Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 16

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 16 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, English regions & LAs
MSAO Map of English cases
[[https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/909430/Contain_framework_lower_tier_local_authority__14_August_2020.pdf
Slides & data UK govt pressers
UK added daily by PHE & DHSC
R estimates UK & English regions
PHE Surveillance report infections & watchlists every Thursday
ONS England infection surveillance reports
ONS UK death stats released each Tuesday
ECDC rolling 14-day incidence EEA & UK
Daily ECDC country detail UK
WHO dashboard
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 📈 📉 📊 👍

Article and data on health and economic consequences of the pandemic and on which countries have kept both the economic damage and deaths low so far.
ourworldindata.org/covid-health-economy

I found those charts interesting but depressing Coffee.

We’ve taken such a hit

From that link, what analysts have found before:

"Contrary to the idea of a trade-off, we see that countries which suffered the most severe economic downturns – like Peru, Spain and the UK – are generally among the countries with the highest COVID-19 death rate.

And the reverse is also true: countries where the economic impact has been modest – like Taiwan, South Korea, and Lithuania – have also managed to keep the death rate low.
.....
But among countries with available GDP data, we do not see any evidence of a trade-off between protecting people’s health and protecting the economy.
Rather the relationship we see between the health and economic impacts of the pandemic goes in the opposite direction.
As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too.

Greece has now been added to Scotland's quarantine list.

Will the UK govt follow?

Considering there seems to be a considerable amount of cases being imported, i think it is probable.

So depressing.

But I remember Chris Whitty talking about waiting for the right moment to suppress. Too early and it wouldn’t be as effective. He put up the curve to talk around it.

Was that the wrong approach or is it more nuanced than that?

@MarshaBradyo

So depressing.

But I remember Chris Whitty talking about waiting for the right moment to suppress. Too early and it wouldn’t be as effective. He put up the curve to talk around it.

Was that the wrong approach or is it more nuanced than that?

Possibly we were caught sleeping? Or perhaps critical people on holiday.

They were concentrating on one area in Italy and didn't realise so many brought it in from Spain.

And BJ is not really good at making decisions.

Some actual data starting to come in from Scotland on the schools debate reported on here BBC News - Tens of thousands of Scottish pupils absent from school
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53983392

It says 117 Scottish pupils have tested positive since schools returned on 17 August. Having just looked at the government data site, there appear to be just over 1000 positive tests in total in Scotland since 17 August. 117 out of 1,000 being in a roughly 12 year age band sounds about the proportion I'd expect tbh, so no sign from that data, yet at least, of significant school spreading. It's annoying though that they appear to know how many school aged children have tested positive in this period but don't publish that age breakdown (unless it's on one of these Scottish only sites I've not really looked at much?) I'd like to see whether there's a change in the proportion of cases among school aged children and parent aged people after schools go back. But you can't tell that from the data on the main government site.

Whitty might have been correct in the logic, but they didn’t have the right information to show the vast numbers already infected in the country as at early March.

@Firefliess

Some actual data starting to come in from Scotland on the schools debate reported on here BBC News - Tens of thousands of Scottish pupils absent from school www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-53983392

It says 117 Scottish pupils have tested positive since schools returned on 17 August. Having just looked at the government data site, there appear to be just over 1000 positive tests in total in Scotland since 17 August. 117 out of 1,000 being in a roughly 12 year age band sounds about the proportion I'd expect tbh, so no sign from that data, yet at least, of significant school spreading. It's annoying though that they appear to know how many school aged children have tested positive in this period but don't publish that age breakdown (unless it's on one of these Scottish only sites I've not really looked at much?) I'd like to see whether there's a change in the proportion of cases among school aged children and parent aged people after schools go back. But you can't tell that from the data on the main government site.

I don't think you can read that from those data. People tend to only get tested when symptomatic. If we take the assumption that children are more likely to be asymptomatic than adults, then we can assume that a disproportionate amount of children are actually positive, as opposed to testing positive.

I'm not saying that's definitely the case, but it would certainly be one interpretation of the figures.

@Nellode The article also states that 40,000 Scottish children have been tested in the last 2 weeks, which means there's a tiny positivity ratio among Scottish children - less than 0.5% - which doesn't suggest that's there's lots of asymptomatic children around (not yet at least)

A long-time lurker here. Can I just say thank you to all the knowledgeable posters on this thread for all their wisdom and patience in explaining the statistics and the data. Much appreciated in the midst of all the mayhem everywhere else. I have for some time taken the view that one of the main indicators on how we are doing as a nation is the number of people in hospital with covid. Can anyone suggest an explanation why, after a long and gradual reduction in numbers, the figure in hospital for England shot up today from 305 to 472, an increase of over 50%.

@serialgrannie I noticed too.... I had a look at the NW and they've had an increase in hospitalisation and ICU occupancy too....😕

@serialgrannie

A long-time lurker here. Can I just say thank you to all the knowledgeable posters on this thread for all their wisdom and patience in explaining the statistics and the data. Much appreciated in the midst of all the mayhem everywhere else. I have for some time taken the view that one of the main indicators on how we are doing as a nation is the number of people in hospital with covid. Can anyone suggest an explanation why, after a long and gradual reduction in numbers, the figure in hospital for England shot up today from 305 to 472, an increase of over 50%.

I think the 305 (and the figures the 2 days prior) was wrong probably due to some nhs trusts not reporting the data over the weekend. Before the weekend the figures were in the low 400 range so not such a jump

Can anyone suggest an explanation why, after a long and gradual reduction in numbers, the figure in hospital for England shot up today from 305 to 472, an increase of over 50%.

Some hospitals do not submit their numbers on weekends/bank holidays. Reported figures for yesterday (305 patients) or Saturday, August 29 (280!?) are almost certainly wrong.

Week on week variances (e.g. Tuesday to Tuesday) are more helpful to assess medium-term trends.

@serialgrannie - the figures haven't changed much, it was 474 on 24th August, dropped a little for 2 days. What happened is several days from 26th onward with no data added from several NHS trusts, who all did a catch-up today. So where there's some churn of exits and new admissions, it got lost. The numbers haven't come down as we would hope they would on previous trend, but they do tend to vary a little. So no need to worry just yet.

Thanks for the explanations. Let's hope we start to see a downward trend again soon.

As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too

how ??

As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too

The economy in every country has been hit irrespective of the measures they took, the amount of damage is much more correlated with the type of economy - service and tourism hit much more than industrial export countries. So of course UK and Spain are hit much harder and Taiwan and South Korea in economic terms, there were no measures that the UK or Spain could have taken that would have led to similar economic performance.

Most Western countries are heavily dependent on services, the hospitality & leisure sectors, even countries like Germany

The relationship between deaths and the economy is pretty obvious:

When there are a lot of deaths, most people are reluctant to go out to work, or to non-essential shops;
they definitely don't go to restaurants, hotels, cinemas etc regardless of what government rules are

Even worse if they feel the government don't are blundering around

Even after deaths are back to normal, many people feel to nervous to go out and spend on non-essentials

In contrast, when there haven't been too many deaths and the government acted competently, people soon pick up normal life again
e.g. The German economy, restaurants etc picked up quickly because there were only 9,200 deaths in a country of 83 million
e.g. the New Zealand economy has picked up

Both these very different economies - NZ and Germany - are predicted to have less frop in GDP by the end of 2020 than countries like the UK with a lot of deaths and where the public hasn't much trust in the government

@MarshaBradyo

So depressing.

But I remember Chris Whitty talking about waiting for the right moment to suppress. Too early and it wouldn’t be as effective. He put up the curve to talk around it.

Was that the wrong approach or is it more nuanced than that?

I remember that, and that is when I started to get seriously worried about the ‘science’ at the heart of government decision making and SAGE. There is no model on earth that could have been so accurate as to pinpoint a ‘right moment’ to ‘manage’ the curve - in a new pandemic where so much was and still is unknown, and the amount of suppression unknown from lockdown actions.

They were talking utter BS. Unless any good minds on here can persuade me otherwise!

I also still have yet to see any good argument that letting Covid19 run through a population for any length of time, from a few weeks to longer, resulted in a more successful outcome for anyone. The most successful countries suppressed it strongly at the earliest opportunity, South Korea, New Zealand, to some extent Germany, Greece...

Re the economy, there are many factors like other good posters have said. Very interesting to look into.

Psychology plays a big part - consumer confidence, public using services.

Direct impact - Meat factories for example had big outbreaks and as a result have been hard hit, not from lockdown, but the virus itself directly.

Localities - in some places the tourism is up, everyone booking out hotels for staycations. Places that are not so attractive to locals, like beach areas in Spain relying on big overseas numbers, are down.

Businesses that were teetering anyway - the pandemic has exposed their weakness and decisions made earlier, but would have collapsed at some point anyway like Debenhams in Ireland.

Temporary vs Long term economic damage - many sectors will bounce back, but some may not (everyone is jittery about inner city services because commuting has crumbled)

Whitty and the SAGE nudgers were looking at compliance:
they didn't think the public would comply until scared by a lot of deaths actually happening

However, COVID lockdown was most effective the earlier it was imposed, because of the basic mathematics of exponential growth

In Europe, including the UK, compliance was pretty good, even in countries like Denmark, Norway, Germany where lockdown was imposed at a stage when they had v few deaths
e.g. the early lockdown is credited as the main factor in Germany's low death toll
and most analysts abroad blame the late lockdown for the IUK's high toll

The modeller James Annan has investigated what would happen to the UK and Germany

if lockdown dates had been just 1 week different:

1. UK 1 week earlier
   ==> deaths 11k instead of 43 k (as of the date of his calculation)

2. Germany 1 week later:
   ==> deaths 34k instead of 9k

https://bskiesresearch.wordpress.com/2020/05/12/the-human-cost-of-delaying-lockdown/
https://bskiesresearch.wordpress.com/2020/05/14/why-cant-the-germans-be-more-like-us/

As well as saving lives, countries controlling the outbreak effectively may have adopted the best economic strategy too.
I wondered if in fact it was that the hardest hit countries were forced into the most damaging lock down.
My gut feeling is this is a virus so there are more likely to be biological reasons for different impacts in different countries (less severe strains, population genetics, diet, vit D levels, infection by similar viruses conferring partial immunity etc) rather than countries with low rates have "done better".

@BigChocFrenzy yes the Government were also saying that there was only a 12 week compliance window, and that doing it too early would result in a second wave.

In my view two assumptions not based on real evidence or numbers. Even now it looks like there are not ‘second waves’ but a continual tidal flow.

And on compliance, hundreds of academics wrote an open letter to SAGe and the Government in March saying that there was no evidence at all to back up that people would only adhere to a 12 week period of compliance for lockdown.

It was based on assumptions, and unlike this thread, not a critical impartial analysis of evidence, numbers or data.

@BigChocFrenzy I also remember a blog post citing historic periods for the Spanish Flu - and looking at if China had locked down earlier - and these I found very persuasive visually that early lockdown = less cases, less deaths, less impact overall

Because of the exponential growth of the virus.

And because by buying time we buy more knowledge. Here it is, from early March...

medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-die-f4d3d9cd99ca