Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 3

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Welcome to thread 3 of the daily updates.

Resource links:
Worldometer UK page
Financial Times Daily updates and graphs
HSJ Coronavirus updates
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre
NHS England stats, including breakdown by Hospital Trust
Covidly.com to filter graphs using selected data filters
ONS statistics for CV related deaths outside hospitals, released weekly each Tuesday

Thank you to all contributors for their factual, data driven, and civil discussions.

ExTwitter That's correct. The U.K. daily figures only include people who have died in hospital. The ONS are collating figures that include deaths in care homes etc but they lag behind by over a week and aren’t included in the daily figures and have not been added onto the totals that the department for health announce each day.

Considering the fact that care homes appear to be badly affected this could make a big difference to our figures. One care home in Bedfordshire has lost 15 residents to Coronavirus already. The care home had less than 70 residents at the start of the outbreak.

I think I've only seen reference on worldometer to some / all (?) deaths in the community being included by France and Belgium. Is it clear that all other countries are including them in their figures?

France are including them now. They had a big jump when they started counting them.
Today no community deaths were included in France’s totals because of a technical problem and it was quite startling how much lower their number of deaths are than ours, now that we are comparing like-for-like. Their figure was somewhere in the 500s today and ours was in the 900s.
I don’t know if everyone is counting deaths in the community and, even where they are, there is likely to be more lag in those figures.

That's terrible really :( gives a false sense of what's happening. Most people I see are quoting the MPs figures.

The first study of antibody levels in recovered COVID patients

Concerning implications for herd immunity if this is the case in wider populations,
but do treat cautiously, as still awaiting peer review

it seems to be the young who didn't make antibodies, rather than the old

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3078840/coronavirus-low-antibody-levels-raise-questions-about

A team from Fudan University analysed blood samples from 175 patients discharged from the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre and found that

nearly a third had unexpectedly low levels of antibodies.

In some cases, antibodies could not be detected at all
....
“About 30 per cent of patients failed to develop high titers of neutralising antibodies after Covid-19 infection.
However, the disease duration of these patients compared to others was similar,"they said.^

The team also found that antibody levels rose with age, with people in the 60-85 age group displaying more than three times the amount of antibodies as people in the 15-39 age group.

The low amounts of antibodies could affect herd immunity, resistance to the disease among the general population to stop its spread.^

Oh shit, that's not good

I did wonder if you had it mildly you still got the antibodies but that doesn’t explain the difference between ages if all same level of mildness.

BigChocFrenzy As you say, still awaiting peer review, but if it turns out to be accurate then it puts the final nail in the coffin of any herd immunity strategy. Not that I think anyone is seriously still thinking of pursuing that avenue anymore.

If the young and healthy don’t develop immunity then that means you can’t use their “herd immunity” to protect the vulnerable. That really highlights the importance of the vaccine, testing and tracing.

BigChoc do you know when the German antibody test study will be complete?

They were questioning the likelihood of a vaccine on the bbc news this morning and there is talk that it’s still not confirmed that they will find one for sure as they never were able to vaccinate against SARS the last time

Maybe the higher incidence of antibodies in older people is because they are more likely to get severe disease?

I was really hoping the antibody results would be good news

For people asking about Sweden and testing a couple of pages back. My SIL is a nurse in Uppsala and had flu/ cough symptoms 2 weeks ago. She was tested for covid straight away. So I think although they are mainly only testing people in hospital they test health workers very quickly. And although there is no lockdown all over 70's have been told to stay at home. My parents in law haven't been out for a month or had visits from their children - just shopping left outside.

they never were able to vaccinate against SARS the last time
They didn't need to produce a vaccine because SARS petered out naturally. Work was in progress though, it was just shelved when it wasn't needed.

Bigchoc,

It seems that most people do produce antibodies.

I might posit that, as these were people in a hospital setting, the young (who don’t normally end up in hospital) were in hospital BECAUSE they did not produce antibodies and that is why they got sicker. The old, on the other hand, reacted normally, producing antibodies but were in hospital because they were frail.

Clearly we need more testing but the overwhelming body of evidence and expert opinion is that our immune system (as a species) is able to mount a normal immune response against Corona-Sars2.

That is really terrible news! I was pinning so much hope on antibodies and immunity.

-larrygrylls, that makes sense. I have just recovered from what I think was probably Covid. I was pretty bloody impressed my body was able to shake it off, unpleasant as it was.

Re young - How do you beat a virus without producing antibodies?

If they were very sick that is.

Idk I think we need more info

Marsha They have found healthy volunteers
but are still waiting for a reliable antibody test that doesn't give a false positive for other Corona viruses

So that's expected to be another 3-4 weeks before they can even start

This would be the group of 100,000 that they will keep testing, to check how immunity is developing within the country

I don't have a date for study end, but I expect we'd get baseline and interim reports

larry About ⅓ didn't produce the antibodies, so about ⅔ did

As for how those without antibodies still fought it off:

"These patients experienced typical Covid-19 symptoms including fever, chill and a cough, but might have beaten back the virus with other parts of the immune system such as T-cells or cytokines.
How they did this was still unclear."

Speculation:
Maybe the younger people who don't produce antibodies are that minority of the under-60s who become seriously ill

"they never were able to vaccinate against SARS the last time"

The vaccine work was abandoned after SARS - and MERS - died out naturally

iirc Gates or someone was castigating pharmaceutical firms for being so short-sighted as not to continue.
However, without an epidemic, there is no money in developing a vaccine.

This is a major illustration why we can't leave public health entirely to private enterprise:

Government has to step in to support work that might be very important for the future,
but doesn't have a business case until disaster strikes

Just as we shouldn't leave it to supermarkets to be our emergency food suppliers in a disaster.
Government must plan to be more proactive and much quicker in the next disaster.
And there will be another.
Again when we're not expecting it.

So if people don’t produce antibodies - how would any vaccine work?

Apparently using plasma from people who do have antibodies can be effective treatment for Covid. I wonder if one's own immune system then 'learns' from that blood?

⅔ of people do produce them
but it would make it a vaccine more difficult
Hence why a reliable antibody test will be so important

I'm sure groups around the world will be testing people who have had COVID,
so we should soon find whether the results of their study of 175 people is reproducable, i.e. correct.

btw, I gather current antibody tests are not ready because they keep producing false positives for other viruses,
not that they produce false negatives

• but there has been a lot of other kit donated by China that has been found defective