Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 18

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 18 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, English regions & LAs
Imperial UK weekly LAs, cases / 100k, table, map, hotspots
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
Zoe Uk data
UK govt pressers Slides & data
ICNRC Intensive Care National Audit & Research reports
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
Alama Personal COVID risk assessment

==> Our STUDIES Corner

@pussycatinboots nope! Crazy. Friday was day 5 so too late after that. Ds is still unwell although has perked up today and my chest has felt worse today. Its all in my sinuses though as my head and teeth are very painful which is how viruses go with me.

@SaltySosha

There is no evidence that any DC or teachers have caught Coronavirus in school.

@Ecosse where have u seen data that it is only a small minority hospitals in the country?

I look at the gov dashboard

Looking at the England graph it's going up, as it is in every region in the north and even the south east who's in patients have gone from 31 to 56 in 12 days! I can't see the data for the midlands or London for some reason.

@PrayingandHoping

Given that there are tens of thousands of hospital beds in the South-East, 56 patients is nothing. It will simply be the result of a local outbreak- possibly even in one care home!

@Ecosse yes I understand that it's a v small minority but considering it's only ever gone downwards it is noticeable it is upwards

It's not a local local issue. Across the board councils across the south east as seeing an increase in cases. Some worse than others. But even areas that had been on zero cases fairly consistently are now posting cases constantly

Cases are rising, but from a very low base, only a tiny % of March-April situation

However, we can see from France & Spain how quickly cases can rocket even from a low base and with the added knowledge about COVID we have today

The situation is not yet serious, but could become so if the govt and / or public get complacent and stop taking precautions.

Also, winter is likely to see a rise, which all European countries will need to take advance action to keep within safe limits.
We need to enter winter from a low infections base, with systems in place and the situation under control

To give hospital numbers some perspective, not all admissions will be people actively suffering from Covid. A proportion will be people admitted with other conditions that are subsequently found to test positive and may not ever display symptoms. Obviously it is concerning that hospital numbers are rising a little but not all of these people will be blue-lighted in with breathing difficulties as seen back in March and April.

Watch ICU maybe even more than total hospitalisations

[quote PrayingandHoping]@Ecosse yes I understand that it's a v small minority but considering it's only ever gone downwards it is noticeable it is upwards

It's not a local local issue. Across the board councils across the south east as seeing an increase in cases. Some worse than others. But even areas that had been on zero cases fairly consistently are now posting cases constantly [/quote]
Yes my area is one.

0 cases for a few weeks. Crept up to 2-3 a week. 7 last week and 14 this week.

I am SE but more S central!

It is worrying. Not so much current figures but if it doubles each week for 4-5 weeks that's really high numbers.

And there is no evidence it's a local outbreak. That's just speculation. What we have is the raw data that cases are increasing and so are admissions.

Illustrating yet again the need for full sick pay and isolation pay until the Covid crisi is over

• we hear about big clusters like this, but not the 10s of 1000s of single incidents where people choose keeping their family fed & housed over isolating

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-54091419

Workers at a chicken factory at the centre of a Covid-19 outbreak say colleagues turned up for work despite being unwell during the pandemic.

Banham Poultry in Norfolk closed last monthh_ and more than 100 staff have since tested positive for the virus.

One worker told the BBC "people were afraid to take sick leave, because sick pay is so low"

Tweet from Dr Zoe Hyde. I note PE was cancelled, has anyone heard anything about this being a high risk activity? Dd is still doing all her usual contact school sports with no distancing whereas friends have children who are doing PE in a more distanced way.

Forgot the other picture

Hospital admissions are starting to rise across the country, faster in some areas than others but infection rates are higher in some places than others.

HCP are moved around if necessary but where possible they stay in the same health authority. It's expensive to have a "flying squad" type unit shipped away to a hotel somewhere. The other thing that happens is that new admissions are directed to another hospital, as they have been at several hospitals during the first wave. This spreads cases around to where staff are and as visiting needs to stop it doesnt matter so much if the patients are not near home.

Deaths should be lower at the end of summer but unless the young start acting responsibly there are still going to be a lot of them, this has got into the care homes again.

What you can do - get your vitamin D supplements ready and start taking them in October, stock up with 2 weeks worth of easy meals in case you are ill, sort out emergency childcare arrangements. Eat heathily and if overweight try and lose a few pounds.

God help those needing other health care, waiting lists will get even longer.

If your school has not yet required masks demand to know why not.

@Reastie

Tweet from Dr Zoe Hyde. I note PE was cancelled, has anyone heard anything about this being a high risk activity? Dd is still doing all her usual contact school sports with no distancing whereas friends have children who are doing PE in a more distanced way.

... PE can be a higher risk when indoors in larger groups, especially with insufficient SD and ventilation

At my gym, the 2 rooms for classes are large spaces with 5.4 m ceilings and well-ventilated, but groups still limited to 12 or 14 (2 slightly different room sizes)

Those school rules are common to most German states, with masks for at least secondary in corridors and on stairs
One of the most highly populated states has mandatory face masks in classrooms too

Currently German cases are stable, with 7-day national incidence around 10/100,000 for a few weeks now, so the RKI are very watchful, but no additional measures

Some schools have been ft since 3 August
No sign that schools are driving cases - the numbers of cases reflect local community levels

I should add that:

German schools have received extra money: extra staff, laptops, cleaning, training for online teaching
This is the easiest thing to do, when the will is there

The most vulnerable staff, about 3% of the total, are allowed to wfh
Masks where not compulsory are at least optional throughout the school for staff and students
There is not the same tradition of forcing attendance of unwell children just for school stats - Gove didn't come here - so less of a shock for parents to be told to keep any sick child home.

[quote Ecosse]@SaltySosha

There is no evidence that any DC or teachers have caught Coronavirus in school.[/quote]
Come now, that just isn't true.

It is unscientific (why should children and schools be magically exempt from transmission), flying against common sense, and there is evidence accumulating to suggest the opposite, albeit slowly and piece by piece, as schools have so far been open only in a very limited and speciifc way.

I am not sure how the situation currently is not serious. We are at the point where people are contracting the virus and having no clue where it came from, in many cases. We do not have clusters, we have cases popping up randomly in the community, meaning that there is a stable, undetected base from which the virus is spreading. The curve of increased cases is looking like a classic exponential, and from what I see, we are not taking sufficient action to stop it. Even my very low case neck of the wood is tracking its own little independent exponential, up from near zero per week, to close to twenty. Currently, growth is accelerating, and until it starts at the very least decelerating, I am not going to say everything looks rosy.

To give hospital numbers some perspective, not all admissions will be people actively suffering from Covid

Many of them hit by buses

Thanks choc. Dd does PE with 40 other children, but for now it’s outdoors...

Very good post @IloveJKRowling at 16:55.

Completely agree, and what many teachers have been worried about.

schoolsweek.co.uk/ons-figures-reveal-65-covid-related-deaths-in-education/

We don't know that any of these teachers caught it in schools for sure, and no-one is ever going to investigate that because that would open up the DfE to legal actions, I'd have thought, especially now that UK schools are going back against the best practice for schools reopening. There are lots of teachers who are sure they caught it in school in March, though (anecdata).

The PHE study of schools in June/July showed that there was transmission in schools (in all permutations, student to staff, staff to staff, student to student, staff to staff etc). The headline is there were low numbers, yes, because hardly any children were back and they were doing SD.

www.gov.uk/government/news/study-finds-very-low-numbers-of-covid-19-outbreaks-in-schools?fbclid=IwAR3cenkrs5dR5XU3-7vkzRSBM35VlLx8CzqZ8em9z15b4oV-81X5hG0dAII

My daughter has gone from (in June/July) under 15 children in a class SD, individual desks, in a small bubble with 2 members of staff (no kids got sick over 4 weeks) to being back a week, no SD, 30 kids in the classroom, bubbles which are 4x the size of June/July (roughly) and 4 kids are already off sick one week in.

It's not rocket science.

The reason rates have (largely) stayed low is because people have generally been doing SD, masks etc. THIS IS NOT HAPPENING AT ALL IN SCHOOLS. My kids - despite DD1 going back in June/July, haven't been ill since March. Now the littlest has a runny nose. We're not going anywhere else, she can only have caught it in school. I hope it's not coronavirus, but if kids are transmitting other illnesses in schools obviously they'll also be transmitting coronavirus.

It's like we are sat watching the inevitable unfold without the power to do anything to stop it.

Agreed, it's like we're back in feb/March with the excel list showing our deaths tracking 2/3 weeks behind Italy waiting for the inevitable

I'm still taking pregnacare breastfeeding supplements- would anyone recommend also taking extra vit D or will the supplements cover me?

I'm in a secondary school and starting to feel anxious at how vulnerable I am we have already lost 2 family members this year and one is suffering from long haul covid.

German schools have received extra money: extra staff, laptops, cleaning, training for online teaching
There is not the same tradition of forcing attendance of unwell children

This is why we cannot compare Germany, when the conditions are so different. I suspect that German class sizes are probably smaller in general anyway, schools better funded and equipped.

I think we might be better off comparing with Israel.

www.nytimes.com/2020/08/04/world/middleeast/coronavirus-israel-schools-reopen.html

I wish teachers would strike, I, as a parent, would be there with them protesting (well, socially distanced with a mask of course).

And I cannot choose to make their working environment safer by keeping my kids at home as I've been told it's send them in or fines and losing places.