Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 15

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 15 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, LAs, English regions
Slides & data UK govt pressers
UK added daily by PHE & DHSC
PHE Surveillance report infections & watchlists every Thursday with sep. infographic
ONS England infection surveillance report
ONS UK death stats each Tuesday
ECDC rolling 14-day incidence EEA & UK
Daily ECDC country detail UK
Worldometer UK page
Plot FT graphs compare countries deaths, cases, raw / million pop
Covidly.com world summary & graphs
Plot COVID Graphs Our World in Data test positivity etc

We welcome factual, data driven, and civil discussions from all contributors 📈 📉 📊 👍

In the two weeks before lockdown I travelled to about 4 major cities for work sitting in small meeting rooms with about 20 people in each, travelled by train and crowded tube, attended a large music gig in a city 50 miles away, sang in a choir concert with 100 other people all crammed together backstage, went to crowded pubs, hosted DSD who'd flown back from Germany to visit, and probably more things I can't even recall. I would have had close contact with many hundreds of people, with only hand gel to protect me! And I don't think I'm that unusual - so that's how it spread so fast and so far - we're a well connected country, with at least 10 major airports, and there were many separate routes of infection via ski trips, football fans, etc.

I know people personally who are convinced they had it back in January, but the facts we know about the length of time between infection and hospitalisation/ death suggests it's not the case that many people had it before late February/early March. The lives we were living back in early March created an R rate of around 4, which is doubling every 3-4 days, which means you go from 400 cases a day to 100,000 a day in the space of 4 weeks.

I appreciate the challenge on tourism volume, but considerations can miss the bi-directionality and distance of UK travel.

UK 2019 there were 93.1 million trips abroad by British: www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/leisureandtourism/articles/traveltrends/2019.
40.9 million overseas visitors: www.visitbritain.org/visitor-economy-facts.
Add to that >9m foreign-born living in the UK, some of whom will travel under non-UK passports: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-born_population_of_the_United_Kingdom.

Then, look at the totals of tourism per country. The majority of tourists in France are from the UK, nearly 24% of Spanish tourists are from the UK.
Outbound trips from the UK are more than any other country has for inbound tourism, then add the inbound tourism being relatively high as well. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Tourism_rankings.

Yes, people travel across borders a lot in the EU, a quick drive from Slovenia into Italy etc - but that would keep spread of a virus local. Spread throughout a whole country requires the whole country to be on the move.

The much higher infections at the time of UK lockdown would have given much more time for community spread

and the big events attended by people from all over the country

In international articles about the UK, the late lockdown is always cited for the number of infections

• if the high excess deaths had only been in a few regions, the UK total deaths would have looked more like those in other countries

As well as the football matches and Cheltenham which are always referred to, I think the 6 Nations Rugby helped the spread significantly. ( And also the reason Cheltenham went ahead, because they saw BJ at the Rugby the weekend before ) As well as half term and thousands of people returning from the Alps.

I’m not sure if anyone has linked to this article before, but I was just looking to see if they think Covid is seasonal and came across it.

covid.joinzoe.com/post/weather-covid

All of these comments are really interesting and good food for thought, thanks. If the country wide spread was due to our late lockdown, does this seem compatible with the fact that only 5-10% people have antibodies and 20% in London? I'm trying to get my head around the fact that the virus is so contagious that in a month it could have spread all round the UK yet in most places supposedly 95% of people didn't come into contact with it. Why did we not see bigger clusters in some places? Just from personal experience I work in an office in Central London of about 100 people and no-one I know thinks they had it, despite daily commuting and large amounts of socialising in Feb/March. Were we just lucky and the couple who died in the remote location I referred to in my previous post unlucky? Or are there more asymptomatic cases/ non susceptibility than we think? It's fascinating.

I catch every shite chest thing going due to virally triggered asthma. (Actually, falling down a rabbit hole revealed that some types of asthma are particularly susceptible to Rhinoviruses)

I had 3 separate viruses between Nov and feb, and then a mild bacterial chest infection (can always tell the difference now). My husband actually fared worse in one of them than me. A colleague was so badly affected by a cough virus in jan ended up in hospital and took early retirement. None of it was Covid; they were all really bad viruses though. There were a lot about.

@Perihelion add Crufts onto that list. 1000s of people crammed indoors! It's like sardines there and it's international

Crufts seems to get away with the hindsight eyebrow lifts (and I'm a dog person)

The ONS is to scale to their survey to 400,000 households (from 28,000), aiming for 150,00 by October. BBC News - UK to ramp up household coronavirus testing
www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53806117

So presumably their estimates will have a smaller margin of error, which is good news.

In Feb half term we took the GC to visit our other 3 children in 3 separate cities, doing a round trip 600 miles. Don't think we had it but who knows, between the 4 of us we could have done alot of spreading and loads of others will have done similar. I haven't gone further than 10 miles since and my husband is pushing for a trip in September but I don't feel that keen and I don't think it is necessary. Hard to know what to do for the best.

This may interest some of you.

It's about if a positive test result means you're infectious.

www.cebm.net/covid-19/infectious-positive-pcr-test-result-covid-19/?fbclid=IwAR02oc8oVcxlGmS_xJWiqPlo4OcjW61OTNryWS-jXxsL1BhUo64fZtO6JKw

" If the country wide spread was due to our late lockdown, does this seem compatible with the fact that only 5-10% people have antibodies and 20% in London?"

Because, as we discussed upthread, antibodies seem to reduce quite quickly to a level at which they cannot be detected
e.g. see how the levels fell from the peak in the English regions:

However, those levels are still higher than figures I've seen for France, Spain, Germany

Even after antibodies can no longer be detected, scientists think that younger people in particular will have T cells which would reduce the severity of symptoms in a future infection,
even though they can still catch it and infect others.

[quote GabriellaMontez]This may interest some of you.

It's about if a positive test result means you're infectious.

www.cebm.net/covid-19/infectious-positive-pcr-test-result-covid-19/?fbclid=IwAR02oc8oVcxlGmS_xJWiqPlo4OcjW61OTNryWS-jXxsL1BhUo64fZtO6JKw[/quote]
....
There has been similar work elsewhere indicating that most people are infectious for well under 14 days

Hence the move towards 7 days isolation

Am I being incredibly dense, or is there a complete anomoly between the "you have been in close contact with an infected person, so you need to isolate for 14 days, regardless of whether you have a negative test" and "incoming flights from high infection counties will be tested and if negative you go on your way".

@Baaaahhhhh

Am I being incredibly dense, or is there a complete anomoly between the "you have been in close contact with an infected person, so you need to isolate for 14 days, regardless of whether you have a negative test" and "incoming flights from high infection counties will be tested and if negative you go on your way".

.... That is the difference between a specified "close contact" who is at significantly high risk of being infected vs someone who is only at generally increased risk, hence low risk contact

The flowchart helps to explain:

Zoe estimated daily transmission rate has gone down once again. It is now 1,214.

covid.joinzoe.com/data

Am I misunderstanding something here? We seem to be getting around 1000 positive tests a day so if 1200 are catching it we are picking up most of the cases? Seems too good to be true.

I've read that the estimated figure for daily cases is 3,500

but it's still a decent rate to pick up 1,000+ comparable % with other countries

BigChocFrenzy Yes, I get that, absolutely. But an incoming flight may well contain people who have been in close contact with an infected person, but because they aren't contact traceable by that country could be infected, hence the current 14 day isolation.

Gargle test ?

Austria and Cologne in Germany have been assessing a new COVID test which just requires gargling for 60 seconds

If it proves sufficiently accurate, then it would be a major breakthrough for schools and indeed persuading adults to be tested:

www.tagesschau.de/ausland/gurgeln-coronatest-101.html

@Baaaahhhhh

BigChocFrenzy Yes, I get that, absolutely. But an incoming flight may well contain people who have been in close contact with an infected person, but because they aren't contact traceable by that country could be infected, hence the current 14 day isolation.

... "Close contact" is only with a specified infected person for 15 minutes not a general risk that they might have been

Whether on a flight or in the workplace or anywhere else, it won't be defined as close contact unless this can be established,
merely a "low risk" contact

We seem to be getting around 1000 positive tests a day so if 1200 are catching it we are picking up most of the cases? Seems too good to be true.

Zoe only estimates symptomatic cases so as a rule of thumb I double the number to get the total transmission rate.

I've read that the estimated figure for daily cases is 3,500

This estimate comes from the ONS survey but I am starting to wonder if the number may indeed be skewed up by false positives. Even if the test specificity is 99.99% (i.e. very high), it will still have impact on the overall result when the prevalence is so low.

Apparently, only 26% of people tested by ONS seem to have symptoms. I find it difficult to believe that nearly 3/4 of COVID cases are asymptomatic. The numbers I saw previously seemed to suggest asymptomatic cases vary between 20 and 50%.

It is impractical - and would cause disproportionate disruption & hardship - to isolate everyone who is at a generally increased risk, but still low risk

Hence countries at this stage in pandemic, with v few deaths still in UK / Europe, have chosen to only isolate those at the highest risk, which is 15+ minutes with a specified contact