reducing the death rate as rapidly as Italy was doing at the same point if their epidemic.

Well, you can look at it in that perjorative sense but my intial thoughts were a) the incidence of infection is much much higher than we anticipate (for whatever reason, political, social) or b) some other environmental conditions are playing a part. Intially, age was seen to be the biggest determining factors in how well people would respond but I am reading a lot about how obseity is a major risk factor. The UK is one of the most obese countries in the world, Italy much lower.

I'm not sure I get your point Copps. I wasn't saying anything perjorative. I was merely stating a fact that our rate of increase of deaths is now significantly worse than Italy's was two weeks ago and has barely changed at all in the 12 days since we locked down. Whereas Italy's rate of increase of deaths was starting to slow significantly by this time after their lockdown.

Look at the graph below. Both Italy and UK locked down when the total number of deaths was in the mid 400s. It's clear that, around that time, the trends in the two countries were very similar. Both of us had doubling trends of around three days and both countries' trends tracked up to about 1000 total deaths. That suggests that there is nothing fundamentally different in the early death rate trend in both countries, whatever the differences in societal structure or background health. So it's hard to see why similar mitigation measures in each country shouldn't have similar effects. But since hitting 1000 deaths, the trends have diverged markedly. With the number of deaths in the mid 3000s, our doubling rate is about 3.8 days whereas Italy's was about 4.8 days. It doesn't sound like much, but if that difference remains, it means we would have 4 times more deaths than Italy over a month. And Italy is certainly on track to hit 20,000 or so overall.

Today's data is a little better than the numbers we have had for most of the past week, and may just show the start of our doubling time increasing. Let's hope so.

I am not disagreeing with the data or figures in any way. I am saying to make a fine grained analysis that pissing about before/after the lockdown is the explanation for some apparent differences in death rates between the UK and Italy is a stretch. There are too many systematic errors in the data and other major factors that can be behind that. One being the underlying conditions of the populationin question. I certainly don't think much can be said about people's behaviour during the lockdown - the timeframes from that behaviour translating into death rates simply don't match yet.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps.

I still don't get what your pushing at.

If there were systematic errors in the data collection, or significant differences in the underlying health of the population, surely that would have shown up as differences in the death rate in the UK and Italy all the way through the timeline?

But the two trends matched very closely up to about 1000 deaths, which in both cases was about 4-5 days after the lockdown. The difference in trend since then is very pronounced.

I struggle to draw any conclusion from that data other than that Italy was doing a better job of halting the spread (or possibly, of treating critical patients, which would be unforgivable since we have their experience to draw on) than we have done at and around the time of the lockdown.

[Copps is Magic]

How do you know the death rate matching Italy up until 1000 deaths was not actually the error?

In short, and I am not trying to be funny, but you don't actually know. Its perfectly plausible that the UK had a much higher infection rate at that stage, but for some reason, less people were dying, and now the figures are catching up. Given the UK has one of the lowest per capita testing rates out of any developed country, nothing would suprise me. But there are so many other explanations.

Let me add another anecdotal observation. In the Netherlands they have managed to flatten all curves. Here, I would say the 'lockdown' has both been late, and not widespread at all. IN some senses its quite laughable. Busses are running, people are out, parks are full of children, shops are full. Shouldn't they also be doing worse than Italy here?

[wilts rover]

Isn't it depressing when we have gone from arguing about how many people we should leave up when defending a corner to comparable death rates.

The thing to remember with the UK figures is that these are not counting all the people who died on that day from covid-19. They do not include anyone who died outside hospital (these are in separate ONS figures) and are of people whose death was recorded on that day. They may have actually died 10 days or so ago.

So it is most likely the UK figures are a big underestimate of the actual number of people who died on that particular day.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/04/why-what-we-think-we-know-about-the-uks-coronavirus-death-toll-is-wrong

[Copps is Magic]

For my own part Wilts, I concern myself with death rates because (unfortunately) its one of the only real ways (along with hospital admissions/reports) to tell if we're on top of this thing or not. Its a dark way of looking at things but somewhat neccesary, every death is a person, and I hope we don't have to continue like this.

[scawsby steve]

Why are Donny figures so low? Not only compared with the rest of the country, but compared with the rest of South Yorkshire?

Are we taking the lockdown more seriously?

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps.

I think you are misreading the figures in that graph.

They show the time taken for the deaths to double against the number of deaths.

Effectively, it is a measure of how rapidly the deaths are increasing at any stage in the epidemic.

So, if you compare trends, you are effectively comparing how many people who were eventually going to die were infected at given times in each country.

You say, "How do you know the death rate matching Italy up until 1000 deaths was not actually the error?"

I don't. But given that pretty much every country in the world has had an initial doubling rate of deaths of about 3 days, until they started to suppress the epidemic, I would lean heavily to the opinion that they are probably not all hiding some systematic differences that just happen to cancel out.

And you're right, it may well be that it is "perfectly plausible that the UK had a much higher infection rate at that stage, but for some reason, less people were dying". But that would suggest that there is a physiological or medical treatment difference between all the different countries that, as with the previous point, just coincidentally meant that all countries had the same increase in deaths in the early times, then suddenly started diverging a but after they had locked down.

I swear by Occam's Razor. I don't go for complex explanations when there's a simple and logical one staring at me. It seems overwhelmingly likely that Italy, France and Germany have all suppressed the epidemics more successfully than we have at a stage leading up to the lockdowns.

I'd prefer that not to be the case, but that conclusion is screaming at me out of that graph.

And it hopefully goes without saying that I desperately hope I am wrong. Because if I'm not, we are looking at 30-50k deaths in this first wave.

[BillyStubbsTears]

PS.

The evidence about nearly all countries having the same rate of deaths Vs total deaths trend before suppression has an effect is in the excellent link that you posted a while ago.

https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/

Switch to "confirmed deaths".

[wilts rover]

Why are Donny figures so low? Not only compared with the rest of the country, but compared with the rest of South Yorkshire?

Are we taking the lockdown more seriously?

No, because as I have written above you wont see the effect of the lockdown for at least another 12 days.

[BillyStubbsTears]

That's not quite true Wilts.

The Imperial College modellers say the AVERAGE time from infection to death is 23 days. But the actual times to death are spread across a probability function. There is in their model a (small, admittedly) statistical possibility that someone could die within a day of catching the virus.

So by now, 12 days into the lockdown, we should certainly have seen SOME reduction in the rate of increase of deaths.

Italy certainly did, as did France and Germany.

It is concerning that we haven't done yet. It might be that today's slightly better news is the first sign of our doubling time increasing, but we won't really know that until the middle of next week.

Here's hoping.

[big fat yorkshire pudding]

It is actually amazing how its brought people out in to outdoors. I run and walk a lot and quite often can go a decent stretch without seeing people, at the minute it is massively more crowded out and about.  Quite nice to see in some ways but also quite nervy given the need to avoid people.

Ironic that my health requires me to exercise as part of managing it, yet being vulnerable to this you could put yourself at risk by doing so.

[SydneyRover]

talking of dying ,
 here's another one of this circus clown car government doing sweet f.a.
( or is it herd immunity ? )

Home Secretary Priti Patel has been challenged to explain why travellers from coronavirus hotspots like New York are not being made to self-isolate after arriving in the UK.

Self-isolation guidance for people arriving from the Chinese city of Wuhan and Hubei province, Italy, Iran or hard-hit parts of South Korea was withdrawn by the government on 13 March and has not been replaced.

Quarantine and self isolation for anyone coming into the country is imperitive if this is not happening then the UK has no chance of containing the virus, I'm surprised this is not being done FB, all the testiing and tracing in the world won't help if new cases are walking in.

[NickDRFC]

It is actually amazing how its brought people out in to outdoors. I run and walk a lot and quite often can go a decent stretch without seeing people, at the minute it is massively more crowded out and about.  Quite nice to see in some ways but also quite nervy given the need to avoid people.

Ironic that my health requires me to exercise as part of managing it, yet being vulnerable to this you could put yourself at risk by doing so.

A huge amount of people would normally exercise in the gym, which isn’t now an option - I don’t think it’s that surprising that more people are now outdoors exercising.

[wilts rover]

Billy

I was presuming SS was talking about the relationship between the lockdown and the number of deaths - which we are going to have to wait a few more days yet to see.

But yes we should see that drop. Yesterday was the first time the UK saw a drop in new cases - so the lockdown is working.

[IDM]

Any drop in recorded cases is welcome of course, but shouldn’t we need a sustained drop to claim that lockdown is working.?

I do hope you’re right however.

[Copps is Magic]

BST, delayed response, but I can sumarise by saying I don't personally believe there is such a simple explanation at this stage. There is too much going on, too many inconsistencies in data, too many dynamic geographical things going on, too many differences in the conditions of populations etc. I also think micro-reading a rolling average of a few days shouldn't be over-analysed, the effects of lockdowns will materialise in the broader trend.

To add two more things to think about which I've read since my last post.

1. It seems we're following a similar path to Spain right now in terms of deaths. Why? Well it could be simply be because Spain and the UK have similar ways of measuring/recording causes of deaths: i.e. those who die with covid symptoms. Other countries do not record deaths in this way.

2. I saw a channel 4 news piece about a spike in deaths in the midlands in the last few days. Actually quite a signifiant spike against the broader population. There was a discussion there about the lockdown social distancing etc. The conclusion was - are the people of Birmingham not following the lockdown measures any more than the people of Manchester, Leeds, or Sheffield? Almost certainly not. So there must be another exaplanation. Some of it could be the social demographics of the population in question (ethnicity - household composition) or it could be other factors down to chance. The truth is I don't know and no one conclusively knows at this stage.

[Metalmicky]

Not sure why this lady is still in a job....

Coronavirus Scotland: Fury as Scots chief medic Catherine Calderwood flouts own Covid-19 lockdown rule visiting 2nd home.

https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5460581/coronavirus-scotland-catherine-calderwood-chief-medic-covid-19/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebaramp

[ravenrover]

But is everyone with Covid19 dying of it or with it?

[BillyStubbsTears]

Copps.

Forgive me but you are consistently missing the massive elephant in the room, that is beautifully presented in the link you posted a week and a bit back.

Pretty much EVERY country has had the same relationship of daily deaths Vs total deaths in the early stages of the epidemic.

That steamrollers any argument about different accounting methods or underlying health conditions.

Those arguments would only account for different outcomes later in the epidemic if there was some reason why they should apply differently in different countries when you have a large number of people infected, but they stunningly cancel out all round the world when you have a small percentage infected.

Like I say, there is a big, well grounded and conceptually simple reason why trends should diverge at higher numbers. That is, the success or otherwise in suppressing the epidemic in each country. It seems perverse to ignore that in favour of speculative other possibilities.

Regarding us following the Spain trend at the moment, the jury is out on that. We'll have a better idea in the next few days. I'd say we are heading towards them but at a worringly higher slope.

[Filo]

Spain, France and Italy all reporting lower deaths today, Spain for the third day in a row

[BillyStubbsTears]

Filo.

It's clear that the effects of their lockdowns are showing now.

[Filo]

Filo.

It's clear that the effects of their lockdowns are showing now.

I think we were about a week behind Spain implementing a lockdown, although our lockdown wasn’t as extreme, our figures will be interesting in comparison with Spain in a weeks time