Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 17

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 17 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, English regions & LAs
MSAO Map of English cases
Cases Tracker England Local Government
ONS MSAO Map English deaths
CovidMessenger live update by council district in England
Scot gov Daily data
Scotland TravellingTabby LAs, care homes, hospitals, tests, t&t
PH Wales LAs, tests, ONS deaths
NI Dashboard
UK govt pressers Slides & data
NHS t&t England & UK testing Weekly stats
R estimates UK & English regions
PHE Surveillance report infections & watchlists each Thursday
ONS England infection surveillance report each Friday
Datasets for ONS surveillance reports
ONS Roundup deaths, infections & economic reports
ECDC rolling 14-day incidence EEA & UK
Worldometer UK page
Our World in Data test positivity etc, DIY graphs
FT DIY graphs compare deaths, cases, raw / million pop
Covidly.com world summary & graphs

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

Thank you for this thread.
I love a bit of reasoned debate and pretty graphs

Re the nature of Covid:
It is increasingly understood to be a disease of blood clotting and vascular problems, and respiratory symptoms are just that: symptoms, not the underlying problem.
Aggressively treating inflammation (that's why steroids improve mortality) and blood clotting has been the main stay of improved treatment.

@Oldbagface

When Van Tam is concerned we all should be. I trust his judgment implicitly.

Anyone else feel the creep of exponential growth?

I agree. JVT is arguably the UK's leading expert on flu and preparing for seasonal and pandemic flu.

Yes, covid isn't "just flu" but the same ideas apply for controlling both.

On another note, I was really saddened and worried by the increase in daily cases to almost 3,000. It will be another day or so before the test results come through at council level, but I will post on this thread the breakdown of this ~3000 daily cases by council as soon as it is available.

I am eager to understand whether this almost doubling of cases over a few days is down to a relatively small number of areas or whether the issue is more widespread.

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Get coronavirus case numbers in your local council area straight to your inbox every day at www.covidmessenger.com

Place marking. This thread is great. Thanks

@Pacif1cDogwood

Thank you for this thread. I love a bit of reasoned debate and pretty graphs

Re the nature of Covid:
It is increasingly understood to be a disease of blood clotting and vascular problems, and respiratory symptoms are just that: symptoms, not the underlying problem.
Aggressively treating inflammation (that's why steroids improve mortality) and blood clotting has been the main stay of improved treatment.

.... Pacif1c iirc you are a GP ?

Kings College Prof Tim Specter (Zoe App) said on BBC's File on 4 that up to 60,000 are suffering Long COVID symptoms for > 3 months

The Royal College of GPs stated there should be a national network of clinics to provide post-COVID care & rehab,
but the Beeb says v few areas have such clinics atm

Do you know about resources, plans, timing to set these up ?

It's not strictly stats, because the paper doesn't seem to have been published yet, but has anyone seen this story?

www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/sports/ncaafootball/college-football-myocarditis-coronavirus.html

PD just reminded me of it when she mentioned the vascular nature of it.

Can non-BMJ members access this? It's a recent BMJ discussion of long covid.

"It is increasingly understood to be a disease of blood clotting and vascular problems, and respiratory symptoms are just that: symptoms, not the underlying problem."

That is a major difference to flu

• and illustrates why it is never good to catch a "novel" virus in the early stages of an epidemic, before doctors & scientists have worked out how it is affecting the body and how to treat this.

Hence also the issue of longterm health issues among the unfortunate small minority of COVID sufferers
and the need for extra care & rehab resources to support them

• and those who cannot work as normal may need financial support asap

@littleowl1

For anyone interested in the change week-over-week in the number of cases in their local council, I have compiled a table and attached it to this post. The data is as of 2 Sept as it takes 5-6 days for tests to be reported in the data at council level.

For anyone who would like to keep an eye on the number of cases in their area, I compile and send a daily email. You can sign up here: www.covidmessenger.com

I've signed up, will be useful. Thanks.

I wonder if testing not available message on the gov testing site will drive case numbers down in the coming days?

It is looking like the current system can't adequately support the number of tests being attempted
This must be improved before winter

It seems particularly daft to send unwell & possibly infected people on longer journeys, as they may stop for fuel, the loo etc particularly those with stomach problems

www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/08/englands-covid-testing-troubles-something-is-clearly-going-wrong

"if you haven’t received results from a drive-through test within 72 hours, then you should presume they’ve been lost.”

I've seen a number of posts on here where people have turned up at a local testing site and they seem to have plenty of capacity for testing, even if the website says no.

So is the problem with capacity of sites, processing capacity or a dodgy computer system?

Something that occurred to me yesterday was that the pillar 1 & 2 tests are done in different labs despite the fact that their capacity seems to be considered together. Is it possible that the NHS/PHE labs doing the pillar 1 testing have plenty of capacity, while the commercial labs doing the pillar 2 testing are over capacity?

PHE age / case stats to end August

Cases growing fastest in age group 10 - 29

The case rate for age 10-19 has quadrupled since early July
and tripled for age 20-29, with 7-day incidence of 26.5 / 100,000 people for that group

Cases rising only slowly for age group 40-49
and successively more slowly rising up the age groups
to level cases at age 70-79

while age 80 has dropped sharply from 11.2 to 6.2 / 100,000

• the major driver of low deaths

age 80 + has dropped sharply

@BigChocFrenzy

age 80 + has dropped sharply

My parents who are 80 plus are living like hermits. But at least they live together so are not totally alone. My 87 year old aunt chose end of life rather than risk an operation for a painful kidney stone after 6 months of isolation in her assisted living facility.

Older people can be kept alive by isolating them so they don't catch the virus but it has a huge impact on their quality of life.

@littleowl1 in terms of case growth it seems to be the 80:20 rules, so for those two weeks 57 LAs account for 80% of additional cases; 164 add the final 20%, 80 saw a week on week fall, and the balance had the same number.

However a decile analysis based on cases per 100,000 still shows a very clear upward drift across the piece. The deciles are by w/e each Sunday so the not an exact like for like for the two weeks in the graph, and of course w/e 06 sep is not yet complete in terms of confirmed cases - however as it has already passed 10,000 I'll take the risk in using it

Is there any proof of a lower death rate, really? In April, especially, so many people weren't getting tested, even if they were pretty unwell, let alone those with mild symptoms/asymptomatic. It's very likely in the first peak there were tens of thousands of new cases each day, but only a small proportion were being detected.

Thank you for these useful threads. I dip in and out so sorry if I've missed it but has anyone modelled what the true number of daily cases must have been in Feb, March and April, given that only hospital admissions (more or less) were being tested? It must be 10 to 20 times the recorded amount, surely? As @SansaSnark says, this would partially explain the "lower" death rate.

I have concerns about all the people who are saying about how hospital admissions and deaths are low at the moment so we don't need to be worried. People seem to have forgotten how quickly things changed in March.

Confirmed cases are now 3,000 per day but there are probably 2 to 3 times this number in reality. We weren't testing nearly as much in March but there's good evidence that cases were at least 100,000 per day by the time we went into lockdown on 23rd March. If we had a doubling time of 3 days back then, then there was probably a similar number of daily infections (6-9k) somewhere around 10th March.

I can't find hospital data from that early but daily deaths back then were still in single figures. I'm not trying to say that we are going to have a repeat of March and April but we definitely shouldn't be complacent just because hospitalisations and deaths are currently low.

My worry is that if cases start of being driven by younger age groups and that fans up to older ones, then by the time we get to rising death rates as a marker, there’s likely to be quite considerable community transmission. And this will be harder to get under control.

I think the public health authorities are on this. But the messaging from the government mixed with those that think admissions & deaths are the only measures worth looking at is a problem.

That's interesting that it's rising sharply in teens, but the 0-5, 5-9 groups are rising slower.

I wonder if it is they are less likely to be in contact (generally won't be going anywhere except school (too early to notice effect there) without parents, so not mass groups at the park), more likely to be asymptomatic, or whether they might be less likely to be tested.

I was just thinking that if I had an under 5yo, and we both had symptoms, then I'd be inclined to get me tested, and assume if I had it they had it too, and not put the little one through a test-ditto, doctors may be less inclined to put them through. It's not a pleasant test to put a little one through.

I think it would be very useful to introduce at minimum a weekly press conference with PM and Whitty and Valance. Things could go pretty bad again if many people don’t step back on their actions and be more mindful, I think that would show the govt taking this very seriously and keep it more in the minds of people who are doing what they like. I miss hearing the scientists’ perspectives even if much of it was reading between the lines in what they were saying. I feel everyone is left out to do what they like too much and the coming month, with cases rising, everyone back to work, schools back, universities due back, cold weather on the horizon, testing issues. It feels like this could be the perfect storm brewing if they don’t take some serious action quickly.

@Witchend - lack of ACE2 receptors for younger children has been suggested many times as a reason why they are much less likely to catch covid. Younger children show up in research time and again, and all over the world, as lower risk. It's not the same as flu and many other viruses that are spread more by younger children. Teenagers are less affected and look to spread slightly less than adults, but not to the degree of young children. Look at age distribution charts from any research anywhere in the world, younger are affected less; sleeping in the same house and shouting/ singing indoors (raves a very bad idea) can still drive teenage spread. I'm not sure why there's such a reluctance around mumsnet threads for varying susceptibility to be accepted.

I agree with bringing back Van Tam. I also think a weekly update on a Thursday/ Friday would be good; summarising what's in the surveillance report, what is of concerb, what is changing and why. I'd probably prefer Matt Hancock running it along with a range of advisers. They can wheel in Rishi Sunak when needed. Probably best not to even bother with Gavin (or replace him, even better).

MRex you’re probably right about Math Hancock being preferable to PM. He seems to be very serious atm about the risks and BJ usually doesn’t seem to always know what he’s talking about and is just full of slogans.

MH has turned up a lot on R4. He has stepped up I’d say

Sunak was good when he was around too

Scientists have been v good