Coronavirus

[french frank]

Covid by Numbers
(Making sense of the Pandemic with Data)

By David Spiegelhalter & Anthony Masters -Pelican £10.99

The Times appraisal (Tom Whipple) was very favourable and interesting. Perhaps the Forum Library could do with a copy?

And a quick rundown by the authors of some key facts.

[Petrushka]

223 deaths today, with nearly 44,000 cases and everybody seems to think Covid has gone away. These are horrendous figures as we go into winter and Government are sitting back waiting for the whole thing to get out of control (again). Shouldn't they be acting before it gets out of control?

Mandatory masks and (sorry ts) vaccine passports coming soon, in my view.

[teamsaint]

223 deaths today, with nearly 44,000 cases and everybody seems to think Covid has gone away. These are horrendous figures as we go into winter and Government are sitting back waiting for the whole thing to get out of control (again). Shouldn't they be acting before it gets out of control?

Mandatory masks and (sorry ts) vaccine passports coming soon, in my view.

We can only hope , Pet, that HMG actually focus on measures to control the spread and effects of the virus, instead of imposing the open ended calamity of VPs on us, which have no demonstrable public health benefit whatsoever, and which can actually have a negative effect on public health. I think there is a strong lobby in favour of vaccine passports/Digital ID in the corridors of power, which has nothing to do with covid at all. Either way, they will be a disaster, that will negatively impact all of us sooner or later.

[Dave2002]

I hadn't seen one fellow member of a club I belong to for a while. He was at the concert I attended on Sunday afternoon, so I asked how he was. His response "Recovering from Covid" - which he had perhaps picked up in the far north of Scotland. The good news was that he is recovering, but the bad news is that the disease hasn't gone away. Also I think he must have been double vaccinated.

We are now booked for a booster shot in a couple of weeks.

Someone else has been "pinged" - though probably doesn't have the disease. I don't know what one is supposed to do if "pinged" - but I'm hoping it won't happen to us.

[Petrushka]

We can only hope , Pet, that HMG actually focus on measures to control the spread and effects of the virus, instead of imposing the open ended calamity of VPs on us, which have no demonstrable public health benefit whatsoever, and which can actually have a negative effect on public health. I think there is a strong lobby in favour of vaccine passports/Digital ID in the corridors of power, which has nothing to do with covid at all. Either way, they will be a disaster, that will negatively impact all of us sooner or later.

Latest here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...johnson-warned

I get your objections to vaccine passports, especially with this government, but would France, Switzerland and Italy be using them if there was no public health benefit?

[teamsaint]

Latest here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...johnson-warned

I get your objections to vaccine passports, especially with this government, but would France, Switzerland and Italy be using them if there was no public health benefit?

They might, if ours is going to !!
And what is the benefit, where is the evidence ? Two parliamentary committees found no justification for them.
In any case, even if there were some public health benefit, we ought to be very wary of the negative societal effects such a policy might land us with.

I , and many others , have plenty of issues with VPs, but the over riding one for me is about the kind of society that they will take us towards, the kind of society that we will hand to young people. Next stop, facial recognition software for the school lunch queue……..


Somebody please remind me not to get involved in this element of the discussion further , please !! I have said it over and over. I don’t want to try your collective patience, but I do feel so passionately about this, it is hard to hold back.

[french frank]

223 deaths today, with nearly 44,000 cases and everybody seems to think Covid has gone away. These are horrendous figures as we go into winter and Government are sitting back waiting for the whole thing to get out of control (again). Shouldn't they be acting before it gets out of control?

I hate to be alarmist but … it seems to me it's getting quite close to 'Batten Down the Hatches' time again, even if that's just a personal choice because there's no steer from the government. Vaccine passports will be irrelevant if all these places have to close down again. The South East, meaning London and Kent, seems to be the last region in England which hasn't hit the 400+ per 100k new cases - and they should be included in the next week or so. Most of Scotland, starting at the border, performing somewhat better. A matter of guess-work why that is. Wales and Northern Ireland pretty much on a par with England.

[Simon B]

Most of Scotland, starting at the border, performing somewhat better. A matter of guess-work why that is. Wales and Northern Ireland pretty much on a par with England.

Scotland's schools returned many weeks before those in England & Wales. They had a correspondingly dramatic wave of infection starting from a notably low base but peaking in mid-Sep. For now this has fallen away significantly at the same time that the Scottish pattern started being repeated everywhere else but with a delay corresponding with the later return to school.

The flaw with this tidy sounding theory is that the Scottish peak was hit approx 1 month after the start of term whereas there's little sign of that being replicated in England & Wales at present. All the same, it'd fit right in with the anecdata of anyone who's ever worked in a workplace with lots of colleagues with school age children. If you had no other indicators to go on you could normally accurately deduce that it was autumn just from first of all your parent colleagues complaining that their children were all ill, then said parents all getting ill themselves, then pretty much everyone else in the workplace falling like dominoes. Even if the consequences are radically different across age groups, the notion that Covid somehow won't follow this pattern (especially after it's evolved to the societal norms of its host) has always seemed to stretch credibility.


If you believe in the veracity of data from the Zoe Covid study (IMV in retrospect it has rarely diverged from the "official" data such as ONS which only becomes available with significantly greater delay) we are about to hit and then exceed the levels of symptomatic Covid reached in Jan 21. https://covid.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time. The better news is that the doubling time is still way longer than that observed in the worst of the exponential phases of previous waves. So, in the event that the Covid harm reduction via a return to more stringent measures would outweigh the damaging unintended consequences thereof, on current indicators Johnson and Co's likely procrastination over them will be less rapidly harmful than previously. How's that for optimistic gloss?

[french frank]

How's that for optimistic gloss?

Pretty good effort!

Just looking locally, the increases seem to vary quite significantly. My MSOA (roughly equivalent to a council ward, with about 8,000 population), has seen a rapidly escalating rate of increase. On the 8th Oct the 7-day %age increase/decrease was still downward (just) at -5.6%, by the 14th (tonight's figure) the 7-day increase was +362.5%, in actual figures from 11 to 74. Bristol's rather less dramatic: from -17.4% to +185.4%. Some surrounding areas have now hit the 800+ per 100k. The direction of travel pretty much the same, some faster than others.

I saw on one of the US TV sites that they were citing a contributory factor as being, ironically, the UK's early start with vaccinations and now the waning protection. There seems to have been a rise in breakthrough infections.

[Dave2002]

MSOA - what a dreadful acronym. I had to look it up. Middle Super Output Area. Not exactly sure what that means even now - but perhaps it does to those who coined it.
Seems to be a finer grained area specification than a whole local authority area.

Here is an interactive map - which works for England at least. It takes in my post code, but I think because I'm in the frozen wastes it then hangs indefinitely.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map/cases

[Bryn]

Just been watching Origins: Hunting the Source of Covid-19. At the time of posting it is not yet available on the iPlayer but should be soon and there are repeats, as indicated.

[french frank]

It takes in my post code, but I think because I'm in the frozen wastes it then hangs indefinitely.

It's been a bit flaky lately and a few days ago they apologised for the length of time it was taking to load. Can't help on the meaning of MSOAs, but they seem to be roughly equivalent to council wards in terms of population though with slightly different boundaries.

Incidentally, the latest video from Tim Spector of Zoe said the government-issued figures for new infections were much lower than the ones being reported by Zoe contributors. He explained it by saying that over 600 days after Zoe had reported to the government that the commonest initial symptoms were now quite different from the standard ones used by the government (fever, cough, loss of taste/smell), the government were ignoring this new dats. The current top symptoms (of the Delta form???) are similar to those of a cold: headache, runny nose, sneezing, sore throat. But if people turned up for a test they were turned away and told 'That's not covid'. So many people with the infection aren't being tested and move around freely in the community, spreading the virus.

[Frances_iom]

Just been watching Origins: Hunting the Source of Covid-19. At the time of posting it is not yet available on the iPlayer but should be soon and there are repeats, as indicated.

Well the blurb states the 'controversial' lab leak theory is now being taken more seriously - controversial only because of the deliberate Chinese moves both to obfuscate the spread and to hamper the investigation by delay + destruction of evidence.

[Frances_iom]

... But if people turned up for a test they were turned away and told 'That's not covid'. So many people with the infection aren't being tested and move around freely in the community, spreading the virus.

so how doe Zoe know which is a cold and which is an obviously mild form of Covid.

[Bryn]

Well the blurb states the 'controversial' lab leak theory is now being taken more seriously - controversial only because of the deliberate Chinese moves both to obfuscate the spread and to hamper the investigation by delay + destruction of evidence.

It might be worth watching the programme, rather than relying on the blurb. The overwhelming view of those scientists actually working on the investigation is that by far the most likely source was non-human animal to human other than via a laboratory leak, accidental or otherwise. The controversy was surely much more to do with Trump's fundamentally racist attempts to redirect criticism of his appalling handling of the pandemic (without a shred of actual evidence, of course). The programme made it clear that the scientific consensus was still considered very much that a lab leak was by far the least likely source.

A similarly interesting case of blame-shifting and uncertainly applies to the so-called "Spanish Flu": https://international.thenewslens.com/article/93408