Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 8

[Barracker]

Welcome to thread 8 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.

newaccount As posted, I think the comparatively low number of deaths has made most people here think that the risks are now worth taking,
to follow Sweden

Lockdown had high support, but there seems a general feeling that phase has passed and we must now live with whatever happens

That is because a huge chunk of the hospitality / leisure sector will be insolvent if they can't reopen soon, despite govt financial support.
That's millions of small businesses and self-employed going bust
and regular employees concerned about their jobs and bonuses

German GDP is predicted to fall by 6% in 2020 - much like the UK -
and big business interests are pushing for a strategy of making the recession / depression "V-shaped",
i.e. quick bounceback

Also a particular German pressure, imo,
is that wages for many employees include an automatic bonus of 1-2 months standard pay,
but this can be stopped at critical commercial need - which this will soon become for even large businesses.

As in the UK, people "taking the risks" have twigged that they are actually at v v low risk - and that it's people in care homes who are at high risk

Antibidy Tests

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/10/can-antibody-testing-deliver-on-promises-to-lift-the-lockdown

For a test to be usable, the specificity should be close to 100%.

If, for example, 5% of the population have had Covid-19,
a test with only 90% specificity would mistakenly assess 95 people in a sample of 1000 individuals as having had the virus,

ie nearly 70% of the positive results would be false.
........
Immunity to pathogens is a spectrum ranging from
the varicella-zoster virus (which causes chicken pox) – against which antibodies confer lifelong protection –
to HIV, where infected individuals produce large amounts of non-neutralising antibodies that do nothing to clear the disease.
....
“The expectation is that there’s at least partial, short-term immunity,
but we don’t know that for sure and

we don’t know if mildly infected patients have any form of immunity,”
says Theel. (Mayo Climic, USA)

“For people that have had a short disease duration, it could be that their body killed off the virus quickly before there was time to mount an antibody response.”

Has anyone seen any info on the relative risks to children. I found this quote from David Spiegelhater,

As an example, Sir David said there are 10 million children under the age of 15 in England and Wales, and, up to April 24, there had been two deaths in this age group.

"This is the tiniest risk you could ever think of, so I do think that when people start talking about protecting our children, this is a bit of a delusion," he said.

"Obviously, I'm talking about risks to the individual themselves, we have to think about the potential for spreading the virus, and that's absolutely vital. But when we talk about personal risk, for young people, it's staggeringly low.”

I also found the GB death under 16 from road traffic accidents in 2018, which is 48. Different geographical area and different time frames, but it really puts all the hysterical facebook shit I've been reading about schools going back into perspective.

Does anyone know of anything online which is properly written and thoroughly researched? I'm supposed to be working from home and homeschoolong two primary kids, so can't look into it as thoroughly as I'd like.

Thanks Barracker

When we talk about schools it's not necessarily about the risk to kids (although we know nothing about long term damage such as lung scarring and male infertility) it's also the huge amount of adults needed to run schools, and deliver the kids to school. Also adolescents spreading it...

I'd have thought that the biggest risk with regards to school opening is the potential for children to spread the virus and increase the R value generally in the population, especially with the very limited amount of social distancing they are able to do in schools. When Reception go back, they won't be able to do social distancing (they could " bubble" them in smaller groups) and learning is play based so they will be sharing toys etc.

Healthcare workers are not the most at risk workers from the look of data from the ONS.

Ed Conway @EdConwaySky
Security guards, workers in food processing plants, taxi drivers: the occupations facing the highest #COVID19 death rates.
^Social care workers face more than 2x the average death rate but death rates among NHS workers are in line with the average
Striking new findings from @ONS^

^Since far more men are dying of #COVID19 there’s less @ONS
data on female deaths by occupation, but hairdressers face the highest rates:^

• hairdressing: 18.1 deaths per 100k^

- process plant workers: 15.6 - social care workers: 9.6 - female average: 5.2 - health workers: 4.8

And here's the link to the ONS page with the data

www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/articles/whichoccupationshavethehighestpotentialexposuretothecoronaviruscovid19/2020-05-11

Oceany New York - total population 8 million - has found that the child victims may be more than realised, because different symptoms to adult

Still v v small numbers though, even scaled up for the UK, but we must watch how this develops
[[https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/new-york-mystery-coronavirus-illness-three-children-die
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/new-york-mystery-coronavirus-illness-three-children-die]]

New York state is alerting all other parts of the US about a new mystery syndrome that appears to be related to Covid-19 and is
causing severe illness and even death in very young children.

So far three children have died
– a five-year-old in New York City,
a seven-year-old in Westchester county
and a teenager in Suffolk county in Long Island.

All three showed signs of blood vessel inflammation, and also proved positive for the novel coronavirus.

Cuomo said 85 cases of Covid-related illness in children were now being investigated by New York, up from 73 on Saturday.

Two other deaths are being looked at.

The syndrome has puzzled health experts because
it appears to be striking young children largely in the toddler to elementary school age,
who had been thought to be largely unaffected by coronavirus.

The symptoms are also unusual.

Instead of respiratory problems normally associated with Covid-19,
the children are experiencing inflammation of blood vessels or the heart.

Their symptoms are similar to toxic-shock syndrome and Kawasaki disease, an illness with no known cause that mainly affects children under five.

Cuomo opened up the possibility that several more children may have been hit by the mystery illness without health workers recognising what was happening.

“It’s possible that these cases were coming in and were not diagnosed as related to Covid, as they don’t appear as Covid,”

Following - thanks for new thread

Oceany I think the number of children who died is probably still in single figures, but weeks ago it exceeded 2
e.g. a 6-week baby died a few days ago

I can't find up to date stats for deaths by age in the UK -anyone ?

However, with such a small risk of death in this age group, parents have been warned for years that even the tinest risk

• e.g. leaving a child in a house or car for a few minutes -

will lead to SS and criminal penalties

imo there is a higher acceptance of risk in some continental countries,
where e.g. a child is expected at age 6 to walk or go by bus to school on their own, as a normal part of development
and playing with other kids outside is normal without any adult supervising.

Thanks @NewAccountForCorona

I thought it was already known that a small number of children are developing a nasty illness Once again BAME seem to be most affected www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31094-1/fulltext

What is new from NYC is that cases may have been missed
because COVID symptoms in adults are so different to these symptoms in children

Thank you Barracker, I've been following along since thread one, much appreciated.

The ONS analysis for deaths by profession is very interesting. Worth caveating that some of the overall totals for some professions is low so I'd be careful about some reporting comparing professions.

The data compares deaths by covid to total deaths for each professional group, and by sex, for ages 20-64, up to 20th April.

Overall 21.5% of deaths in the dataset (8,630 total) have covid listed on death certificate.

Some significant conclusions however:

Overall health professionals are not more likely to die from covid, (though when split by sex, it does seem men are more likely to have died from covid).

Carers are more likely to have died from covid - statistically significant - but actually only 23% vs 21.5% for the gen pop.

Teachers are less likely to have died from covid than the general population.

Overall "business, media and public service professionals", "transport and mobile machine drivers and operators", and "customer service occupations" have the highest proportion of covid deaths.

The lowest three are "skilled agricultural and related trades", "skilled construction and building trades", and "secretarial and related occupations". The first two of those definitely seems to back up the lower rates of transmission outside.

The higher number found in NY may just be statistical variation - such a tiny % of cases for children
or because NY had a worse outbreak than London

"Teachers are less likely to have died from covid than the general population."

We need to know the teacher hours in school for the lockdown period, as a % of the normal total of teacher hours there.

In general, to assess death figures for all jobs,

we need to know what % of their normal working outside home was actually continued during lockdown.

The data from the ONS on excess deaths last week showed that fewer children are dying than would be expected at this time of year. So this helps put the risk of this syndrome into perspective - if there is a risk it is less than the normal risks of day to day life. In fact, it was only above age 45 that there are ‘excess deaths’ and then they rise sharply.

On the 6 week old baby, it is obviously tragic but the baby had underlying health conditions and Covid deaths are anyone who died with covid, regardless of whether it was covid that caused the death. So it is not clear that covid causes the death. Clearly overall there are excess deaths so covid is causing deaths - particularly in those over 50 where excess deaths really rise - but if the impact on everyone was the same as in children or the under 50s, we’d all be living normal lives.

My understanding is that most deaths occurred from transmission that occurred before lockdown.

So I'm not sure that it matters hugely how many of the teachers continued to work in the classroom after lockdown.

That would be more relevant and interesting for deaths that occurred more than a month after schools closed.

Spiegelhalter: How much ‘normal’ risk does Covid represent?

Note added 2nd May 2020.

"Some people seem to be interpreting this article as suggesting that COVID does not add to one’s normal risk.

I should make it clear that I am suggesting that it roughly doubles your risk of dying this year."

https://medium.com/wintoncentre/how-much-normal-risk-does-covid-represent-4539118e1196

.....So, roughly speaking, we might say that getting COVID-19 is like packing a year’s worth of risk into a week or two

eyewhisker When it comes to forecasting deaths without lockdown, we can't assume they would be the same as with lockdown

In fact we are already seeing rises in Germany, after cases had been falling for weeks,
so there will likely be a rise in deaths here after a couple of weeks

What will determine the increase in deaths - whether it remains with "acceptable" limits -
is probably how promptly areas of infection can be locked down again - Germany's policy.

This depends on effective mass testing and contact tracing, to give erly warning and control,
which the UK does not yet have

Also, with Germany's 7,000 deaths in a population of 83 million and only 3% excess deaths to 5 April,
I suspect the public here would easily tolerate 4 times this number as the price for the economy running at say 90% again

• so long as we don't get uncontrolled exponential growth and deaths

whereas the UK public might not tolerate 4 x 30,000 or 4 x 50,000 excess deaths, however you want to calculate it

The doubling of risk is only for those above 20. For children, the increase in risk is much much lower.

I was making a very specific point about the risk to children in response to claims that there is a high risk to them. Even if there is some risk from covid, the fact that fewer children are dying now than the 5 year average despite ‘50,000’ excess deaths suggests the risk is lower than general everyday life (road accidents etc).

In fact, this is the same up to about age 45, after which it rises sharply. This helps put the relative risk in perspective. Clearly there are excess deaths and Covid is killing people, but this only really becomes significant above age 50 after which it starts to rise sharply. So the risk is high above that age but not very significant below it.

Marking

The ons data on occupation has been adjusted for age and sex but

This analysis does not prove conclusively that the observed rates of death involving COVID-19 are necessarily caused by differences in occupational exposure; we adjusted for age, but not for other factors such as ethnic group and place of residence.