Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 7

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Welcome to thread 7 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.

That's awful

This is very sad:

Coronavirus: Second death at Skye care home with 57 cases www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-52529893

Almost all of the residents are infected & a high proportion of staff.

Skye is such a remote area & there isn't a large hospital for miles.

Very, very sad.

Alberto Nardelli@AlbertoNardelli

Italian stats authority has published a report on excess mortality in March
< we will need April too, for a fuller picture >

https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/242149

Deaths in March increased +49.4% compared to March 2015-2019 average
but with significant regional differences:

+94.9% in the north, where COVID-19 hit hardest,
+2% in the south

The increase is particularly dramatic in the worse affected areas of the country:
Bergamo (+568%),
Cremona (391%),
Lodi (371%),
Brescia (291%),
Piacenza (264%),
Parma (208%),
Lecco (174%),
Pavia (133%),
Mantova (122%),
Pesaro & Urbino (120%)

The report notes that the first local/community case was reported in Lombardy on Feb 20
and with the exception of the first three imported COVID-19 cases at the end of Jan 2020,
the epidemic was mostly driven by local transmission

The full report, which includes data for age groups, gender and geography, can be found here

https://www.istat.it/it/files//2020/05/RapportoIstatt_ISS.pdf

Should add:
on non COVID-19 excess deaths, stats authority puts forward 3 hypothesises:

.non-tested people;

indirect effect of the virus (eg organ dysfunction as a consequence of viral infection);

mortality not directly related to the virus but, for example, to health sys capacity

Hmm, not sure about the staff but I presume the residents would not likely be hospitalised in any location?

Statistically, 3 Russian doctors all falling out of windows after treating COVID patients must have v low probability

Even lower probability that they all fall out of windows within a 10-day period

No such side effects of COVID noted for medical staff in the West

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/russia-doctors-coronavirus

Alexander Shulepov, a doctor at an ambulance unit in Russia’s western Voronezh region, complained in an April 22 post on social media about shortages of medical supplies and being forced to work despite testing positive for COVID-19.

Ten days later, he fell from a hospital window under mysterious circumstances, local media reportedd_,
making him the third Russian doctor treating coronavirus patients to suffer a similar fate in just the past 10 days.

Hospitalisation doesn't have to mean ventilators, mainly O2
and tests for any non-COVID infections that hitched a ride - and can usually be treated

So some residents might well benefit from hospitalisations, especially the formerly more active ones

I’ve linked an article about Bergamo.

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.euronews.com/amp/2020/04/28/coronavirus-more-than-a-third-of-people-in-italy-s-covid-19-epicentre-estimated-to-have-ha

Assuming the numbers are correct, I calculate the CFR to be 1.55%, a shockingly high figure. The fact it’s based on actual deaths gives this added credence.

BCF ,shoots et al. Can you explain the significance of this and will the low death rate be different in say Lombardy/London?

Apparently one in five infections occurs without noticeable symptoms suggests that infected persons who secrete virus and can infect others cannot be reliably identified on the basis of recognizable symptoms of the disease,” says Prof. Dr. Martin Exner, head of the Institute for Hygiene and Public Health and co-author of the study. This confirms the importance of general rules of distance and hygiene in the corona pandemic. "Every supposedly healthy person we encounter can unknowingly carry the virus. We must be aware of this and act accordingly," says the hygiene expert.
Studies of multi-person households showed that the risk of infecting another person was surprisingly low. “The infection rate in children, adults and elderly is very similar and is apparently not dependent on age,” says Prof. Streeck. There are also no significant differences between genders.

www.uni-bonn.de/news/111-2020

Today's stats for Germany:

Several groups are tabulated here wrt hospitalisation or deaths, staff or clients

Care homes are grouped together. Looks like everyone in an institution, so not just elderly but also disabled, homeless etc even prisons

Care home hospitalisation rate looks similar enough to the overall hospitalisation rate of 18% for all confirmed cases
The number of care home residents who died is nearly as high as the number hospitalised - but a (small) majority of people recovered

The median age of those who died was 82, 56% men, % women

• which for that age group shows an even higher risk for the male sex than the actual numbers.

Eek glitter. Opening schools up would make absolutely no sense then.for several reasons!

The Russian doctors make me think of the Cipriani Five. One of them apparently jumped out of a window too after problems with business deals in Russia. The other 4 met similar unfortunate ends...

Public Health England have are starting a more detailed analysis of COVID cases to look at risk factors such as ethnicity.
www.gov.uk/government/news/review-into-factors-impacting-health-outcomes-from-covid-19

BigChocFrenzy, thank you for all your contributions here. I go straight to your posts to catch up quickly if behind. Always relevant, always clear. Thanks

If we consider under-reporting, it's apparent over 1/3 of older deaths are not reported as covid-19. When the 90+ excess deaths, mostly in care homes, are included, the death rate exceeds 1% of all adult males aged 90+ and is likely to reach 2%+. However, as most 90+ yo are women, the numbers of under-reports are much higher in absolute terms for women.

It follows that the IFR of 10%+ for Italy for ages 90+ are rather misleading in that if 70% are women, and the female risk is somewhere over half the male risk that the IFR will be over 15% for men in this age group.

Thank you, edujaded

Further on those March statistics from Italy:

https://www.istat.it/it/archivio/242149

https://t.co/0DT5ltUaJz?

John Burn-Murdoch@jburnmurdoch (FT)

fresh data from Italian stats agency @istat_en give the first full picture of Italy’s excess deaths.

25,000 excess deaths in March alone.
When April’s data land this will rise.

Clear geographical pattern
Regions sorted North to South here; death tolls far higher up North

Covid outbreaks are local, not national.
< as we have discussed - and in the Uk too <

Lombardy had a brutal month;
Calabria virtually untouched.

This is why lockdowns matter:

No lockdown ➡️ asymptomatic people keep travelling ➡️ Calabria is another Lombardy

As with Wuhan, lockdown confines the worst to one or few regionsregions

squashedflybiscuit I think it’s established that the rate of infection in children is similar to adults, however whether they transmit it in the same way is less so. Hence Switzerland allowing grandparents to hug grandchildren and Denmark (iirc) reopening schools. Other countries are so far being more cautious with this theory.

imo, risks for particular sex / age groups are clearer when normalised by population in each group

A person cannot alter their age or sex, so given that they are e.g. an 85-year-old woman, it would make it easier to assess risk

Dr Drossen, the most well-known COVID virologist in Germany,
is among several scientists here who have said that the theory is unproven about children being significantly less able to infect than adults.

Hence policy won't be changed by this, until there is considerably more evidence

That is:
risks for male / female at each age group are clearer when deaths or hospitalisations are normalised by the number of males / females in that age group

Grim FEMA Predictions from the US
but difficult to assess without seeing the document and e.g. the assumptions within the model

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/04/us/coronavirus-live-updates.html?

As President Trump presses for states to reopen their economies, his administration is privately projecting a steady rise in the number of coronavirus cases and deaths over the next several weeks.

The daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, according to an internal document obtained by The New York Times, nearly double the current number of about 1,750.

The projections, based on government modeling pulled together in chart form by the Federal Emergency Management Agency,
forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.

@BigChocFrenzy

Indeed... very grim. I’d be interested to know their assumptions. I very much hope they are wrong.

I cannot see the article without giving my e mail and being inundated with yet more random marketing e mails.

How can the case rate go up by a factor of 8, though, and the death rate by lower than a factor of 2 (assuming not just time lag, producing far more deaths later..)?

@larrygrylls

It must be due to lag. Given the 3-4 week gap between infection and death, it would be more questionable if infections and deaths did increase in tandem.

US forecasts of Covid deaths haven’t had a good track record to date. Only 3 weeks ago, University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) forecast that total US deaths would be 68,000 by August (albeit with a large margin or error) - it is already at 70,000. I’m sincerely hoping the FEMA model is wrong too in the other direction. It must be assuming that decent social distancing can’t be maintained as the US lifts it’s lockdowns.

Further update from the Germany study suggesting more people have been infected than first thought.
www.uni-bonn.de/news/111-2020