Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 11

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 11 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Slides & data UK govt pressers
NHS England stats including breakdown by Hospital Trust
ONS UK statistics for CV related deaths outside hospitals, released weekly each Tuesday
Financial Times Daily updates and graphs
HSJ Coronavirus updates
Worldometer UK page
Covidly.com to filter graphs using selected data filters ONS statistics for CV related deaths outside hospitals, released weekly each Tuesday
Plot COVID Graphs Our World in Data

We welcome factual, data driven, and civil discussions from all contributors 💐

from the guardian website about the fact that hospital data is stuck on 16th june ....

Several readers got in touch yesterday to ask why this chart only contains data up until 16 June. On Friday last week, when No 10 published the last of its daily slides containing this information, the hospital admissions data went up to 23 June. I’ve asked No 10 for an explanation, but have not had a response yet. The small print of the website says that this chart is now being updated weekly, because that is when Scotland updates its hospital admission figures, but that does not explain why more up-to-date figures were available last week.

This chart is important because, if there is a second spike in coronavirus cases, the first really clear evidence of that may turn up here.

That is good news with data.

I would expect to see admissions drop to 200 max in a week or 2 reflecting number of cases. 🤞

The beta website coronavirus-staging.data.gov.uk/cases is up to date - still 3,695 coronavirus cases in hospital but at the moment admissions still declining. Those cases will include some sent back from ICU to covid wards because they are still sick but dont need as many resources as well as people who were never sick enough to need ICU.

Reasons why the fatality rate appears to drop would be many and varied, starting with when numbers admitted are declining your population on any given day excludes some of the most severely ill, admitted earlier - because they have already died. To get case fatality rates you normally follow all those admitted on a particular day, it's really a very odd study. The initial fatality rate was more than 33% as the study someone quoted didnt include all those who died, some were still in hospital and they wouldnt all have made it out alive. Although I dont have figures for the Uk a study that looked at the shielded internationally concluded that there were a higher percentage of men - a change in the sex ratio for admissions could easily produce an apparent, but not real, drop in fatality.

Still a drop in the fatality rate was always likely because treatments have improved. It became apparent early on that ventilation was not always a good thing, that this was a blood disease as well as a respiratory disease and that you had to provide a lot of support for various organs. It's easier to do that when you are past the peak of infection so less demand on limited resources and less staff off sick. Then some drugs ere found to help. Vitamin D levels are higher as you move into summer and possibly protective. So probably a genuine drop in age and sex adjusted fatality rates but a better study is necessary to identify just how much of a drop.

In addition to possible long term lung damage the virus is believed to be triggering diabetes in some people.

@Derbygerbil I actually think the way the media have behaved throughout the pandemic is almost criminally irresponsible. We need clear, sensible information at a time like this, not misuse of statistics to fuel panic and misery.

This week's [ok, the week ending Friday-before-last days ago] deaths vs.the same graph last week. Deaths at home still far above average for the time of year, and stable vs. last week. Hospital deaths fell another 117 below the already below-annual-minimum's deaths.

Care home death's fell another 178.

@Derbygerbil

Apparently according to local news in my area, Suffolk has seen a 50% “spike” in cases over the past fortnight!.... .

That seems to be based on Pillar 1 cases increasing from a grand total of 2 for the week a fortnight ago, to 3 over the past week....

Of course, complacency is wrong... but really!

I know, the fail is describing it as a bigger spike than Leicester!!! Absolutely ridiculous, and I'm sure something was said about how when numbers get that low it makes the R number pretty irrelevant and inaccurate.

Derby I was reading your post thinking "oh no - are we starting to see rises everywhere"

Totally agree that the media need to stop fuelling a fire.

They have had nothing to report apart from this and it's actually meaning we the left POV, right POV, centric POV - and generally if we read sensible sources the actual real stats!

That why I'm sticking here

What’s the betting that the Government has done a piss poor procurement and has selected third parties to deliver the testing with even more piss poor logistics.... it would be typical.

Having had a home test sadly I can confirm this was my experience, with the delivery aspect certainly. Some sort of error with the address in the gov.uk site meant that while I entered my door number it didn't print on the parcel.

Amazon delivery then called me once to try to find out the number, didn't get through, and announced it delivered through tracking. Got in touch with Amazon, because it's not something ordered through their website their customer service can't help. No other help number.

Had to order a new test and try to rectify the door number issue myself by manual entry, test arrives a few days later.

You also need to order a return courier to pick it up and can only do this between the hours of 8am and 4pm. I received mine at 5pm, so had to wait another day to order the courier, then another day to do the test. It was negative, but apparently the sensitivity does reduce so who knows if it would have been positive 3 days earlier when I should have received it...

marcelineMissouri Concerning because people who put in their postcode to check infections in their area only see Pillar 1, which may only be a small fraction of the positive tests

It appears to be lack of joined up systems, because the local authorities seem unable to get Pillar 2 either; only central govt can do so and then only after a delay

FT paywall is resisting my Google, but New Scientist summarises their story:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2237475-covid-19-news-uk-deaths-fall-below-five-year-average/#ixzz6Qs8fL2Ov

"Official daily coronavirus case numbers for UK cities and regions, including Leicester, only reveal a fraction of the real total in those areas,
according to an analysis by the Financial Times.

Although the government publishes a UK-wide number for all confirmed covid-19 cases every day
– including from tests conducted at home or in commercial labs –
at a regional level the new daily cases only contain those recorded in hospitals.

More than 90 per cent of new coronavirus cases recorded in Leicester are now being detected through community labs and home testing kits,
and were therefore missing from the publicly released data.

Peter Soulsby, the mayor of Leicester asked why it took 11 days for health minister Matt Hancock to impose a new lockdown on Monday after saying he feared a new outbreak in the city nearly two weeks earlier.

According to the FT,
“hundreds of local authorities in the rest of the country are unable to see a timely picture of what is happening in their communities.”

and there is this testing chart from Leicester Mercury:

Incomplete data

We can't make any assessment of spikes, falls or whatever in different parts of the country until we see the total number of positive tests for Pillars 1 + 2

If there are variations in very small numbers, then these are obviously unimportant

"What’s the betting that the Government has done a piss poor procurement and has selected third parties to deliver the testing with even more piss poor logistics.... it would be typical."

Well, iirc last month 50,000 tests had to be sent to the USA for processing
and then some of these were lost and had to be redone
(but were included in the official number of tests done)

@BigChocFrenzy

"Can anyone point me in the direction of where I can find the European average no of cases? I believe it's being used as a benchmark for deciding if Greece will allow flights from the uk over the summer."

@theskyispurple Sorry for late reply - you probably have the info now, but ...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/29/us-visitors-set-to-remain-banned-from-entering-eu

A key threshold is the EU average infection rate of around 16 per 100,000 inhabitants
with only those countries with comparable or better rates considered for inclusion.

Thank you x

Thank you @BigChocFrenzy, that graph is shocking.

In my opinion, it’s better to publish no data than misleading data, and the Government’s figures are extremely misleading.

It’s a disgrace and ridiculous they can’t get Pillar 2 data by area quickly... It should be a straightforward algorithm applied to the data.

That pillar 2 data and the lack of transparency is depressing

My mayor and local news have no idea the data they are presenting and referring to when praising our amazing lack of cases is only pillar one. People are getting very cross about known spikes not showing up and the mayor has been saying they are just delayed and will show it.

I've had to at length explain that they were pillar 2 results that confirmed the spike and they aren't available to local authorities. They don't even understand that they don't have the data!

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/30/us-buys-up-world-stock-of-key-covid-19-drug

The public suffering a further lack of trust is concerning, but
I'm even more concerned that local authorities are in the dark about positive test numbers

because local authorities are the ones who should be in charge of monitoring their "patch",
of ordering tests, of track & trace, of implementing lockdown if need be, informing and reassuring their population.

France & especially Germany have shown that local authorities are more effective in control of all this

Unfortunately, it looks like centralisation in the UK doesn't allow this

• so too much happens from central government, which cannot react in time to what is happening in every part of the country and doesn't know the local areas

listening In an emergency, any country can order a "compulsory licence"to override the intellectual property rights of Gilead or any other company
and buy a generic drug from India (cheaper too)

..... if they are prepared to face the wrath of the US president
I suspect the Uk govt would flinch & dither, but hopefully a more available drug with similar effect can soon be found anyway

The reason for Trump's action ?
he's claiming COVID is "just embers", but he knows Fauci is more likely right:

Fauci has warned the USA is "going in the wrong direction"
and could see 100,000 new coronavirus cases daily unless effective action is taken

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/30/coronavirus-fauci-senate-states-reverse-reopening

Public health experts agree that honesty and transparency during an epidemic (or indeed any crisis) are important to keep public cooperation
and avoid wild rumours & panic

This kind of secrecy damages public trust - which is already fragile:

‘Why weren’t we told?’: Anger in Yorkshire town at centre of major coronavirus outbreak kept secret by council

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-yorkshire-cleckheaton-outbreak-meat-packing-plant-factory-a9576396.html

“If we disclose the location and name of any business or organisation we seriously risk discouraging others from coming forward.”

I put this on another thread but it probably should belong in the analysis thread so re-posting here. Credit to @PatriciaHolm again for the original map link.

@PatriciaHolm posted these PHE maps on another thread from their most recent weekly surveillance report (so published last week). Just the weekly case one added here

Whereas the daily dashboard publishes pillar 1 in terms of both actual confirmed cases and confirmed cases per 100,000 people the PHE maps just give a banding of cases per 100,000 residents. The maps are also upper tier local authorities only, and you do need to know your local authority geography. councils' map www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?hl=en&mid=1S_AbfmYbOpHBeyLEcmB9f-wRD4Y&ll=53.59615067528699%2C-2.0960400430810333&z=10

Not quite sure how the maps display, but one shows the cumulative position for pillar 1 and pillar 2; and the other for the most recent week.

If which map is which is not apparent on the cumulative map the red areas have over 601 cases per 100,000 and on the weekly one red is over 45 cases per 100,000

The weekly map might be of greater interest. So red and dark red blobs include Bedford, moving into the Midlands to Leicester; up into South Yorkshire which looks to be Rotherham; then up to Barnsley (dark red); Kirklees (red) and Bradford (dark red - this presumably explains why Keighley has been mentioned as a surge area). Then west to Oldham, Tameside, and Rochdale (dark red) and finally Blackburn.

The banding is a bit of a blunt instrument. County Council areas are a bit meaningless. Kent has a population not far off 1.6m people, and 12 district councils areas, which probably don't all have the same case rate. So just cumulative pillar 1 from the dashboard has Ashford at over 700 cases per 100,000 whereas Tonbridge and Malling has less than 200 per 100,000.

Likewise there is no way of knowing on the maps if an LA is near the bottom or top of a banding. So Cheshire West is in the 10 to 15 per 100,000 band and Cheshire East the 15 to 30 band. The former might be 10 and the latter 29.9, so a significant difference; ot it could be West in 14.9 and East 15.1 so to all intents and purposes the same.

@Derbygerbil I think the PHE combined latest weekly map backs up the hopefully positive picture in Suffolk, shading suggests

UK deaths 155
Positive tests 689

To be clear there are ten generic manufactures of remdevisir , but they are only allowed to sell in poor countries , so India, Indonesia , Thailand yes , but Mexico, China, Malaysia no.

I imagine Gilead will subcontract the production for developed countries as well.

Gilead have distributed as a donation some hundreds of thousands of doses,but how this matches with global demand I'm not sure.

remdevisir would not be needed or useful for the vast majority of the 10 million cases globally, most of whom won't become very ill

We have insufficient info about how many patients would need the drug, or how many doses

and it is unclear where those hundreds of thousands of doses were donated - presumably to developing countries

I hope Western govts who wish to obtain the drug are able to quickly arrange local subcontracting with Gilead

btw, one thing happening for a treatment,
but there would be more outrage if Trump - or Biden - buys up the entire 1st 3 months supply of the first vaccine and the other vaccines are way behind.

I hope any vaccine would be manufactured v quickly in hundreds of millions of doses
and preferably that a few vaccines come onto the market around the same time

V early Chinese vaccine approved for their military only - fit young guinea pigs ?

https://fortune.com/2020/06/29/china-coronavirus-vaccine-military/

Chinese troops will be among the first to get jabs of one of China’s leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates.

On Monday, the Chinese biotech firm CanSino Biologics said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange that

China’s Central Military Commission gave the go-ahead for China’s military to inject soldiers with Ad5-nCoV,
the company’s leading vaccine candidate, for a period of one year.

the lack of transparency is shameful

"Public health officials have complained about being kept in the dark on Covid-19 testing results, making it difficult for them to locate outbreaks and target hotspots throughout the pandemic.

Reuters reported today that the Cabinet Office had forbidden PHE from sharing data with local officials and, by extension, the public from early on in the crisis.

... the government had initially ordered the agency not to share with local councils its surveillance reports containing data about notified cases from local hospital emergency rooms and general practitioners.

"Until April 2020 PHE was not permitted to share the surveillance reports with local partners by the Cabinet Office," she wrote in the memo. After April, information was shared with public health directors, but the reports remained official secrets and were "marked as official sensitive and not in the public domain," said the memo, which was reviewed by Reuters."

www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/new-web-dashboards-reveal-local-covid-cases-first-time/