Something doesn't add up to me

[Greysparkles]

If the virus is as contagious as claimed by some, as in you'll catch it from sitting on the same patch of grass someone else has, or just walking through where someone sneezed earlier.

Why haven't more of us got it??

"For most people (certainly the middle-class, mumsnet-using, computer and wifi owning crowd) this is an inconvenience not a hardship."

You're right that we're only a few weeks in so shouldn't be talking about lifting lockdown or breaking the rules at the moment.
However, being on house arrest 23 out of 24 hours a day if you don't have a garden, not speaking to anyone face-to-face for months if you live alone, is more than an inconvenience. It's definitely a mental health risk, even if you don't consider it a hardship.

"Surely if that was true there would be many more NHS workers dead. "

In one of the hospitals in northern Italy, every medic there was infected.

"if surgical masks are sufficient to protect NHS staff giving personal care to covid patients , why can’t we all go about our daily business wearing surgical masks?"

Because the proper masks aren't available. Those that are being manufactured are being given to frontline health workers.
In some countries, people do wear these masks. Compulsory even in some countries in Europe now.

"The 10,000 number is used to scare people because it adds up to a big number all in one go. What the government fails to add is that even with a severe and early lockdown, those 10,000 people may well have died anyway, just not all at once." An epidemiologist (think from Oxford or Cambridge) very early on said that the death rate for the elderly (can't recall if it was just the over 80s) entirely mapped what you would expect normally in that age-group.

I'm not sure I made myself very clear upthread. So would being super fit make your immune system so robust you'd be more at risk of dying from the cytokine storm effect?

Why is so very little still known about it?

Either Science is far less incredible than we are usually led to believe. Or something fishy is going on here.

What's with the 'fishy' it's new that's why not much is known about it fhs!

The science on this has been incredible so far but virus are so big and wide ranging they act in many different ways and a lot of experiments need time
Take the reinfection rumour going around data on that is patchy

Let’s look at Boris Johnson he had a negative test now I wouldn’t be surprised if he (if they tested again) got a positive result because the negative test was a false one or didn’t pick up enough in sample

But without time no one can say. What we know about measles/chicken pox etc comes from years of research

Take Smallpox the first steps to eradicate it we’re in 1796. The WHO started in force in 1959. It was finally declared defeated in 1979.

We are trying to do the same now in 12-18 months if we do so it was be an incredible scientific feat. So we have to accept that within that we will have to learn how to live with it for awhile

feodora We have been taking a lot of precautions, some without a lot of proof they are necessary,
but slipstream behaviour is at least an existing field of knowledge

I expected the study to be controversial

• anything is that might cause exercisers to consider others more ! -

and have read the many criticisms, some informed and some not at all.

However, as someone who has worked in the computational fluid dynamics field,
I have been keeping a much greater distance from fast runners and cyclists than 2m, ever since social distancing started.

This study just added to my caution

"An epidemiologist (think from Oxford or Cambridge) very early on said that the death rate for the elderly (can't recall if it was just the over 80s) entirely mapped what you would expect normally in that age-group."

That dubious remark has been widely misused to write off the dead as just one of those things
by those who want to restart the economy right away and get on with enjoying their normal lives

The great majority of the dead were not terminally ill

A high number of extra deaths within a few weeks has far more disruptive consequences than the same number of extra deaths spread out over a couple of years

People need to see it from the point of view of avoiding contact with other people as much as possible rather than trying to exercise their 'rights'.
I have a friend that was using her daily exercise to go to the local shop and this kept her life almost normal and she was as proud as fuck about this except.....she was risking the life of the shop keeper and his staff as well as herself. She thought it was a risk worth taking without thinking about anyone but herself. Shopkeeper has pointed this out to her in no uncertain terms. I had told her this already and also that by her interacting in the shop on an almost daily basis was also exposing her a damn sight more than a shop once a fortnight in Morrisons.
Finally the penny has dropped for her! It took the bloody shop owner to have a go as she wouldn't listen to me !
This sort of thing is making me re-assess a lot of my friendships. My DH's witness at our wedding has spent his Easter 240 miles away from his home with his elderly mother and I am done with him on SM and real life.
Instead of thinking about your rights, think about your health and that of others. The Govt. have made it as simple as they can and yet still people are being as thick as shit about this virus.

COVID Deaths

ONS (Office of National Statistics) says
total number of deaths in UK in week ending 3 April was 6,082 more than the average for that time of year.

Extra deaths in just 1 week

One in five of all deaths recorded that week referred to COVID19 in the certificate.

Note: these are ALL deaths - not just those in hospitals, which are the headline figures we see each day

According to ONS, 46.6% of all London deaths mentioned COVID on the certificate
so as at least a factor

www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/

Shows the death statistics. You can break it down into age.

8 deaths out of 10261 (this is just England) were under 19 so 0.08%. 91% are over 60 and 50% over 80.

Care homes stats are just going to bring those percentages up

NewModelArmy I wonder if the choice of drug treatment will end up depending on the patient? Several being trialled are immunosuppressants. These could be appropriate for those with overly strong immune systems, and a different drug for others?

Gwenhwyfar Yes it will be much more bearable for those living in a large home with a garden. Lots of housebound people have to live in small flats with no outside space on a permanent basis. No wonder mental poor health goes together so often with physical ill health. Hopefully society might have more empathy for their plight after all this? Could we finally see improved mental health provision?

Iceland who found that half of the cases were asymptomatic and 7 died out of 1600 - also about 0.4%.

No, half of cases detected by the biomedical research company who are ONLY testing people with no serious symptoms. Not half of all cases detected. Most cases are diagnosed by the healthcare system, which is how you get tested if you're actually ill.

And a PP was quite right to say that many of those would have gone on to develop symptoms - a family in our local community was found positive by the research company and were really surprised. They had been caught early and most of them did later become ill, with different degrees of severity.

Sadly 8 have now died in Iceland.

Look at this graph. Blue cases were diagnosed by the healthcare system. Orange cases were diagnosed by the research company. You can see that 50% of the orange cases is a tiny percentage of the overall.

The foreign media have always published a lot of absolute rubbish about Iceland and it seems they don't see any reason to stop now.

Yes it's not half of the cases, it's half of the positive tests in a random sample test

Admittedly adding them together as shown in the graph may not be very representative either. They're two different data sets

One guest had it, he was a member of the wedding party so met everyone there. Every single other guest (85 people) later tested positive from exposure to that one person.

Wow. Every single person. That's very contagious. I would have thought that it would have been a bit random e.g. some people touching their faces after he coughed on them, but not all of them doing that.

@Gwenhwyfar - this is not strictly accurate. There were 65 wedding guests. Not all developed cv. They dispersed after the wedding and caused the Banff cluster in NZ - see my earlier post.

None of the bar staff or waiters at the wedding caught cv.

That's very easy to explain. There's a tipping point, before which the cases just look like random illnesses. This virus has been around since November at least, so there will have been people here and there feeling unwell, getting coughs and a small number will have died. A lot of the people who died will be older and very unwell people so the assumption would be that the flu got them. It was only when Wuhan raised the alarm that people started joining the dots. Eventually the number of people infected was so great that inevitably the number dying also increased, it's a matter of sheer quantity.

@TheDailyCarbuncle - but then why didn't the umber of cases go up much faster from January? it was mid-March when we had the first recorded deaths in the UK. If covid-19 was really here from mid-January you'd expect it to have started spreading then, not waited until March...

Hmm, don't you have to add them together to get an overall representation of how the nation has been affected, to the best of our knowledge? I don't know anything about that kind of thing, I just read it as best I can based on what I know about the two testing programmes! Would be very interested to hear insights from people who know more about statistics.

It's more that using the cumulative total to imply a proportion of asymptomatic cases isn't accurate. This is because the two groups have been sampled in different ways.

So group 1 - sampled by the health service. I'm not sure what the Icelandic criteria for testing is, do you know?

Group 2- a random population sample.

Adding one and two doesn't tell you the total number of cases, it tells you the total number of diagnoses but you can't add the two together and then say that means (asymptomatic/total) is the true asymptomatic percentage.

Looking at it a different way. The point of random sampling is to try and gauge the level of infection in the whole population

So, if I've got a group of 1000 and I randomly choose 100 of those to test. I get 10 positives, 5 asymptomatic and 5 with symptoms. That would imply that in the total population the numbers would be 100/50/50.

Then you have targeted testing. This is specifically looking for people with symptoms, or people believed to have exposure if contact testing is in place.

Unless your targeted testing is excellent you'd expect it to get lower results.

If the two are taking place in the same population then you'd expect an overlap - so the random sample would randomly choose some people also tested in the targeted testing. This needs to be considered and allowed for in the study analysis

Adding one and two doesn't tell you the total number of cases, it tells you the total number of diagnoses but you can't add the two together and then say that means (asymptomatic/total) is the true asymptomatic percentage.

Thanks. OK so I should draw a distinction between cases and diagnoses?

I think the data they are giving us doesn't actually tell us anything about the number of cases that are truly asymptomatic from start to finish.

I was using cases to mean people with it, vs diagnosed as having a positive test. Not official language but made sense

I think they would need to do follow ups to get a picture of true asymptomatic cases. Also need to know how they dealt with selected sample cases who were known positive before hand - if they were excluded then it biases the results at a population level.

If the two are taking place in the same population then you'd expect an overlap

I don't think this is happening because as I understand it, if you are ill enough to qualify for targeted testing, you are not allowed to book an appointment with deCODE because you should be in quarantine. Does that make sense?

I thought the sample was chosen by the company (decode) but i haven't looked in detail.

If they chose a sample and invited people, and people replied saying "can't I've got covid" then they should have been put in the positive/symptomatic category to get a population level analysis.

If they excluded positive symptomatic they'd skew the results

If people self selected it's a different ball game

Does that make sense?

Initially it was volunteers. Then they did a random sample, not sure if they excluded people unable to attend due to illness. Now it's volunteers again! So it's been a bit mixed up.

They have a red warning on the website where you book an appointment saying you mustn't come if you are supposed to be in quarantine.