In July people on Leicester were 40 times less likely to be hospitalised than the WHO suggests

[Treesofwood]

So apparently only 7 out of over 1300 confirmed with Covid in July in Leicester were hospitalised. According to WHO that should be closer to 250. So what's their secret? How does this measure up to hospitalisation rates for other illnesses?

@Morfin no need to apologise!

I saw today that over 122k tests were processed, apparently the highest so far

@Olivia333, I'm with Nan.

@LaurieMarlow

The situation in Ireland at the minute is playing out in exactly the same way. A big spike in cases but hospitalisation/ deaths are very low (the latter almost non existent).

It’s how the situation in the US played out too. It didn’t last long. First the hospital admissions started to go up, then the deaths did. I think the same thing happened elsewhere. There’s just a lag between the younger generations getting it, them passing it on to the older generation and then a lag between those infections and admission and admission and death.

If you are testing nearly everybody in a locked down area you are probably getting closer to the IFR than the CFR. The IFR is tiny for flu. It’s entirely possible for the number of people dying per known case to be lower than the CFR for both Covid & flu but still be more deadly than flu. Precisely because we are testing more.

I don’t think those ‘currently dying of flu’ figures are all flu either. It’s flu & pneumonia so it’s a sort of catch all from all sorts of stuff.

Please provide a link to these WHO statistics.

As far as I know they have never released a figure for the number of people with the virus who 'should' be hospitalised in any particular courtry. The number will obviously vary from place to place and over time.

Does it maybe indicate that we could have had quite a lot of people back with it before March and hospital cases rising? People then wouldn’t have known what it was and there was no testing anyway so no quarantine/isolation?

I was poorly with a strange illness back in late Feb as were my parents, I was too unwell to leave the house for a number of days but not 14, I have had the guilts I might have had it and spread it ;/

Obv there’s no way of knowing what I had back in Feb but it was certainly symptoms that would now warrant isolation and a test.

@LangClegsInSpace

Please provide a link to these WHO statistics.

As far as I know they have never released a figure for the number of people with the virus who 'should' be hospitalised in any particular courtry. The number will obviously vary from place to place and over time.

I think the OP might be referring to the original 80% mild, 20% severe i.e. Hospitalised figure.

@Noextremes2017
Absolutely.

I'm so glad to see this thread with people being normal and not hysterical. Please can this be OUR thread?!

@Derbygerbil thank you that's a very good explanation of fly/phenomena figures.

In Feb, I wouldn’t rule it out, Raspberry. We know from gene testing that it’s likely the virus was seeded into the UK over 1300 times at the end of Feb/beginning of March. I’d say it’s quite likely there was some level of community spread in late Jan/early Feb.

However there was something with a persistent cough that kept coming and going circulating all winter. I’m fairly sure that wasn’t Covid.

@Treesofwood

Streptococcus pneumoniaeis - the most cause of pneumonia - inhabits the respiratory tracts of a significant proportion (perhaps a 1/4 to 1/2) of the population, and does so harmlessly the overwhelming majority of time. It only tends to cause a pneumonia illness when a person is in significantly weakened health. If it’s already living inside people, masks are irrelevant!

@RaspberryRuff

Does it maybe indicate that we could have had quite a lot of people back with it before March and hospital cases rising? People then wouldn’t have known what it was and there was no testing anyway so no quarantine/isolation?

I was poorly with a strange illness back in late Feb as were my parents, I was too unwell to leave the house for a number of days but not 14, I have had the guilts I might have had it and spread it ;/

It is very possible. My son was off school from the beginning of march with all the symptoms. At the time I didnt even consider covid as they said it wasnt spreading then. Looking back I do wonder. He had been in school, as had his brother, I am a teacher and his dad had been in germany on a stag do at the end of feb so plenty opportunities for exposure.

It’s how the situation in the US played out too. It didn’t last long

How much of a lag though?

Cases in Ireland have been rising for weeks now. Equally the Leicester lockdown was some time ago.

I guess I’ll never know @RafaIsTheKingOfClay mine was a weird bug, it seemed like a combination of norovirus, the flu and a really bad cold. Covid wasn’t on my radar but I remember saying to my husband at the time I couldn’t fathom what was wrong with me as it seemed to be a bit of everything.

There has been a lot of talk about earlier similar illnesses on these threads. My own family suffered too and it spread through the school like wildfire in February. However I could say the same about last year too.

I suppose the only thing that’s notable is that I kept saying to my husband that I wished I knew what the bug was, it was so strange. I’m 47 so been around a long time and had a lot of colds/flus/infections bugs and it was just like nothing else. I’ll never know and I hope it wasn’t as fuck knows who I spread it to if it was!

It seems as though those determined to press the “Covid’s only a mild form of flu” position believe they have a “gotcha” moment with the ONS stats presented. As I have tried to explain, they really haven’t.... and only demonstrate they tend only to have a superficial understanding of the figures and the science.

They start from the premise that “Covid is overblown”, rather than let the science and figures form the foundation of their understanding, and accept as fact anything that supports it, and dismiss anything that doesn’t...

@LaurieMarlow

Ireland has averaged 50-80 new confirmed cases per day... the USA has been nearly 1,000 times that!... It’s completely different.

Various US states allowed their numbers to rise until they we’re forced to take action because their hospitals risked overflowing. The Irish Government are concerned not because they are in the same position as Texas or Florida, but because if they shrug their collective shoulders and just let things take their course, they are likely to be at some point in the next month or so.

@LaurieMarlow

It’s how the situation in the US played out too. It didn’t last long

How much of a lag though?

Cases in Ireland have been rising for weeks now. Equally the Leicester lockdown was some time ago.

I think it was about a month. I seem to remember there being quite a lot on the US media at the end of June about how cases were rising and how admissions and deaths weren’t.

I think the difference between here and the US is that in a lot of areas they ploughed ahead with ending restrictions even though cases were rising. Whereas here we at least locked down areas where transmission was rising and halted reopening in some areas. I wonder whether that might be enough to stop the admissions and deaths rising. Or at least increase the time it take to go from the younger to older generations.

In fact, there’s no “nearly” about it, the USA has been 1,000 times higher. Florida, about 4 times the population of Ireland was recording 10-15,000 cases daily a week or two back.

And if Florida had been recording cases at Ireland’s current rate - which scaled up to Florida’s population would be about 300 per day, people would have been marvelling at how well Florida was doing compared to the other US states, even those performing “well”.

Thank you derbygerbil for that explanation of what the flu/pneumonia statistics can cover in terms of different diseases.

As far as false negatives go, it's been bugging me that there is so little info about this despite the fact the rate of false negatives seems high. I've had a number of friends with mild covid symptoms pretty much carry on as normal (i.e. going out etc) once they've had a negative test, which I find a bit worrying if the false negatives is truly this high. Why are they not recommending more than one test?

@LaurieMarlow Florida "beat" cv and started opening up in May, pretty much ditching any attempt at virus control at the same time.

By end June the number of cases was noticable riding rapidly - but this was apparently ok because rates of hospitalizations weren't. At this point the virus was predominantly spreading amongst the young.

By mid July the age of people catching COVID was increasing and huge numbers of people were getting infected every day. At this point the number of hospitalizations started to increase- but that was apparently ok because the death rate was stable/falling.

Now, a month later, they have just recorded their highest ever weekly death rate.

^^luckily this is nothing like what is happening here as here we are actively trying to control spread.

Interesting thread. Thank you

@Noextremes2017

Funny how the Government and media make no attempt to put Covid into context against Flu and other causes of death. Why is that?

Because “flu” as I covered in an earlier post is a catch all for a wide number of respiratory illnesses, whose death rate isn’t particularly impacted by social interaction in summer when the influenza virus isn’t generally circulating. We’d have some pneumonia deaths irrespective of whether we all lived as hermits or lived on top of each other.

With Covid, as we have seen clearly (it’s hardly theoretical like it was at the start of the year!), a relatively small number of infections can become overwhelming in a short space of time if no action is taken (there were no particular issues in February, but it was out of control in March!).

This clearly means it requires a very different response.