Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 4

[Barracker]

Welcome to thread 4 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.

Thanks @FATEdestiny. Hopefully that means we start to level out now rather than continue to climb...

I wonder if the discussion in the media about greater compliance has been planted by the Government.
Are the British public being groomed to except and agree with an early release from “Lockdown”
Have the “Government” or some of them decided the economic price is too high and getting back to work is more important than the number of deaths.

In any case this “story” appearing now will again weaken the instructions to stay at home.
Are the “herd immunity” theorists beginning to win the day?
As someone in the high risk category, due to age, I don’t like that idea one bit.

There seems to be a 50% govt target floating around MN, but this is not based on anything I can find, other than wishful thinking.

Assuming the government is still using the Imperial report for their modelling, the assumptions are:

• Social distancing of entire population: All households reduce contact outside household, school or workplace by 75%. School contact rates unchanged, workplace contact rates reduced by 25%. Household contact rates assumed to increase by 25%.
• Social distancing of those over 70 years of age: Reduce contacts by 50% in workplaces, increase household contacts by 25% and reduce other contacts by 75%. Assume 75% compliance with policy.
• Voluntary home quarantine: Following identification of a symptomatic case in the household, all household members remain at home for 14 days. Household contact rates double during this quarantine period, contacts in the community reduce by 75%. Assume 50% of household comply with the policy.
• Closure of schools and universities: Closure of all schools, 25% of universities remain open. Household contact rates for student families increase by 50% during closure. Contacts in the community increase by 25% during closure.

The media is a bit of a menace atm. They know CV19 stories are popular but there is very little from government to go on. The DM uses vague phrases such as ‘ministers say’ no names, no quotes. They flip flop from releasing early to long lock down, early vaccine, late vaccine.

The longer it goes on the better just looking at the data and numbers is. This thread is a port in the storm the rest of mn is a reactive (more so) than the media.

I wonder if the discussion in the media about greater compliance has been planted by the Government.
Are the British public being groomed to except and agree with an early release from “Lockdown”
Have the “Government” or some of them decided the economic price is too high and getting back to work is more important than the number of deaths

with you here Gfplux

I sometimes feel it goes both ways and the government responds to pressure from the public/media. They brought in lockdown more quickly than they’d originally said because people were calling for it and other countries had brought it in. Now other countries are talking of easing up, naming dates, the media have started to question when that will happen here. Also the lockdown is due for review on Monday, after 3 weeks.

But saying that I definitely thought we were being prepared on Tuesday for the jump in numbers when an hour or so before the announcement the bbc was running a story saying not to read too much into the figures.

I wonder if the briefings are also planting ideas with discussions of the impact of economics on health. I do wonder if they have a get out strategy or not. There is so much that is unknown and so much has changed so quickly.

According to the Times today (looks like it comes from our deputy chief medical officer):

Number of patients in hospital -2% yesterday.
‘Steep’ fall in London but 11% rises in Yorkshire and the Norh East.
R (infectivity) has fallen to 0.6 since lockdown.
Encouraging trends.

Is that 2% decline in overall numbers in London hospitals larry; or 2% decline in growth in admissions?

George,

The below (I used a share token so should open) is the article it is from: ‘overall, number of patients in hospitals down by 2%’.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/coronavirus-death-toll-is-flattening-experts-believe-dk2nl0n87

Hancock speaking on Radio $ says admissions flattening.

In the UK, heath Secretary Matt Hancock said it was still too early to determine whether the peak of coronavirus infections in the UK had been reached.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “The good news is we have seen the number of hospital admissions starting – starting, I stress – to flatten out.

“You can see (from the government’s charts) that instead of going up exponentially, as they would have done if we had not taken the measures, that they are starting to come down and flatten.
“We haven’t seen that enough to have confidence to make changes.

“The answer to your question, about have we reached the peak, is nobody knows.”

Asked about the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, saying the UK was two weeks away from the peak, Hancock added: “Our judgment is that we are not there yet and that we haven’t seen a flattening enough to be able to say that we have reached the peak.”

this shows admissions falling in London but still incresing in NW and NE

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1eTKeK9vRxgw0KhvKxPCaDrfaHnxQP-n9TsLzsEymviY/htmlview#

I'm sorry if it's already been covered, and thank you to you all for your excellent analysis and comment on this thread.

I'm not good at understanding statistics and would appreciate some thoughts on the reading of obesity as an underlying health condition.

There is a table up thread from the CDC that BigChoc posted that showed high % of affected people being obese, while affected immunosuppressed people were in the 10% range.

Does this mean that obesity in itself is showing as an underlying factor alone?

I understand people who are obese are likely to have other health problems, and that large portions of the US and UK population are overweight or obese, but I can't work out if this is causation or correlation?

Yes I heard that Perdito

R (infectivity) has fallen to 0.6 since lockdown.

This is very encouraging indeed.

The UK ICU data which I can't be bothered to find showed that the number of ICU patients who were obese was in line with the relevant demographics (i.e. middle aged and elderly)

There was unsurprisingly excess in the morbidly obese category, but merely being a bit fat doesn't seem to be a big issue.

Obesity has been identified as a risk factor in France, where obesity rates are lower uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-france-confinement/obesity-is-major-covid-19-risk-factor-says-french-chief-epidemiologist-idUKKBN21Q1HR

Finding the latest UK ICU report takes about 1-2 minutes:

www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports

54% of patients with BMI under 25 get discharged from the critical care live. This compares to 46% for patients with BMI between 30 and 40 and 43% for patients with BMI over 40.

Dulang had already posted the link to the latest ICNARC audit report last night.

The sex factor is also consistent with the earlier reports with nearly 3 quarters of patients in critical care for covid-19 male. 72.5/27.5%

More than the more equally distributed group of earlier non-covid pneumonia patients used as a comparison.

Age seems to be the biggest critical care survival indicator so far, with death rates going up as you go up the age categories, which is unsurprising, and is the same as the flu figures (although the percentage of deaths for all age groups is much higher than with flu).

Sex and comorbid conditions make a difference as to whether you get to critical care or not, but impact less on survival/discharge rates.

With the recent alarming news about BAME NHS doctors and African Americans, I really think ICNARC need to start breaking the survival/death rates down by ethnic background (at the moment it’s recorded as an admissions percentage, but I can’t see it mentioned in the outcomes section?)

Again, all the ‘resolved’ cases data is based on shorter than average ICU stays, we should start seeing the more typical, longer stays in the next couple of weeks worth of reports.

With the recent alarming news about BAME NHS doctors and African Americans, I really think ICNARC need to start breaking the survival/death rates down by ethnic background (at the moment it’s recorded as an admissions percentage, but I can’t see it mentioned in the outcomes section?)

Good point. Has any other country done this, does anyone know?

Place marking!

I couldn’t be without these threads.

I've read several articles with that table, wintertravel
The only 50% compliance I see estimated is for self-isolation with symptoms

However when this 50% has been quoted on MN, it has been used to excuse carrying on some normal activities against govt advice

"R (infectivity) has fallen to 0.6 since lockdown."

That came from a theoretical model by iirc the London School of Tropical Medicine, which said treat with caution

Do we have some confirming evidence now ?