Coronavirus

[Nick Armstrong]

Caliban lives nearby - I wonder if he heard this.

No.... Alexander St is the best part of half a mile away.

Had they attempted a full-scale rendition of the Leningrad, it might have been audible

[Alison]

Does anyone know what percentage of confirmed virus cases are fatal?

[LMcD]

Caliban lives nearby - I wonder if he heard this.

A cellist friend tells me that during the composition of his 7th quartet Shostakovitch was expecting to be arrested at any time!

[eighthobstruction]

....I would love to see some of the emails that must have been flying around Whitehall to cudgel the testing figures to 100k....just in time....

[johnb]

Does anyone know what percentage of confirmed virus cases are fatal?

The simplistic answer is, using yesterday's data:

No. of confirmed cases: 171,253
No. of deaths of confirmed cases (inside and outside hospital): 26,771

That would give 15.6%

But - most of the confirmed cases were prior to the recent expansion of testing so would have a very high percentage of people who were seriously ill when tested (i.e. ill enough to warrant being admitted to hospital). This is why the UK's case fatality ratio (which is what we are talking about) is particularly high when compared with countries who have had much more extensive testing (i.e. who didn't only test patients who were seriously ill). At the moment we seem to at the top of the league table - but I stress that is because we have previously only tested seriously ill patients.

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/global-covid-19-case-fatality-rates/

(The table in the above website uses UK data from one day prior to the date of the figures I quoted above.)

[LHC]

Does anyone know what percentage of confirmed virus cases are fatal?

The case fatality rate in the UK is currently around 14%. However, because it is suspected that a lot of people have had CV19 and recovered without being tested, this is almost certainly a significant overstatement of the fatality rate. Worldwide the rate is around 7%, and there are several countries with a much lower rate.

Most estimates for the real fatality rate are around 1%.

[johnb]

Most estimates for the real fatality rate are around 1%.

Or between 0.5% and 1%.

[Count Boso]

The UK appears to be one of only two countries (the other being the Netherlands) which doesn't give a figure for known TOTAL RECOVERED on the Worldometer table:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

[johnb]

Yes that's very odd indeed.

[Alison]

Thanks, informative answers.

Thought I’d heard the 1% quoted but was computing along the lines of John’s first message.

Glad I asked!

[Count Boso]

There's a very interesting article on the WHO in Prospect magazine on the diplomatic tightrope it has to walk to ensure maximum cooperation between countries. Points that struck me:

"Things could have been far worse if China had regarded the WHO as hostile. As it was, Beijing first reported a cluster of cases of pneumonia in Wuhan on 31st December 2019..........The WHO was then quick to act. The next day, on 1st January 2020, as the head of China’s centre for disease control briefed his counterpart in the United States.......,"

"Over the weekend of 11th-12th January, the Chinese authorities shared the full sequence of the coronavirus genome. Consequently, by 16th January German researchers in Berlin had already developed a new lab test for the virus, soon followed by companies in South Korea"

"Other countries did not follow the WHO advice, and there was little the organisation could do. In the UK and the US, weeks went by without the adequate development and rollout of testing. Both were forced to limit testing severely as the virus spread. "

"Even where a sufficient weight of expertise settles into a consensus, the WHO is not automatically free to act on it. It cannot declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern” (PHEIC) without convening an Emergency Committee of experts to review the evidence and make a call, a restriction governments have imposed. The WHO convened such a committee on 22nd-23rd January and it failed to reach a consensus. Fortunately, it did not let matters rest. Instead, it despatched a senior delegation to China to gather more data and to call a second meeting of the Emergency Committee at which the experts gave approval to declare a PHEIC on 30th January."

And so on. And incidentally, the WHO's budget is about the same as an average US hospital.

[Dave2002]

Backsliding - today.

Today the the worldwide progress of the virus had reverted, so showed absoute values, rather than proportionate to population size for each country. Deliberate or accidental?? MMMMMmmmmmmm. Of course, as a couple of people said, including BJ, it doesn't always make sense to compare countries - and to some extent that is correct. It's a selective process of course, but if it really doesn't make sense to compare countries, then why show any comparison at all? Presumably it's felt important to make a little effort in the direction of "complete transparency".

I do hope the proper proportionate graphic, with up to date data will reappear tomorrow.

There’s been no repeat of that or similar graphic, so the backsliding continues. While I accept that “proper” comparisons of different countries can only be fully evaluated a long time hence, I do believe that attempts are being made to suppress the full scale of the damage, to misrepresent what has happened, and that the UK has not done better than other countries. The only country which seems to have been worse hit is Belgium, based on the data and graphics shown to us. What’s done is done, but the presentations shouldn’t be manipulated to pretend otherwise.

I think it is true that once the full scale of the potential devastation was realised that the UK did well to mobilise people, and to make very strong efforts to construct the new hospitals, but acting earlier would have saved more lives. With a long tail to the graph of “the peak” sadly I fear that ultimately the number of deaths will be at least double the value at the peak. I would love to be wrong.

All countries will now be facing similar problems after this first wave - “how do we get out of this?”. That is going to need a lot of effort and international cooperation. A number of US states have now relaxed full lockdown - though not the worst affected ones. It will be interesting to see how well that works, though I hope it won’t be a sad thing to observe from a distance. Maybe the UK will learn something, and not go gung-ho into rapid action. This is not a fight which can be “won” with valiance, courage, swords or tanks. It’s against a virus.

[teamsaint]

There’s been no repeat of that or similar graphic, so the backsliding continues. While I accept that “proper” comparisons of different countries can only be fully evaluated a long time hence, I do believe that attempts are being made to suppress the full scale of the damage, to misrepresent what has happened, and that the UK has not done better than other countries. The only country which seems to have been worse hit is Belgium, based on the data and graphics shown to us. What’s done is done, but the presentations shouldn’t be manipulated to pretend otherwise.

I think it is true that once the full scale of the potential devastation was realised that the UK did well to mobilise people, and to make very strong efforts to construct the new hospitals, but acting earlier would have saved more lives. With a long tail to the graph of “the peak” sadly I fear that ultimately the number of deaths will be at least double the value at the peak. I would love to be wrong.

All countries will now be facing similar problems after this first wave - “how do we get out of this?”. That is going to need a lot of effort and international cooperation. A number of US states have now relaxed full lockdown - though not the worst affected ones. It will be interesting to see how well that works, though I hope it won’t be a sad thing to observe from a distance. Maybe the UK will learn something, and not go gung-ho into rapid action. This is not a fight which can be “won” with valiance, courage, swords or tanks. It’s against a virus.

I’m assuming, given the opaque statements from government , that there are only really 3 ways out of lockdown.
1. Vaccine.
2 Herd immunity
3 A fully functioning contact tracing system, both physical and an app, when the number of current cases is down to a workable level.

Given that 1 and 2 aren’t within touching distance, that just leaves 3, and my assumption is that government cant do anything significant about releasing lockdown until a system is in place , and case numbers are low enough.
But it seems to me that they aren’t actually saying this, even though they must surely be working towards it.

The delays in setting up a comprehensive tracing system are a woeful failure I think, not least since there are a lot of professionals such as environmental health officers who are in position and could quickly be switched to the new tracing duties ?

[oddoneout]

I’m assuming, given the opaque statements from government , that there are only really 3 ways out of lockdown.
1. Vaccine.
2 Herd immunity
3 A fully functioning contact tracing system, both physical and an app, when the number of current cases is down to a workable level.

Given that 1 and 2 aren’t within touching distance, that just leaves 3, and my assumption is that government cant do anything significant about releasing lockdown until a system is in place , and case numbers are low enough.
But it seems to me that they aren’t actually saying this, even though they must surely be working towards it.

The delays in setting up a comprehensive tracing system are a woeful failure I think, not least since there are a lot of professionals such as environmental health officers who are in position and could quickly be switched to the new tracing duties ?

The mismatch between what could be done and what has actually been done is a defining feature of dealing with the pandemic in this country as far as I can see. Throughout there have been(and still are)reports of organisations and individuals offering help, making suggestions, and being ignored/overlooked, while the government lurches along inventing a square wheel and hampering anything that does actually work.
This 'public taking the lead' I have found heartening and hope that aspects of it will inform life after the pandemic. I am not sure though that it will be as useful for dealing with any easing of restrictions, given shambolic government planning (assuming there is even any) and absence of clear explanation for 'decisions'. From my limited perspective over the past 3 days, the mere mention of 'easing lockdown' seems to have signalled a change in atmosphere and approach - much more road traffic, at Morrisons no more cleaned trolleys and much higher levels of shopper throughput, heads down on phones creeping back, indications that some 'households' have got bigger when the barbie comes out...

[johnb]

There’s been no repeat of that or similar graphic, so the backsliding continues. While I accept that “proper” comparisons of different countries can only be fully evaluated a long time hence, I do believe that attempts are being made to suppress the full scale of the damage, to misrepresent what has happened, and that the UK has not done better than other countries. The only country which seems to have been worse hit is Belgium, based on the data and graphics shown to us. What’s done is done, but the presentations shouldn’t be manipulated to pretend otherwise.

You are probably correct in suggesting that using the number of deaths per million of the population is a better metric when doing international comparisons. However, on the one occasion they did show separate charts for each metric the chart using deaths/million showed the UK in a marginally more favourable light than the chart they normally use. So I don't think that using deaths (instead of deaths/million) is part of the "attempts [that] are being made to suppress the full scale of the damage, to misrepresent what has happened". The countries shown that are dramatically different when using deaths/million are the US and Belgium.