Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 9

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Welcome to thread 9 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.

Seeing the U.K. excess deaths at 60k in the ons figures out today

Is that covid deaths?

I’m sorry, I’m not keeping up with this at all as I find the figures really difficult to get my head around. I’ve been using worldometer and that has the UK at 37000 deaths.

Froq - excess deaths means how many people ‘more’ have died in the last week than would have died between those same dates in a typical year. It is safe to assume most of these excess or extra deaths are down to covid - especially if you think far fewer people are dying in eg car crashes.

I wonder if any of you know if there is a way to find out the estimated R level for a particular area?

London numbers are very, very low.

I have now started looking at daily numbers of positive tests (which were meaningless when we could not test people outside of hospitals):

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/#category=nations&map=case

(Download the latest cases data as CSV)

The files get updated daily. The daily number of people tested positive in London has gone down from nearly 1,000 at the peak to 50-60 a week ago.

The most recent numbers are still meaningless (i.e. not all tests have been processed) but the trend is very clear. C19 cases in London seem to be declining very rapidly.

@wintertravel - do you know how the total additional new cases of c.2000 on the main page correlate to the breakdown on the spreadsheet of only 26 for England? There can't be that many in the other nations or the time lags? It seems to say 'new lab confirmed cases' for both?

Thanks!

do you know how the total additional new cases of c.2000 on the main page correlate to the breakdown on the spreadsheet of only 26 for England?

The test reporting is similar to deaths stats, i.e. it is based off cumulative totals. The daily number for today will include positive tests taken earlier where the result has only been confirmed today.

The 26 in the spreadsheet are positive tests where the specimen was taken on May 25. Total number of confirmed positives for England (including earlier specimens) was 492 (the difference between 150,294 and 149,802). 492 is part of 2,000 announced for the whole of UK.

Since positive tests can be confirmed with a significant time lag (4-5 days), I tend to ignore numbers for the past week and just look at earlier figures. I also discount weekends/bank holidays since testing in England drops at weekend and numbers look better than they actually are.

Thanks @wintertravel1980. The 492 still looks low against 2000 for the UK but appreciate the explanation

That’s good to know about regional data, thanks Winter. I guess it’s all skewed by lockdown and the incubation / illness period anyway so the fact remains we don’t know what will happen when it all opens up again. But that is reassuring that there are so few cases now at least.

APOE e4 genotype predicts severe COVID-19 in the UK Biobank community cohort

The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, glaa131, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glaa131
Published: 26 May 2020

https://academic.oup.com/biomedgerontology/advance-article/doi/10.1093/gerona/glaa131/5843454

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reaction-to-study-on-covid-19-and-a-faulty-gene-linked-to-dementia/

Prof Tara Spires-Jones, UK Dementia Research Institute Group Leader and Deputy Director, Centre for Discovery Brain Sciences, The University of Edinburgh

“Using data from over 300,000 people in the UK BioBank, Prof Melzer and colleagues observe
an association between the APOE4 gene and risk of testing positive for COVID-19.

“This study is robustly conducted, and the observation is important and will lead to future research into how APOE4 may influence the risk of contracting COVID-19
or having severe symptoms requiring hospitalisation, where most tests are performed.

This is interesting because recent research into why APOE4 also increases the risk of Alzheimer’s disease indicate that APOE4 is involved in the immune system.

“An important limitation of the current paper is that this type of observational study cannot prove that the APOE4 gene is the cause of the observed increased risk of COVID-19.
The scientists did a thorough job of trying to control for other things associated with APOE4 that could account for the risk,
but it is still possible that there is an unknown related factor causing the increased risk.”
...
Prof Clive Ballard, Medical School Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University of Exeter, said:

“The E4 gene is a major risk gene for Alzheimer’s disease – people with one copy are at 3-4 fold increased risk and people with two copies have at least a 10 fold increased risk.

The current findings may partly explain why people with dementia are more at risk of severe COVID, and we should be taking more care of this vulnerable group of individuals at this challenging time”

“The implications of the study are well beyond the significant implications for people with dementia.
25% of people in the population carry one E4 gene, and this is clearly an important risk factor for developing severe COVID.

ApoE4 plays a major role in lipid and cholesterol metabolism and also has some role in immune response.
This may give us important clues in helping to develop new approaches to reduce risk.”

Can anyone explain or point out where they are getting daily cases data from.

They seem to be much lower than what the daily briefings give us.

Thank you

Does anyone know where we are up to re track and trace?

What happened to the app trial?

I know there's trials using human trackers starting in 10 councils but that's all?

I do suspect the DC stuff is a diversion from this.

For example, this has apparently started in Newcastle this week.

There's a thread in coronavirus where people are clearly starting and in the middle of training for it.

But this isn't a national thing according to this report.

www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/newcastle-confirmed-pilot-location-test-18298138

Education select committee asked about track and trace this morning and were told there would be an announcement later today.

This government do like an “announcement”! If they are planning to announce that they will open schools on Monday They need to have the test and trace up and running or have announced that it will be by then I suspect.

If anyone is on Facebook there is an icu consultant called Joseph Cosgrove. Worth having a look at his last post as it covers similar ground to discussions here.

Ooh yes he is interesting. Newcastle based too.

Anyone have any ideas why the excess mortality is so high for England, as compared with for example wales. I am also bemused as to whilst this has come down, it is not nearly as low as other countries and once again wales. It seems to be plateauing at a high level. This appears very bizarre.

"Not all the elements will be in place by June 1st" of the TTT. Says someone in Sheffield is saying on world at 1.

Good question.

Weeks 6 -11, Wales = 679 ave. weekly

Weeks 12-20, Wales = 7972 = 1861 excess

Covid-19 deaths Wales: 1955

So negative excess deaths.

England:

138,052 deaths vs. 91,916 based on 6 week average = 46,136 excess
covid-19 deaths: 39,073

So relatively 7k excess deaths, which is 15%

However, England has no excess deaths for the last 2 weeks, after subtracting covid-19.

It's already been observed, that despite what the cranks say, about everyone dying of cancer being given a covid-19 death, that in fact there was a large rise in 'old age' deaths (dementia, etc.), which are fairly obviously covid-19. This was true in April, but no longer, as covid-19 death certificates are now being issued for the elderly perhaps slightly excess of the total.

So it would make sense that covid-19 death certificates were being issued more in Wales, or fewer care home deaths in the early stages.

Differences to the other 3 UK nations need to be studied in depth,
but population density and the massive number of international connections that London has could be factors - infection from London would spread more to English regions.

Major factor, compared to most other European countries, seems to be the delay in lockdown, at a similar stage in the epidemic
With exponential growth, infections rocketed within a short time and spread throughout the country.
Hence takes longer to close them all down than in other countries

Then the lack of organised mass testing, contact tracing
and failure to treat many patients early enough, so they seriously deteriorated

Sunday Times Insight: 22 days of dither and delay on coronavirus that cost thousands of British lives
[[http://archive.is/qbvY7
archive.is/qbvY7]]

New York Times study of excess deaths highlights the UK:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html

Sorry, answering wrong question !
re Wales I was looking at total deaths, not just excess

shoots has rightly highlighted that excess deaths are probably a matter of not counting / discovering COVID deaths

For actual death rates, let's also look at total deaths / million and see if there are significant differences there

In that NYT report to end April (old but shows trends), UK and Belgium both have 63% deaths above normal
but

look at the number (excess deaths - COVID deaths):

UK 16,000
Belgium 400

Belgium is counting deaths anywhere, including at home, with possible COVID even without confirmed test
Hence v few deaths missed

I think Wales can only be a population density/demographic thing. I'm Welsh and testing has been really badly organised in Wales, it was very difficult to get tests in care homes until very recently ( we've relocated a family member during that time. They were well behind England when it comes to mass testing. From family, lockdown has been similar, apart from the very latest changes - driving to exercise and meeting with one person in a park.

Thanks shoots, i was looking at the euromomo graphs which i think are two weeks old so england still way above normal ( whilst wales was much lower). Good to see it is approaching normal now. I had very much assumed that the extra excess ( not allocated to covid ) were other "collateral" deaths ( heart attacks that did not go to hospital etc). Are they then just mis reported covid related?

Not sure i can understand yet why the excess is so much higher in england than wales - will need a few weeks to think about it! Thank you for your help shoots and big in trying to help me unravel my thinking on this.

Thanks cathy, but not sure that would explain the lower excess deaths in wales( but my brain works slowly ) to me anyway - but will have to gear up my brain and work out what people are explaining.

Not sure i can understand yet why the excess is so much higher in england than wales - will need a few weeks to think about it! Thank you for your help shoots and big in trying to help me unravel my thinking on this.

Excess deaths are 31% for normal deaths Wales.

50% for England.

That means MORE covid-19 deaths in England per head of population.

Which we knew - Wales, outside of the Cardiff metro area has lower infection rates.

It's not surprising that Wales should be lower as it's more rural

What we know (more-or-less) is that a few weeks ago, the very old were dying of covid-19 but this wasn't being recorded. AND this varied from area to area. Salford, for example, was more likely to record deaths in care homes in early weeks as covid-19 than other areas.

So either Wales were more on the ball with this, or there was simply a lower toll of deaths of the very old, at home/in care homes.