Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 8

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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.

If you dig around on this site - the French equiv of ONS - you should find the raw data on deaths for previous years:

Actually a crossed post - I shall try and look tomorrow.

Those treating COVID patients were indeed wearing space suits
and hospital doctors have said for several weeks that they have plenty of PPE

But there are 400,000 doctors in Germany, most not working in hospitals
Those doctors protesting about lack of PPE were those treating all the ordinary non-COVID patients in their own offices and surgeries

The measure of PPE shortages is deaths:
18 deaths of medical personnel, not even doctors, is very low, below the working population average

==> It is more likely that they were infected at the supermarket etc than at work

The measure of performance during a pandemic is deaths too
The official numbers who died from COVID, hospital+care home:

UK 521 deaths / million pop
Germany 98 deaths / million pop

that's official COVID deaths, not considering the very higher UK "excess" deaths vs the 6% increase in german total deaths.

OK, Germany has done very well, but the UK should not be so much worse
That extreme difference is because serious mistakes were made

My post upthread gave the most important mistake:
the difference earlier / later lockdown would have made to the 2 countries.

Excellent news:

Spain death toll below 100 for 3rd consecutive day

"Half a dozen" people from 3 English Premier League football clubs tested positive for Covid-19 in the space of two days,

which may delay football resuming next month (to be played in empty stadiums)

We wont know how much worse uk has done until we get the antibody results. Though of course if there were to beno immunity or there is reactivation or reinfection.

Sweden's deaths are not reducing very noticeably, whereas its neighbours - who had lockdown - have very few cases now

However, what would really be interesting would be when - hopefully - Sweden and say Norway carry out nationwide blood sampling for antibody tests

The infection rate for Sweden would presumably be high.
However, only when their cases drop to near-zero, i.e. saturation point, would we have some measure of the maximum infection rate, for a reasonably low density country

Nationwide antibody tests - or tests within a city - would indicate the overall % infected.
and hence the death rate

However, the only "performance" measure it would provide is how well the NHS has done at keeping people alive

Unless herd immunity is a policy goal,
then the "performance" measure in this 1st phase at least, is the number of deaths

Diabetes deaths analysed. Not good news for Type 1s, although age very much still a protective factor.

www.england.nhs.uk/publication/type-1-and-type-2-diabetes-and-covid-19-related-mortality-in-england/

Spain death toll below 100 for 3rd consecutive day. I can imagine the gov looking at this and making plans assuming that we are going to be there in a week or two.

Recalling @CrunchyCarrot and the daily updates on Italy v uk deaths on the way up the curve - we were 14 days behind Italy and then our deaths accelerated so we were 11-12 days behind. Yesterday the UK had 545 deaths. The last time Italy had deaths over 500 was 534 deaths on April 21st. So are we a month behind now we are on the downward slope? Lockdown late and not as hard would change the shape of the curve.

I am expecting our deaths to plateau soon as the loosening / breaking of lockdown causes transmission to rise.

news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-could-anti-blood-clot-drugs-help-save-covid-19-patients-11990927?dcmp=snt-sf-twitter
Another news story appeared on blood clots. Medics are really taking interest in this now.

Choux we have to be careful with the 500+ deaths.

1. ours includes care homes and community deaths with positive test which may differ from italys daily reported information.
2. we have a definitive lag after a weekend and the graph clearly shows how much we have a drop every weekend and un proportionate increase every Tuesday.

It's clear our levels of death are still higher than Italy and Spain and France. We are about 2 weeks behind them (average).
Our 3 day death rate has been 170/160/548 so total of 292 on average each day. Still horrific obviously but the ONS releases figures over a week and averages and compares weekly figures as it's a more accurate.
Last Tuesday our post weekend increase was to 650+.

I still hypothesise looking at our data we will not be averaging below 100 deaths a day for at least 3 weeks. Which yes, does mean after all I said we have possibly fallen further behind the curve.

Re care homes. Does anyone remember the story in the paper about a care home abandoned and discovered with all residents deceased? Was it in Spain?

"Up to 30% of patients who are seriously ill with coronavirus are developing dangerous blood clots, according to medical experts.

They say the clots, also known as thrombosis, could be contributing to the number of people dying.

Severe inflammation in the lungs - a natural response of the body to the virus - is behind their formation."
From the bbc.

I don't know if anyone has asked this but its about the low r rates in London when this seemingly doesn't make logical sense and people have said maybe there is herd immunity there despite the testing suggesting otherwise.

What we've seen is a pattern of hospitals being the point of infection though. Has anyone seen anything investigating the possible level of herd immunity amongst hospital staff? And pondered how this might prevent future cross infections?

BigChocFrenzy Thank you for so clearly stating your agenda. It's very obvious that the British government took some stupid decisions early on. They seem to have been pursuing a policy of herd immunity and abandoned that only when it was clear that individuals and businesses were losing down the country anyway. Whether their decisions were, as they claim, based on scientific advice we will not know unless there is a public inquiry and possibly not then. Our Prime Minister was once fired from a job for lying and public servants here can not speak out in their own defence.

Doctors have known about blood clots for some time. I dont know how often anti-coagulants are being used in hospitals now but they are being used. Their use is not without risk so people on them need to be monitored.

The reliability of swab tests drops quite rapidly with the time after infection so the linked estimates of infection will be a lower limit on numbers infected.

Yes @itsgettingweird there was a story of that nature in Spain weeks ago.

@itsgettingweird

Think this was it. Very early on. www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-52014023

Care homes abandoned...was it Spain

Yes

RedToothBrush, I'm looking forward to the results of antibody testing on front line staff, especially in London.

At the moment they are testing ICU staff only, which seems bonkers to me as they are the least at risk due to correct PPE. dd in a London hospital has been nursing Covid positive patients from the start; for the first few week she had no protection at all, that "improved" to a mask and apron a couple of weeks in. When working in ICU/CCU she has full PPE (she moves from her usual ward to CCU, depending on shift).

As an aside, none of her friends (touch wood) have even been tested for Covid at any stage. All have had short patches of "not feeling well" but whether that was stress or virus no-one knows, and there were strict criteria for testing at the time that none of them reached.

At this stage she (and her colleagues/friends) must either be immune due to having had it, or immune due to some sort of natural immunity. Without antibody testing, it's impossible to know.

Thanks how I thought it was Spain. The reason I wondered is because I think when looking at other countries etc it would need to take into account how social care and care homes are run. Eg private v LA. I don't know these figures for other countries but ours are 84% private.

The date on that article is interesting. 1 day after our lockdown. I think this was about 16 days after Spain locked down?

this is a really good video by a Dr about the research on blood clots in Covid 19 and the reason why they happen even when the patient has anticoagulant treatment about 7 minutes until 13 minutes is a good p starting point

Sorry I've asked for my post to be removed wrong thread

Johnson has been sacked from two previous jobs for lying not one. Once by Max Hastings and once by Michael Howard.

Yes, we were about 16 days or so behind Spain with lockdown. I don't want to out myself but I was due to drive a friend to an airport because he had lost a family member in Spain (not covid related) just as Spain went into lockdown so the timeline was something I was involved in, if that makes sense. He still hasn't been able to see his family. Very sad. I am fluent if you come up with anything in Spanish you want help translating or understanding.

Can he make it a hatrick?!

I think we have to be cautious about separating lies and a use a language that portrays a positive to reassure people.

There are definite mistruths. One being that we haven't yet tested 100,000 people per day. I'm not even sure we've reached 80k people. Obviously this means approx 140k people we've missed a week for 3 weeks - 420k people in total we could have tested. That itself would have given us more statistical data re numbers of positives, R number, clusters and hopefully more of an ideas how many people in the population have been infected as a total.

"Ramping up testing" isn't a lie. But the action of ramping up is useless without it having some kind of purpose in data collection to inform our next steps.

After all science etc (behavioural and medical) is all very well and political opinions etc are all very well - but - this is a novel virus. We need absolute data to be able to determine patterns of infections, risks etc.

I personally feel I've learnt so much about this virus from the wonderful people on this thread (bigchoc and shoots for analysis and fate and barraker for amazing numerical data and graphs) and I've found it's been easier to understand the narrative with this statistical data - which quite frankly cannot be argues with.