563 dead today, is this our peak?

[Whitefeather01]

Surely we have to be close to peaking??

There are a number of Youtube videos showing the mathematics behind it, for example

I've known 2 people admitted to ICU. One at 5 days, the other at 8. Both now discharged and one feeling fully recovered, the other still making progress.

Also Italy is a bigger country than ours with a higher population so will of course have different numbers

Just to clarify, would a peak that was 11 weeks away mean the death rate continuing to double every couple of days until that point?

A hospital worker on the Irish MN thread said that they were admitting Cheltenham patients at the moment. That was a couple of days ago. That is interesting, when I heard the high numbers today I wondered how many are from Cheltenham Festival, not to mention Crufts and the big concerts that weekend. Total madness.

Thank goodness we managed to squeeze in the Cheltenham festival and all those other essential crowd gathering events before we pulled the finger out and started to treat this seriously.

I don’t believe what they are saying about the peak being 11+ weeks away, there is no evidence to suggest that will be the case. I think we will see numbers rise quickly this week and maybe peak next week before we see a very slow reduction. Lockdown won’t have effect for a few weeks. Spain are possibly near their peak with numbers around 800+ (deaths) per day, we are a week or 2 behind them.

There are a number of Youtube videos showing the mathematics behind it

No, you're talking about 'flattening the curve' - mitigation measures. What the government are trying to do at the moment with lockdown is suppression measures. It might not work (although looks like it is, fingers crossed) but it's a different thing to moving the curve lower and later.

@DisinfectantDoris Italy has a lower population but is a bigger country. To me that looks bad as were much more densely populated perhaps

A peak 11 weeks away would mean either that the current lockdown measures weren't working, or that it takes an average of 11 weeks from getting infected to dying. There's no evidence that the first one of those is true and there's plenty of evidence that the second one isn't.

@Frigginella That feels pertinent to me too. We are so packed together.

Lockdown is to slow this down and flatten the curve @GoldenOmber so that the NHS can cope.

There are so many varying statistics and predictions on this thread but based on what? So many seem made up.

Yes, that's because people are just talking out of their arse. They don't know, they are just making it up.

Why can't we have a daily recovered toll as well, to tell us how many patients have made it out of icu?

We are not 2 weeks behind Italy anymore! Stop spouting that shit!

We were at a couple of stages at the start. But no longer.
Today total deaths in the UK stands at 2352.. 2 weeks ago in Italy it was 2978. That's 600 difference. 20% less than Italy (I'm not calculating just generalising).
Yesterday UK total was 1789, Italy 2 weeks ago was 2503. 700 difference.
The gap is closing.. but unless the UK starts getting 900 deaths per day or overtakes Italy per day then we arent two weeks behind them anymore.

And just to add.

What the hell are Germany doing that the rest of the world arent?! I know they're testing so many but their first case was a week before us but their death rate is a fraction of ours..

Also Italy is a bigger country than ours with a higher population so will of course have different numbers

It's a bigger country with a smaller population.

We are 15-16 days behind Italy. I think people saying 2 weeks are just rounding down.

unless the UK starts getting 900 deaths per day

Surely we're not too far away from this?

Lockdown is to slow this down and flatten the curve @GoldenOmber so that the NHS can cope.

No. Mitigation is to slow down the epidemic without stopping it. Lockdown is to get it as close to zero as possible (temporarily, while buying time for NHS and other measures and so on).

The point of lockdown is to shrink the infection rate down, so that every infected person infects less than one other person. If that's working - and there is evidence that it is, fingers crossed! - then it makes no sense to say that lockdown will move the peak further into the future, because the rate of new infections is going down right from the start of lockdown.

@SabineSchmetterling

At the start we were 2 weeks. So even 16 days is.. the gap distancing and a positive sign

@Eggcited but we just dont know that?
If it gets to that I'll eat my hat. But for now its unknown statistics causing fear.

The only countries hitting those figures so far is Italy and Spain. Even the US is nowhere near that.

Peak in approximately two weeks, peak to last at least five weeks so I'm told. Though I think nobody can know for sure.

Why the fuck are people going to the beaches and parks ? I went to a beach today. I live close to it, I walked brisky along the prom and briskly back, I saw a total of 8 people, two on bikes who whistled past me, a mother with 2 kids, a man running and a young couple. No one got anywhere near 2 metres of each other, with the possible exception of the bike riders but they went past so fast I'm not sure how close they were but definitely over a metre away. First time I've been out in 2 weeks except for dropping car off for MOT before they were suspended. I'm sure alot of people walking on pavements came across more people than I did.

Pleasedont, the countess

if you're considering skewed figures looking at dying from and dying with and you're based in England then you might want to consider the numbers in the community rather than acute that are dying FROM the virus without being admitted and without testing so don't necessarily feature in the figures/on death certificates. I saw something from Scotland saying they thought the figures would be reconciled and they thought they would have no deaths from Covid in the community as everyone admitted. I've no experience in their patch. In our patch, the number of deaths in the community FROM Covid looks significant and probably won't ever be counted where the patient won't be tested.

Given UK government historical decisions about not testing and not contact tracing and not increasing testing capacity before, there will be many dimensions of uncertainty in UK figures from not tested to tested, dying with and dying from and infected but never tested.

Given the lag in progress of the disease (stock and flow to outcomes) and treatment we've seen with the duration of patients supported in ITU and the % successfully coming off ventilation and being discharged after lags of weeks, even the figures being quoted now are, at best, indicative.

I wouldn't presume reality is happier than the figures if you're seeing dying with rather than from Covid given how community deaths are being treated.

Where keeping dying from and dying with in mind perhaps more useful to highlight is comparisons between countries - if one country has a relatively low death rate and the reason isn't their approach, rather should they attribute deaths to the reason for admission rather than Covid but Covid is the substantive cause of death (more complicated in reality than a binary but suppose admitted for an RTA and the patient dies from Covid if was ready for discharge after treatment for the RTA).