Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 7

[Barracker]

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.

Yes it is Whats; this is interesting. We won't know till people are tested etc. I do believe there were a number of other particularly nasty bugs about this winter you though. Lots of staff off ill in my school before Xmas with a nasty cough virus.

Coronavirus doctor's diary: The strange case of the choir that coughed in January www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52589449

The virus isn’t playing by the rules. It has hit densely packed cities and BAME here but not densely packed African cities, slums in India and Latin America. Even similar places like the Dominican Republic and Haiti have been hit differently. Even allowing for different reporting and Governments covering up/ being rubbish at adding up there are huge problems with trying to make sense of these datasets.

Would all of those densely packed African cities not have much younger populations though?

I shared this slide earlier on, it’s from Chris Whitty’s Gresham College lecture showing the different age distribution in different regions.

Here's what Boris has just posted on Twitter:
mobile.twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1259440331763978240?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

Given the exponential relationship between age and risk of death, how much of the difference can be explained by differences in age profile? BAME might then perhaps either being a factor on its own OR because they are more likely to work in specific professions such as medicine or transport workers OR because some underlying conditions are more common in people of specific ethnicities?

Are these underlying conditions equally common in people of those ethnicities worldwide, or specifically in the populations in some countries?

Apparently all of the devolved nations have rejected the Stay alert message, and are sticking with Stay at home instead.

Nicola Sturgeon just gave the Scottish daily press conference, and clearly stated that it wasn't being adopted in Scotland and that the important thing to do remained to stay at home. One of the comments on Twitter during the press conference was 'Stay in yir hoose ya bams' 😄.

I wonder if the vitamin D link explains why BAME communities have been hit harder here than in other countries and cities closer to the equator. Just a thought and I guess we won’t know for a long time why there are such discrepancies.

The vit d fits pretty much every reason why countries are beig affected differently disregarding gov actions

Bame
The geographic nature so lombary /capital cities where the air pollution is worse the citizens lungs are damaged plus it stops vit d from the sun too.
Southern hemisphere hardly touched
Kawasaki in children of black ethnicity
Sweden isnt doing bacly despite not locking down but they eat cod liver oil and maybe fortify food plus air polution is lowe r across all scandinavia.
Belgium and NL are also bad for air pollution.
Obesity affects it
And alcohol (posdibly why more women than men)
And of course the icu studies where the patientx are all deficient.

Do more germans take suppliments or fortify their food. Their air pollution wasnt that bad.

@delatron I don't understand why there's not more research into this. It comes up again and again.

I think they need a list of risk factors for vit d deficiency.
with prescriptions for say care home residents.

Control the virus is a shit message though isn't it?

We may be able to help control the spread of it but we can't control 'the virus' itself

Of course you can.

Just tell Coronavirus to stay on its lead and shout at it a lot if it misbehaves.

Your kidneys cannot convert vitamin D to its active form. As people age, their kidneys are less able to convert vitamin D to its active form, thus increasing their risk of vitamin D deficiency.

Your digestive tract cannot adequately absorb vitamin D. Certain medical problems, including Crohn's disease, cystic fibrosis, and celiac disease, can affect your intestine's ability to absorb vitamin D from the food you eat.

You are obese. Vitamin D is extracted from the blood by fat cells, altering its release into the circulation. People with a body mass index of 30 or greater often have low blood levels of vitamin D.

🤣 @RedToothBrush

I know it's semantics but it's making me unreasonably cross

I know @Strangerthanstrange. We really need more research on this asap.

If this virus is going to be around for a while and if upping levels of vitamin D in at risk groups would help then it could save lives.

Brazil and Mexico have suffered quite badly which causes a problem with the temperature or Vitamin D theories.

@Keepdistance it does all link back to Vitamin D doesn’t it? Ethnicity, age and obesity affects levels.

There was a discussion on Ecuador, they have been hit badly and despite being close to the equator they have a vitamin D deficiency problem as a nation.

Wonder if Brazil/Mexico do too. Will investigate!

The mean vitamin D concentration among the Brazilian population between 2000 and 2017 of 67.65 nmol/L (95% CI: 65.91, 69.38 nmol/L).The prevalences of vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency were 28.16% (95% CI: 23.90, 32.40) and 45.26% (95% CI: 35.82, 54.71), respectively, for the Brazilian population. The highest prevalence of deficiency were observed in the southern and southeastern regions and the highest occurrence of vitamin D insufficiency was among the populations of the southeastern and northeastern regions. Finally, there are high prevalence of inadequate vitamin D concentrations among the population, regardless of age group in Brazil. The development of vitamin D food fortification policies in needs to be cautious and carefully planned.

A quick google tells me yes, Brazil has a vitamin D deficiency problem too. Off to research!

Recently, we discovered that the vitamin D receptor (VDR) is induced in T cells by progesterone. This finding connects the function of progesterone to that of vit. D and suggests that the two steroid hormones cooperate with each other for sequential and effective regulation of the immune system. Potential implications of the regulation in health and disease are discussed.

I just saw finland do fortify but so do usa and canada. (,it is in marg here but i dont have margarine). I think they had added it to milk

If its true we need to move to containment and delay. There is a real possibility we can decrease deaths by fortifying. Sunlight and supplements. But it seems to that at least a few months
And injections maybe for eldrly and nhs.

Why can't the government spend millions on this sort of research? Would the progesterone link also explain the male/female stats? And what about children?

The virus isn’t playing by the rules. It has hit densely packed cities and BAME here but not densely packed African cities, slums in India and Latin America.

It hasn't hit BAME here per se - the raw death rate is lower among the Chinese population and slightly higher among other Asians. The death rate only becomes higher when you ignore the population profile (much younger for all non-white BME populations than the white British/Irish )

The death rate, from, say tuberculosis is higher in Pakistan, India AND Bangladesh than it is here from covid-19 among those same populations.

Add in a whole host of other nasty diseases which kill millions of almost entirely non-white people across the world annual disease and you'll realise that covid-19 is a rich man's (yes, men) disease.

Yes, it's killing people in developing countries, but most developing countries have a higher mortality burden from road accidents. Covid-19 is not even a blip on their radar really.

More people will die in South Africa this year from AIDS than will die in the UK from covid-19, and the great majority of the latter were people were going to die in the next year or two anyway.

The Covid-19 global panic is caused by:

Cruise ships full of very old people dying
The oldest region in the world's second oldest country (by age) having lots of old people dying.in horrific scenes.

But really it is nothing and is unlikely to ever be nothing to countries that with live death on a daily basis. In most of the world people bury their own family members. Meeting an untimely end from essentially preventable illness is normal. Covid-19 is what happens when the global norm starts affecting rich countries who thought they had conquered the grave.