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.

I see Belgium has jumped to the top of the Worldometer table for deaths per million population (excluding the tiny countries). I presume that is because they have included all deaths. Have France now caught up with all the outside hospital deaths or have they included only some? And presumably Italy have never included deaths outside hospital in their figures.

I expect the totals will only be known in a year or more when all the expected vs actuals are added up.

And presumably Italy have never included deaths outside hospital in their figures

I don't know the answer to that question. But I can tell you that Italy took everyone into hospital with symptoms, which is why they got so overwhelmed. Italy is not a big believer in non-treatment, so I don't think there will be many deaths outside hospital anyway. I could be wrong, but this is anecdotal from my Italian roots.

@conveniencestore why is the death rate in Wales 50% lower than in England? Is it because of less pressure on beds/ventilators?

I'm not sure, although I am beginning to think that since Wales may be behind England in terms of spread of infection, and many areas of England are behind London, again in terms of spread- that Wales locking down albeit on the 23rd March, have locked down in relative terms, earlier than some areas in England?

The hospitals in Wales are under crippling pressure from all angles and the demographics here, esp in the South Wales region, in terms of general health, are worse than UK average.

I put a graph in my spreadsheet and some estimates for total deaths based on first 1, 2, 3 days of reports

gofile.io/?c=icTk1X

Graph also attached. The green line is my estimate, which for yesterday is necessarily very rough due to only 1 day's data, however the data show the spike.

@NewAccountForCorona - am not sure whether France has totally caught up with adding their care home figures yet, but i think/hope so. i keep thinking they have and then big numbers get added again. It seems that maybe the backlog has gone in but the numbers are just big everyday. It is now a more than 50 percent of the figures.
Hospital more than 10,000 deaths
Care homes more than 6,000

@NewAccountForCorona

Belgium includes all deaths from Corona and those where CV19 is suspected. For example, today 417 new deaths were reported. 127 of these were hospital deaths; 289 were reported in residential care homes. 31% of the people who died in care homes were confirmed cases.

Around half of the total number of deaths in BE occurred in hospital according to today's briefing.

They have extended testing to residential care centres - 20% of those tested in Flanders have tested positive for CV19. It seems rampant in care homes and this is contributing to the high mortality and infection levels in Belgium.

I put on another thread this morning- Italy initially wasn't counting deaths outside hospital and as we all know from the stories coming out of Bergamo, they were triaging to see who would get a ventilator, and were not testing post mortem.
As the virus is now running rampage through carehomes, (the carehome "scandal" is now invariably the lead story on the news bulletins) and a govt and various regional enquiries have been launched with crime files opened on several carehomes, post mortem testing is now being done and so the figures are included. But I can't find when they began to be.
What I did also find was that initially also, any death where Covid was present was reported as a Covid death whether or not it was a "with" or an "of".

There is a study from Ireland and one from Switzerland both saying that 50% of their Covid related deaths happened in care homes.

The numbers are horrific: 68% of all deaths in one region took place in carehomes, in Verona 1 in 3 deaths were in carehomes. Etc etc.
In my province we have the highest number of infections in the region I live in. Most of which are in two carehomes. My DH knows a nurse in one of them who said 3-4 weeks ago they were going to be decimated.
Maybe not for this thread, but just as many other myths about Italy need busting, so does the "looking after gran" one. For every Italian granny living with her grown up children, there's probably a dozen in a carehome run by nuns (or worse) or living home alone, with a "badante" (poorly paid generally Eastern European or south American women who live in and do what the families can't, or won't)

It seems all of Europe (even Germany) are experiencing high death rates in care homes, pretty much regardless of their lockdown protocols, or PPE or any other extenuating circumstances. I repeatedly come back to my musings, that this virus seems to be pretty consistent in it's outcome, whatever governments do, or do not do.

Japan seems to be in trouble now too, another member of the G7, Asking the public for raincoats for PPE is a pretty bad place to be.

@conveniencestore
why is the death rate in Wales 50% lower than in England? Is it because of less pressure on beds/ventilators?

I don’t believe so... There is no ventilator shortage at present I believe. It’s probably a result of the virus transmission starting earlier in parts of England. Lockdown was applied to us all at the same time, meaning Wales didn’t have a chance to “catch-up”. All talk about one place being behind or ahead of another no longer applies - it was only relevant pre-lockdown.

The are wildly different outcomes depending on what governments do.

@LilMissRe and @Derbygerbil
You might be right about Wales having much lower death rate due to being further behind, but a couple of weeks ago Gwent was the second worst affected area in the UK after London. Now it is Birmingham, I think. So figures for Wales should not be so significantly different. Did Wales have better PPE? I guess NHS Wales has different procurement and supply to NHS England?

Thanks so much for all the interesting info. Placemarking :)

Shoots fruit That graph is I was going to say very graphic 🙄---- very clear and frankly disturbing

Gwent was very badly hit, I think that the lack of great transport links might have been a positive factor for mid and north Wales? Welsh communities are quite well connected socially, I'd imagine that as soon as things got bad in Gwent most of the rest of the country started rigidly following social distancing.

Thanks for all the perspectives from the various countries. It seems that, looking back, the people who died in hospitals in most countries may be just the tip of the iceberg everywhere

I noticed east is rising in cases.

Interesting graph with the death rates per day - but why the big dip on 31st March? I thought that would get filled in by reporting lag from later days or something.

the dip on 31 March has been discussed, and essentially the conclusion is 'impossible'. Must be some sort of clerical error.

The NHS year runs from April to March so it may be linked to “closing the accounts” for the year end.

ok thanks, I haven't been reading all these threads as there's so much to keep up with! It did seem like quite an outlier

Has everyone seen the Dutch antibody data? They’ve been testing blood donors’ blood for antibodies. Only 3% have them.

@ChipotleBlessing I hope that’s not ‘the elephant in the room’ with all this. In other words it’s not been that the ‘immunity’ tests are not sensitive enough or faulty.

I don’t think it necessarily says anything about the quality of the antibody tests. It’s more likely that it means the optimistic hopes of very widespread asymptomatic community transmission - meaning we could move out of lockdown relatively quickly - are unfounded.