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.

Actually, should I start a thread for my question? It's not really in the same vein as daily numbers I guess?

Ah thanks Marceline!

I'm going to say it doesn't survive the processing to the sea...

WhyNotMe40 tes have done an article with the stats on teacher and education workers deaths.
26 teachers
Total 65 education workers. (10 of which ta)
If kids can spread it i would assume at least that many parents too.
Also ta deaths i assume are in primary...They would be sat directly with kids.

7 days is 4 days longer than thought! It could stay alive. Luckily ive gone with caughtion and qusrantining for many days.
It being viaboe in faeces and wee isnt good really either in terms of people getting it at schools and i think you can shed it for months after... And it can aerosolise when you flush

www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-revealed-least-26-teachers-have-died-covid-19

all those people desperate to head to the seaside but not finding a toilet open are going to be going somewhere - so I think I'll give sea bathing a miss for a time. Anything that has gone through the sewage system is likely to have been disinfected it's the untreated pollution that would concern me.

To find out the real risk in schools we would need to know the date they were hospitalised to work out when they were infected (eg pre 20/3) and how many healthcare front line and transport workers had does in that period and also supermarket etc.
And probably total numbers to look at the percentage. Obviously stats needs lots of data to compare but 26 teachers and 65 education staff by 20/3 is roughly equal to frontline healthcare ?

@itsgettingweird we'd need to know what 65 is as a percentage of the total education workers.

Id expect a greater percentage of women as well which should lower their risk.

Interesting read from a link on another thread:

off-guardian.org/2020/05/05/covid-19-is-a-statistical-nonsense/?cf_chl_jschl_tk=090eca03cf790a3b2800eecdc9229bfe0e0ab5df-1589388717-0-ARrN7OtUz6U7aS6ICDpbwyRm7cG-ZY7rrW2_yiU54_2Dkwsbm6gMtFHW0-qc2fDczDCHDctHzkjDN5rgTReEVt9p9hGp3w4aD4i4tt1M9QyCn-xzLIct3algHBtEuaPlZx-SoevzxFl-1WnCexlZRAS4Gq4baBXZdSyWDWaVVUoHHyGREP6K0WMUkrtN9AZonmKKKSwdMZ8F-bhXPQhxe_4uH8m9eAeuDN2G9Djby8C_6cCmPAACypbrcOrw07TZp_aRzncgpzwCOlZ8YKJoftG7KTi7gmHjPVJQWLAq6gih_D5gnntysMHd8huzC81ZwSHb88Gy7ZU-7DwUQrvB6NQ

Thanks Puzzled, that is very interesting.

Thought people here might be interested in this. I live in Spain and they've just (like, right now) released preliminary details of their seroprevalence survey (I hope that's right) to see how many people have had Covid and produced antibodies. Only 5% of the population has. Some areas have as high as 10% some as low as 1%.

www.eldiario.es/sociedad/Illa-Yotti-presentan-resultados-seroprevalencia_0_1026798049.html

I’ve been playing around with the ONS numbers and produced this which I thought you lot might find interesting - feel free to tell me if it’s an inappropriate format or I’ve missed something (obviously the major issue is that the child fatalities are tiny and volatile - ideally I’d put some error bars around the averages)

Interesting, MrsWarren Thank you

Puzzled Those 50,000+ excess deaths occurred during the few weeks that we have had a COVID pandemic
Coincidence ?

As has been discussed here before, people under 19 have actually had fewer deaths,
because they have been protected from some of the few hazards they would normally face

So elderly and middle-aged people are dying in their thousands, with a big chunk of deaths in care homes, where they are protected from RTAs etc

You know with flu deaths, we don't actually have confirmation of 20,000 or whatever estimate PHE give each year:

Only a few hundred deaths actually have flu on the death certificate

Then the FLUMOMO mathematical algorithm uses excess deaths and doctors visits etc to estimate the real flu deaths

This is not unique to the UK - the USA & Germany estimate mathematically for flu as well;
probably most Western countries do so

Belgium counts deaths as COVID in its official daily total without a test, just a suspicion from any doctor that it might have been.

There was an article in Germany justifying counting deaths here as COVID even after an accident or murder, if the victim tested positive
(these would be a tiny handful of cases, so no significant overall effect, btw)

That will probably be similar in the UK, then? It’s not going to provide herd immunity.

Sorry, that in reply to @OrangeBlossomsinthesun

That is interesting, MrsWarren and shows that all ages over 45 are similarly affected.

@Puzzledandpissedoff
Very interesting read thank you.

Those 50,000 excess deaths occurred during the few weeks that we have had a COVID pandemic
Coincidence?

I wouldn't have thought so, no - but the more I read about this the more uncertain I become. Nobody with sense denies Covid's causing deaths and even fewer would want the chaos this is causing, but I honestly don't think we should hold back on questioning the way it's being handled

You're also quite right that not everone who "dies of flu" has flu on the death certificate, but flu epidemics haven't resulted in the removal of so many safeguards - and that worries me deeply

Obviously COVID is causing a huge number of deaths. I suppose concerns about the changes to the way deaths are being recorded might not be so much that there is a belief COVID is not causing excess deaths (it clearly is) but how you disentangle COVID deaths from deaths caused by other factors including the lockdown itself?

"I honestly don't think we should hold back on questioning the way it's being handled"

Noone's saying give the govt a free pass - they have cocked up on tests, contact tracing, PPE and gawd know what else

However, the basic principle of having a lockdown - and then relaxing it in stages after the 5 conditions have been met -
is what most virologists and epidemiologists around the world have recommended
and is what nearly all countries have been doing

Even Sweden, the country that all those opposed to lockdown quote, has sufficient social distancing to cause a predicted 4% fall in GDP for 2020
Germany has a predicted 6%; I don't know the UK's but it's probably similar

The major difference is not in GDP falls but in % deaths:
Sweden's death / million is 10x its Scandi / Nordic neighbours

What made the UK govt U-turn away from herd immunity is that Chris Whitty told them the UK curves were following Italy

Where Italy - or the UK - would have been without lockdown is not where Sweden are now

Sunshine The 0-19 group have fewer deaths than normal under lockdown

Leaving aside the necessity to earn a living (!)
being home is safer for most people because it reduces RTAs, work accidents, pub / alcohol / street crime etc

People who died because they are too scared to go to hospital, or because their doctor say treatment for cancer etc is too dangerous ....
died in effect because of the epidemic, even though not of it

Without lockdown, cases would have been multiples higher - we can deduce that from e.g. comparing Sweden vs Norway

I can't imagine how cases would actually be lower if we hadn't had lockdown

So the dangers preventing access to medical care would be higher
and there would be far more excess deaths "because" of the epidemic, not "from" it.

You may think herd immunity would have been a better policy for the economy, but it does lead to more deaths

imo, the current balance most countries have chosen is correct:

• lockdown - gave time to build up the health service and systems for mass testing & contact tracing systems
• relax in stages once the infection is under control and apply the new systems e.g. local lockdowns of new hotspots

The UK's problem is that the government locked down too late
so it's taking longer to bring down the numbers
and also it's making a horlicks of testing & contact tracing

These are issues of incompetence, but imo they have lengthened the UK lockdown from what bit should have been

John Burn-Murdoch@jburnmurdoch (FT)

Timings of people’s changing activity levels over recent wks have been as much voluntary as rule-driven.

True in terms of people staying home pre-lockdown, true of people moving more before lockdown lifted,
will be true of people’s reluctance to return to normal post-lockdown
...
the same is true in the UK.

Here, Apple mobility data clearly show that most of the reduction in movement came before lockdown
....
This is best seen by grouping neighbourhoods by type:

• Retail and business park locations saw biggest falls in activity, and are still quiet

• Suburbs (lots of construction workers) and rural (agriculture) saw smallest declines, and are also seeing earliest resurgences

Again, this matters because same will be true as restrictions ease.

Govts may like to think they can just switch activity on/off, but people will act independently.

Some will move around more despite no loosening of restrictions;
others will stay home weeks after lockdowns end.
....
This means govts can’t just switch the economy back on to full power overnight.

People will need to feel completely safe before they start piling back into restaurants etc, regardless of when rules permit that.
And some behaviours may simply never return to normal.

I’m not arguing against the policy, I agree we don’t have a choice. I’m just wondering if we should be doing a better job with how we are recording cause of death so we actually know for definite (or as close to definite as we can get) who was killed by what.

Thank you to all for the ongoing informative discussion.

@MillicentMartha not really. What we expect is that covid-19 provides an increase in the normal risk of dying from illness in proportion to the risk of dying that people have of that age. So for example, 1 in 100 people of say 60 will die of illness in a given year, whereas for say people aged 20 it would be more like 1 in 100,000.

That's things like flu, heart attacks, cancer, etc. What it is not is murder, road accidents, etc.

What you will have is different causes of death and some of these will be HIGHER for younger people, for example the risk of murder is lower for 60 year olds than 20 year olds. These sort of 'untimely ends' will make up a low 'background death' total, which may be higher for younger groups than older groups but in absolute terms are extremely low. So for example, if you have 20 untimely deaths per year per 100,000 in the age group 20-25, and 5 illness deaths in the same group, you might have say 40 untimely deaths per year per 100,000 in the age group 80-85, and 10,000 deaths per year from illness.

Anyway, what covid-19 does, simply, is increase the underlying risk of dying from illness. At the same time, the lockdown is dramatically cutting the untimely deaths from young people behaving like dickheads, as so many do. So the fall in the untimely deaths is from say 20 to 10 in the younger group, while the illness might be from 5 to 10, but that still results in a lower death rate.

What we'd expect now is as the lockdown is eased that more young people will start going back to their normal lifestyle of being arseholes and then the death rate will start to rise back to or slightly above normal levels (when you add in the teeny tiny inconsequential risk that young people have from covid-19)

The problem with looking at excess death rates as a % of normal rates is that they don't properly show that normal death rates are very very low if you are young, so whether young people's death rates are down 25% or up 25% is not really that consequential.....

But it's pretty much likely that covid-19 adds the same % to everyone's risk of dying of illness, it's just that young people essentially DON'T die of illness, whereas a few decades later, they very much do.