Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 5

[Barracker]

Welcome to thread 5 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
Google mobility stats

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

What is not very funny is seeing western Government particularly the Trump hinting that they always believed the original numbers so thought is was not necessary to act early.

I think western leaders wanted to believe the numbers. I also think the west was guilty of seeing it as a "Chinese" disease that, like SARS & swine flu, wouldn't really trouble Europe or the US.

To be fair, democracies often have this problem dealing with dictatorships:

They keep assuming a basic minimum level of morality that is just not there

The countries nearest China, who best know the communist regime,
slammed down the hatches and booted up their epidemic plans as soon as the first reports came out from Wuhan

• and those epidemic plans existed because they had previously suffered from China's whoopsies

WIth exponential growth, it is the earliest actions that count the most

Of course, the USA has the additional disadvantage that they elected a raving psychopathic narcissistic crook as their leader,
whose actions in this pandemic - and in everything else - are driven only by what he thinks will benefit him personally

The WHO issued an early statement (January?) didn’t it which seemed to have little effect.

For UK it feels like a case of see it to believe it.
Trump a liability.
Later countries such as NZ had the benefit of seeing other countries act and they still could act early.

With both the US carrier and Diamond Princess, I'm not sure what you mean by people 'are naturally immune'. Do you mean have had covid and short asymptomatic infection? It has been established that there are a lot of false negatives when testing and also that you need to test when people are actively producing antibodies. With the Diamond Princess, 3700 passengers and only 700 tested positive, despite the quarantine only being put in place 10 days after a passenger tested positive after leaving the ship meaning that Covid was being transmitted around the boat for probably almost 3 weeks. Probably just being pedantic and would welcome any virologists to correct me on the viral/immune response.

Spread of SARS-CoV-2 in the Icelandic Population

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2006100#.XpazU9O-qNA.twitter

Children under 10 years of age were less likely to receive a positive result than were persons 10 years of age or older, with percentages of 6.7% and 13.7%, respectively, for targeted testing;

in the population screening, no child under 10 years of age had a positive result, as compared with 0.8% of those 10 years of age or older.

Fewer females than males received positive results both in targeted testing (11.0% vs. 16.7%) and in population screening (0.6% vs. 0.9%).
......

CONCLUSIONS

In a population-based study in Iceland,
children under 10 years of age and females had a lower incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection than adolescents or adults and males.

The proportion of infected persons identified through population screening did not change substantially during the screening period, which was consistent with a beneficial effect of containment efforts.

Long time lurker on these threads, thank you to everyone who contributes

I found this article interesting. Former pandemic advisor to US government suggests that rather than test everyone with symptoms, we assume they have CV19 and use the tests to try to find the asymptomatic cases in the community. Isolate both groups to really stop the spread.

I have read elsewhere that up to 50% of cases in China were asymptomatic but spreading.

Also I have read several times that people ending up hospitalised had had negative tests before testing positive so they were potentially spreading before the positive test.

This approach seems really sensible to me but I have zero scientific training so interested in others opinions

www.bbc.com/news/52311388

""I'm not sure what you mean by people 'are naturally immune"

What's next I was thinking of examples like this
(I certainly will be relying on effective treatment and vaccination asap, not hoping I have v lucky genes or whatever)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InnateresistancetoHIV

A small proportion of humans show partial or apparently complete inborn resistance to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.[1]

The main mechanism is a mutation of the gene encoding CCR5, which acts as a co-receptor for HIV.

It is estimated that the proportion of people with some form of resistance to HIV is under 10%

The figures from those ships, particularly navy ships where people are crammed together in close quarters for weeks,
reminded me of the study on sex workers who slept with large numbers of clients who had HIV, but never caught it themselves

It would be very important to know which people are much less likely to catch COVID, independently of their behaviour / lifestyle / environment

Eveidence is that small children are among this group

• not helpful when choosing frontline NHS staff, but important when e.g. deciding early vaccination priorities, or reopening schools

Also important to know if this % among adults is ZERO or 10 or even higher, when assessing the risks and means of restarting the ecomomy

@randomnewname I watched the video and it makes a lot of sense re ventilators not working v well and links to altitude sickness treatment - the symptoms are bang on with my friends daughter.

I'm going to read up a bit more!

At some level if you are exposed to the virus, depending on how efficient your immune system is you will have some kind of response to it. If you don't react to it ie have some form of immune response then surely the virus will just replicate. It may be that the tests aren't sensitive enough to pick up early immune responses? There are numerous other virus eg EBV which are asymptomatic in early years eg .journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1004746

re those with resistance to HIV, I have not read any paper suggesting that it replicates in later years

Matt Hancock said yesterday that many deaths that aren't in hospital occur at home. He didn't say nursing homes he said 'at home'. This was at the Health briefing that was shown on Sky/BBC news.

I don't know why, if there is more than enough hospital capacity, these poor people weren't admitted. Did anyone see him say this, and was it expanded on? I missed some of it due to a phone call. Thank you.

Even a response delayed a couple of years in some % of adults would be just as important for the current emergency,
until a vaccine can be found to enable herd immunity

Are there any statistics on deaths at home for this period and the corresponding period in 2019 ?

www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=230110#

This again seems to back up the 'oxygen first' theory.

If small children are resistant, what happens as they grow up to make them less resistant? Puberty? Testosterone seems to be involved somewhere, does it weaken the immune system or have I made that up? Women also produce T, though far less than men.

I think “at home” means wherever domiciled, whether their own home or in a nursing home.

All virus replicate, its how they work. I didn't mean in later years - I meant in terms of the infective process. Apologies if not clear.

Innate resistance still requires an immune response: this is a more relevant paper.www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6959104/

@borntobequiet, thank you that makes sense.

For me, all that is of interest in this crisis is whether such people are very unlikely to catch the disease
and / or very unlikely to pass it on

In the case of those with partial / full immunity to HIV, the study showed this was because of CCR5 deletion and HIV uses CCR5 as a co-receptor to enter and infect host cells

In that case, how would the HIV be able to multiply ?

Probably already posted but the ICNARC weekly report was updated yesterday

Those ICNARC figures are v useful for ICU, but I wish we had similar data for all hospital COVID admissions

Anyone know ehere these are ?

It would be useful to know how many cases were serious enough not to be treated at home - with stats for age and sex etc -
and how many of those then proceed to ICU

I am presuming that the age is lower for total COVID admissions compared to those in ICU,
but I want data and especially to quantify the % of the young and middle-aged hospitalised

Can anyone see behind the pay wall for the times article about 10% of italians having antobodies?
Have they tested confirmed cases to check for antibodies or the wider population?

Re Trump only NY and NJ are doing worse than the UK from what I can see, and both are completely solid Democrat states with no influence of Republicans at state level.

Otherwise there is Michigan which is a swing state currently swinging towards the Dems including the Governor, Massachusetts and Connecticut both cast iron rock solid Democrat, and Louisiana,which has a Democrat governor but is otherwise Republican.

So 6 out of 6 states with bad covid-19 death totals have Democrat governors. To what extent is this the response to this the responsibility of the state and to what extent the federal government?

Also about that ICNARC data, is that information just for a week or is it cumulative totals from the beginning?