Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 2

[Barracker]

A follow on thread from here

Please try to keep it data driven, factual and civil.

www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

Tests on demand due to suspicion of mild illness seems like dreamland stuff at present.

But then you read about places like Singapore and South Korea extensively testing and seemingly having really good results with their control. There must be a way to manage this here...

*The antibody test will tell you nothing useful about medical staff who have symptoms but are not actually infected with Coronavirus. Although I don't know how many people might be in this group.

There's also the question of how long it takes between becoming non-infectious and developing antibodies that can be detected.*

How about the bigger question. Johnson was promising an anti body test in the millions a few days ago when he was at the same time exaggerating (lying?) the number of tests for the infection that were taking place.

My instinctive feeling is that extensive testing works well at the beginning of an outbreak when you're looking at a few hundred/a thousand cases, but if you miss that window of opportunity then testing is best used in a highly targeted way unless you can easily do vast numbers of tests.

Testing in Britain of Health workers or for that matter anyone has been greatly exaggerated by Johnson and we are finally waking up to this mis direction.
Perhaps we don’t always take at face value the front pages of our daily newspapers but they are now asking PM Johnson what is going on.
This from Politico.eu LONDON PLAYBOOK daily email.
QUOTE
Today’s front pages (see them here) are probably the most uniformly hostile Boris Johnson has ever endured, and come at a time of maximum crisis for the nation. Most painful will be the dramatic attack from his alma mater the Telegraph, its huge banner headline “Questions but no answers” absolutely hammering his ministers for failing to explain what went wrong. The Times splash reads “Virus testing plans in chaos,” while the bleak Daily Mail front page focuses on the tiny fraction of NHS staff tested so far. The Daily Mirror splash simply reads “Shambles,” while even the agnostic Daily Star — which usually avoids politics like the plague — yells: “Get a bleedin’ grip, Bozo.” How long ago that election victory party must now seem.
END QUOTE

Sounds like some time before reliable antibody tests are available - and unreliable ones would be worse than useless
Better to wait and do it properly

In Germany the public health authorities plan to test the same group of 100,000 people for resistance over time to see how the epidemic develops.

They say they would have started already but the tests available also test positive for some other Corona viruses.

They estimate it will take some more weeks till a proper test is available.

Random info from an nhs hr person I know was that their trust had bought 2 million tests from America. Now stuck in customs over there. Now obviously commandeered by the U.K. government for their use, where they see fit. I had no idea that was possible, though apparently so.

I think there's been utter chaos behind the scenes. The nhs isn't fully centralised anymore, though I imagine the virus bill has reversed this. And won't the US want to keep those tests now?

Basically, the government will be working as hard as they can on this but there's a world pandemic and resources will be scarce everywhere.

I wonder if China and other counties were more equipped due to SARS etc originating there in the past. They would have focussed policy to be able to deal with it better if it happened again. It's not been a priority here.

My instinctive feeling is that extensive testing works well at the beginning of an outbreak when you're looking at a few hundred/a thousand cases, but if you miss that window of opportunity then testing is best used in a highly targeted way unless you can easily do vast numbers of tests.

Yes, we missed the point in the ‘containment’ phase where we could’ve followed South Korea’s plan. I don’t mean that as a criticism, really, just an observation. East Asian countries have had prior experience with a less-contagious still-serious Coronavirus, SARS. Lessons learned 15 years ago will have greatly informed the responses of countries in the region.

Looking at the UK’s pre CV19 ‘HCID’ documents, it seems to me that our government (successive governments, not just present day) have never truly believed we’d ever end up in this position. They planned for handfuls of ‘imported’ cases of new infectious diseases, but not for a disease that had already begun it’s ‘community spread’.

Whether that’s due to naivety, a kind of systemic xenophobia or simply that our governments think almost exclusively in 5 year plans, I don’t know. It doesn’t make much difference at this point in time anyway.

@nauticant I agree but I also think it’s the only way to manage a functioning society once we get to the other side of the curve. We’ve missed the opportunity at the beginning but there’ll be another one the other side but that means managing smaller areas of outbreaks.

I really hope that they look at the data available and find a way to use it.

That's reasonable Cornettoninja. I think that testing, whether that's antigen or antibody, needs to be applied differently at different points of the crisis.

The refighting the crisis in hindsight by commentors and those with particular axes to grind, whether political, economic, or whatever, is going to be unbearable.

@nauticant - and we thought brexit was bad!

DuLANG it seems that the planning for many years has been to rely on "herd immunity" even for large epidemics,
i.e. to ruthlessly sacrifice large numbers of people

RNorth (whose views I ignore due to his considerable ability to research obscure govt documents):

http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87565

From the very start, the planners concede defeat, stating that stopping "the spread or introduction of the pandemic virus into the UK is unlikely to be a feasible option"
....
we learn that local planners "have been set the target" of preparing to extend capacity on a precautionary but reasonably practicable basis,
and aim to cope with a population mortality rate of up to 210,000 to 315,000 additional deaths.

As to timescale, these deaths may possibly occur "over as little as a 15 week period and perhaps half of these over three weeks at the height of the outbreak".
......
the main practical response was to plan for the mass disposal of bodies.
This was not outbreak management – it was the strategy of defeat.

We even have a carefully-drafted 59-page document setting out "a framework for planners preparing to manage deaths,"
which is only thirty pages shorter than the entire Pandemic Influenza Response Plan.

This doesn't surprise me BigChocFrenzy. When thinking about a hypothetical pandemic it's easy to think "we can't shut down the economy, it would cause vast economic damage, there is no alternative". However, when it actually happens a leader thinking about what comes when the pandemic subsides and they are held responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths as a result of their choice to prioritise the economy is another thing altogether.

New figures for Spain:

2nd April: 6120 new cases and 616 new deaths

1st April: 8195 new cases and 923 new deaths

Could Spain have turned a corner?

Men appear to be disproportionately affected. I have seen this discussed on other threads.
These are pie charts from little Luxembourg showing male/female cases by age group.

I'm not sure if worldometer data for Spain is released gradually through the day, there have been a couple of days where I thought the numbers were dropping but then they seemed to be higher by the end of the day. Or that might have been Germany. I'm getting increasingly number-blind.

My source for the above figures is the Worldometer, but this story from the Daily Mail appears to have much higher figures:

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8179745/Spain-suffers-day-record-coronavirus-deaths-950-killed-24-hours.html

Not sure what's going on there

Sorry I should have said the numbers are for Italy and the analysis from Luxembourg.

Those figures aren't correct for Spain. El País is reporting 950 deaths in the last 24 hours. That's another record death toll.

I think the DM, like the BBC website, is using yesterday's figures for Spain.

Interesting BMJ article on sex/gender in relation to the virus. Asking for data to be disaggregated by sex.

blogs.bmj.com/bmjgh/2020/03/24/sex-gender-and-covid-19-disaggregated-data-and-health-disparities/

Thanks Somnolent. It sounds like I might have jumped the gun in that case - apologies.

Those figures aren't correct for Spain. El País is reporting 950 deaths in the last 24 hours. That's another record death toll.

Yes, sorry folks - I didn't realise that Worldometer revises its figures throughout the day. My fault!

What I don't understand is this - how can infections STILL be increasing 3 weeks after lockdown if nobody is going out?

The number of new cases also increased by 8,102 in the last 24 hours, bringing the total from 102,136 to 110,238, but marks the lowest percentage increase in cases yet - in a sign that lockdown measures put in place almost three weeks ago are working.

(Source: Daily Mail)

Because of :
a) 5 day incubation
b) 7 day lag before seeking medical attention
c) 3-4 days for confirmation of positive test

Thats just for the index case then there's:
d) Household transmission
e) Healthcare transmission
f) Lockdown is imperfect

[2020-04-02] 33,718 confirmed cases, 2,921 deaths.
+4,244 new cases (29,474 yesterday), +569 new deaths (2,352 yesterday)