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 📈 📉 📊 👍

Wouldn't be popular I meant!

@tootyfruitypickle this article is 4 weeks old but gives you some answers re Belgium. It doesn't say how enforced which would be interesting:

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/d5fb0b2a-6d1d-4ccb-a349-30fccc2602d5

My friend has been trying to book a test in Rugby (West Midlands). Taken all day to get a test offered and has been offered... Aberdeen or Inverness. Rugby has a mobile testing site in town today til Saturday.

"How are schools meant to know if a parent is clinically vulnerable, though? Obviously we would contact parents of vulnerable students, but we don't store data on parent health conditions as a matter of course.

I suppose parents could let schools know if they are concerned, but if parents are expecting an automatic phonecall, they are likely not to get one."

We had a return to school questionnaire, asking if we'd been on holiday, had symptoms, lived with anyone with symptoms, had anyone vulnerable living at home etc

Could your friend try just turning up? Worked for us yesterday!

@Augustbreeze

Could your friend try just turning up? Worked for us yesterday!

Trouble is we don't know where the mobile testing site is. Need to get the jungle drums working.

mobile.twitter.com/10DowningStreet/status/1303731779971493889

This is the link to the hexmap that was shown as one of the slides.

@itsgettingweird
No it's actual numbers of people admitted per day. So yes when the number of people is that small the percentage increase is less relevant because it's from such low numbers. So it makes it sound much more dramatic than it is. But it's useful for identifying the trend, especially if the numbers get larger...
mobile.twitter.com/john_actuary/status/1303375727392428039

So for NW England, for example, with the number doubling every 11 days you can estimate future numbers if (big IF) that trend was to continue. But that's how small numbers can become very big ones quite quickly if the growth is exponential and continues to grow at that rate...

The problem with testing everyone regularly is the rate of false negatives and false positives. It gives reassurance which is not always justified. People are also testing positive long after they have stopped being infectious so you could end up confining people to their home and making them miss weeks of work or school for no good reason.

This looks like potentially good news though amongst all the gloom www.cebm.net/covid-19/declining-covid-19-case-fatality-rates-across-all-ages-analysis-of-german-data/

[quote CoffeeandCroissant]@itsgettingweird
No it's actual numbers of people admitted per day. So yes when the number of people is that small the percentage increase is less relevant because it's from such low numbers. So it makes it sound much more dramatic than it is. But it's useful for identifying the trend, especially if the numbers get larger...
mobile.twitter.com/john_actuary/status/1303375727392428039

So for NW England, for example, with the number doubling every 11 days you can estimate future numbers if (big IF) that trend was to continue. But that's how small numbers can become very big ones quite quickly if the growth is exponential and continues to grow at that rate...[/quote]
Thanks. I couldn't get my head around the maths.

So that would be for example 45 people one week and 54 the next? So for whole of SE that isn't too bad currently. Cases slowly creeping though.

And it appears contract tracing details being provided in libs etc will become law rather than voluntary guidance which I've been saying should happen for weeks.

What's the point of rest and trace of leaving details is voluntary 🤦🏼‍♀️

I'm GDPR days officer for ds swim club. The amount of work I had to do to ensure each parent provided details, to make sure data is safe but also tell parents by providing it they agree to it being used by us, local public health and maybe leisure centre if there is cases. Explaining how registers are kept electronically and each lane is a bubble etc.

It's just common sense!

A preprint exploring the impact on lives and mental health of Australian adolescents. Demonstrates how important it is to keep the schools going.

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.07.20190124v1

France in at 8577 today. Deaths still seem to be averaging just over 30 per day. But hospitalisations are increasing, including in ICU. Until now people have been pretty blasé about that just saying "oh but nowhere near as many as last time", but today I heard people worrying about it. Several of them were pointing out that the average ICU stay is 26 days for covid and so it won't take long before we're out of capacity.

In other news, my boys' tests came back negative. Phew!

"*How are schools meant to know if a parent is clinically vulnerable, though? Obviously we would contact parents of vulnerable students, but we don't store data on parent health conditions as a matter of course.

I suppose parents could let schools know if they are concerned, but if parents are expecting an automatic phonecall, they are likely not to get one."*

I saw that a local school has had a y1 child came down with symptoms at the end of last week, result was positive on Sundays. The letter quoted in the news article about it was lovely and asked any CV parents who were concerned to get in touch so individual could be discussed.

But it highlights the urgent need for fast tests. If the child (or adult) was still waiting 5 days later, as I've seen in a few places, any child they'd infected before they developed symptoms could be by then infecting others.

Research from CEBM looking at declining fatality rates across all ages

www.cebm.net/covid-19/declining-covid-19-case-fatality-rates-across-all-ages-analysis-of-german-data/

Comparing death rates in Germany with those in the UK is like comparing caviare with frogspawn though. The Germans have had a much more effective lockdown system, testing and tracing regime and far lower death rate even at the April peak than the UK and other European countries.

Guardian has done a factcheck :

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/09/coronavirus-testing-the-pm-fact-checked

[quote MarcelineMissouri]Research from CEBM looking at declining fatality rates across all ages

www.cebm.net/covid-19/declining-covid-19-case-fatality-rates-across-all-ages-analysis-of-german-data/[/quote]
.....
That decrease in CFR within age groups is again because we are testing far more than we were at peak, when we had far more cases
So we are picking up more of the cases with no sympoms
That applies to all European countries and is nothing new

Thanks big choc. I hadn't thought of that but of course you are right!

Asymptomatic cases aren’t counted in the CFR. It is only diagnosed cases with symptoms. IFR includes asymptomatic cases as well. So picking up more cases without symptoms shouldn’t affect the CFR.

But CFR will be picking up lots more cases with milder symptoms though surely?

@SarahMused

Asymptomatic cases aren’t counted in the CFR. It is only diagnosed cases with symptoms. IFR includes asymptomatic cases as well. So picking up more cases without symptoms shouldn’t affect the CFR.

.... I don't think that's correct

CFR is Case Fatality Rate, where a "Case" is anyone diagnosed with the disease,
i.e. a positive test, in the case of COVID
not necessarily having symptoms

Of course people with milder forms of the disease not requiring any treatment would also be found with more testing

So picking up more cases without symptoms shouldn’t affect the CFR

That is correct, but remember the rules for obtaining a test were not just "symptoms", you had to have significant enough symptoms to appear at a medical setting. If you just isolated with a bit of a temperature and a cough you never appeared as a case. So there were symptoms, but it wasn't counted in the cases stats at the time as no positive test, now there will be a positive test, hence counted.