Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 19

[BigChocFrenzy]

Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 19

Welcome to thread 19 of the daily updates

Resource links:

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
Modelling real number of infections February to date
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 ⏮

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

My objection is to a "herd immunity" approach without any vaccine,
because of the 20-25% proven infection "overshoot" we've discussed before

But this is the somewhat dodgy part, the overshoot happens when the herd immunity is uncontrolled, there are ways to influence the overshoot as you say, although you use vaccines to help, other methods worked - such ensuring that everyone is infected with low doses and the more vulnerable you are the more protected - variolation dropped smallpox to 1-2% from 30% death rates.

It certainly feels impractical to me to isolate vulnerable, but it would be nice to see more evidence and models of what would actually happen so as to refute "if isolating everyone is the approach, why not just isolate the vulnerable" ?

Derby The quality of the messenger affects the quality of the message

I value the alternative pov from Hendrik Streeck in Germany

• I trust his long record, intentions and hence his expressed concerns for society as a whole, if SD continues or tightens here.

I agree with you somewhat about Heneghan, but his views and Gupta's continual playing down of Covid were obvious from the start of the pandemic,
whereas many others of equal or greater stature, e.g. Spiegelhalter, don't display an agenda, other than reporting accurate facts & calculating risks.

Sikora is very different and I am disappointed that Henneghan & Gupta would join with him so publicly:

His description of the NHS (Newsnight 2017) as "the last bastion of communism" among many other statements,
his careless claim to the HoC of being a prof at Imperial - he hadn't been for 5 years -
who he has on twitter - Farage and other hard right figures
... I reject anything with his name on it

Sadiq Khan doesnt trust the figures for London - testing inadequate so looks at other things

"For example [the number of] 111 calls, calls to GPs, those who are blood donors and also hospital admissions.

"So we fear the number of cases in our city could be far larger than is known."

@sirfredfredgeorge

*My objection is to a "herd immunity" approach without any vaccine, because of the 20-25% proven infection "overshoot" we've discussed before*

But this is the somewhat dodgy part, the overshoot happens when the herd immunity is uncontrolled, there are ways to influence the overshoot as you say, although you use vaccines to help, other methods worked - such ensuring that everyone is infected with low doses and the more vulnerable you are the more protected - variolation dropped smallpox to 1-2% from 30% death rates.

It certainly feels impractical to me to isolate vulnerable, but it would be nice to see more evidence and models of what would actually happen so as to refute "if isolating everyone is the approach, why not just isolate the vulnerable" ?

... Those "other ways" and "low doses" are unproven, outside of a lab

With a country of 67 million, including 15 million vulnerable, it is reckless to try out unproven theories and just hope it turns out OK

A country can't take the same kind of risks as a start-up tech firm

However, if GB does get so bored with SD that it chooses herd immunity,
I suppose it would be a useful guinea pig for other densely populate countries in Europe to observe
and easy to isolate from the rest of the world if infection gets out of control,

already i thought hospital admissions had slowed in London?

I may be wrong as I'm sure I heard it here?

"why not just isolate the vulnerable" ?

If we can't explain to someone why isolation of 15 million isn't feasible, especially if infection is rampant in the other 52 million,
then either they aren't listening to anything except getting back to "their normal", or we are too crap to try explaining anything else.

Any 'managed' herd immunity approach surely risks spiralling out of control very quickly because of exponential growth. A relatively small percentage of the population had Covid in March and April and this level put our healthcare services under severe strain.

This summer has been somewhat of a herd immunity experiment in that we didn't wait until the virus was completely suppressed like e.g. New Zealand before encouraging people to get back to work, shops and pubs. The young generally socialised more during this time and spread it amongst themselves and more of them will now be immune. But now it's started to grow rapidly and spread to other sections of society and we need to turn the tap off.

I don't see how we can do any more experiments with the young spreading it between themselves over winter without our hospitals becoming disaster zones. Come next Spring, vaccine or no, we'll be able to lift restrictions again. A later winter vaccine may give room for manoeuvre a little earlier.

@BigChocFrenzy
@TheSunIsStillShining

Thank you. I’ll ponder your posts when I have some time later.

383 new cases in Scotland, with 7.6% of newly tested being positive.

London doesnt look too bad, the published data has not shown hospital admissions rising that fast. However clearly the mayor thinks there is more going on, maybe when the figures for the last few days are published we'll find out why.

Some doctors in London have recently been reassigned to Covid ICUs starting in December, it's odd.

@BatSegundo

Thanks *@NeurotrashWarrior*

What do you think of children being at the bottom of the list for testing? I really think that we need to keep it out of Special Schools like yours. Although deaths in children are very low, those that have occurred have largely been amongst the very vulnerable. I think Special schools should be given extra test kits for this reason (there also good arguments around minimising isolation for those least able to understand it and where parents really need the respite).

@BatSegundo

An issue is that: we have a higher staff per pupil ratio. So in a school of 100-150 you can easily have 40-60 staff members, including part time staff, not including any therapists employed outside the school.

That's an issue because, even with bubbles, we can quickly reach a situation where too many staff are off in normal circumstances. With staff potentially SI from family/ child cases or closed bubbles at home, plus normal illnesses, plus potentially a long dose of Covid this could be a huge issue.

Supply staff can't easily be wheeled in in those settings.

SD can't effectively happen well with the pupils I am trying personally as I cover staff ppa, but it's still hard. Many pupils are unaware of personal space and some need comforting or physical interventions. I teach some y6 who feel like a 2 year old inside. Staff try to SD with each other but in some situations it's challenging.

We have smaller classes and actually do a lot outside anyway but I think this is offset by the number of adults in a class.

In primary we aren't wearing masks. I don't think it would be an issue to do so in my setting but obviously in some settlings it could be.

I do feel we could wear visors if trained properly; staff are deliberately and accidentally spat at.

And this is besides any health vulnerabilities. There's an extra difficultly that some children can't describe how they feel.

Yes, I feel sen schools should have access to more tests for pupils and staff but I wouldn't be surprised if local authorities are prioritising access. Certainly the cases we've had in staff, so far resulting in closed bubbles, we were able to use our school tests.

No indoor visits to others private homes in Scotland.
At least teenagers 12-17 are allowed to meet up in a group of 6 outside, not just from 2 households.

@Sunshinegirl82

I'm at work so haven't had an opportunity to review the full report on reinfections but the individual who unfortunately suffered from severe disease the second time, does the proximity to the two positive tests combined with his severe illness not suggest an immune issue in that individual?

Obviously we don't know how widespread immune issues of that nature might be but it doesn't seem to present as a typical response. Again, apologies if I have missed something in the full report.

I've read the original paper - they tested him for immunodeficiencies and couldn't find anything wrong with him.

Thanks Neuro The extra adults are another compounding factor. I am planning to make enquiries in my own LA to see how we're protecting Special Schools.

@Perihelion

No indoor visits to others private homes in Scotland. At least teenagers 12-17 are allowed to meet up in a group of 6 outside, not just from 2 households.

No household mixing indoors? That seems quite a big difference compared to England. Have Wales and NI announced their measures yet?

Where Nicola goes, Boris follows...

A fair part of the West of Scotland including Glasgow were already under that restriction and the whole of Scotland was a maximum of 6 from 2 households, not just 6 people in total. So the 6 teenagers outside is a relaxation for them. Under 12s are allowed to play outside in unrestricted numbers now too.
Feel really quite flat even though I expected it. I did a flyby visit to my in-laws yesterday as I didn't think it would be allowed by the weekend

Can still meet in gardens and hospitality venues in groups of 6 from 2 households.

@clarexbp

I haven't read the reinfection report but I'm wondering how many of the six they have identified could be errors...?

Is it possible that occasional errors creep in? Person A's swab (which is actually negative) gets mislabelled/put in the wrong machine/contaminated by another swab and they end up getting Person B's (positive) result...?

Subsequently, person A then actually gets COVID and it looks like they've been reinfected when they haven't. (Or the reverse of course - correct positive first time round, followed by false positive second time).

I've never worked in a lab, so I don't know how possible these errors are, but I've worked in lots of other environments run by humans, even very competent ones, and mistakes do just creep in.

Even if mistakes are incredibly rare - say 1 in 100,000 swabs, then worldwide that would mean there would now have been over 300 errors like this (Worldometers reckons over 30 million positive tests worldwide). Of those 300 people, it's entirely plausible that 6 have, at some point, caught COVID and returned a genuine positive test.

The one who ended up in the hospital was as close to being certain as you can that it was a genuine reinfection. They even went so far as doing DNA testing on both samples to make sure they both came from the patient. The biggest source of false positives would be all of the amplified cDNA fragments in the environment from the PCR tests, since they sequenced the full viral genome we can exclude that as a possibility.

No household mixing indoors? That seems quite a big difference compared to England. Have Wales and NI announced their measures yet?

NI announced restrictions yesterday, including a ban on visiting households indoors.

So Boris has seen evidence that the spread is due to late night drinking - does anyone know where that information has been published?

@BigChocFrenzy

"why not just isolate the vulnerable" ?

If we can't explain to someone why isolation of 15 million isn't feasible, especially if infection is rampant in the other 52 million,
then either they aren't listening to anything except getting back to "their normal", or we are too crap to try explaining anything else.

Exactly this! How do you do it? How can you separate two little boys from their daddy who has 2 health issues that make him at much greater risk, for example? This is just one personal situation that I know of but the vulnerable are just not the elderly and those who may be vulnerable for a short while only while eg being treated for cancer.

@sirfredfredgeorge

So Boris has seen evidence that the spread is due to late night drinking - does anyone know where that information has been published?

as a note Madrid has also added this to their guidelines so not sure what bojo has seen but sounds like other countries are taking the same approach

@BatSegundo

Thanks Neuro The extra adults are another compounding factor. I am planning to make enquiries in my own LA to see how we're protecting Special Schools.

And to add to this; as I'm sure in many schools, a large number of pupils are vulnerable from a safeguarding POV.

We had a significant increase in DV incidents and some pupils who are now in care as a result.

Some pupils have extremely challenging behaviour and parents rely on respite care and school.

So pupils are safer in school, school need to be safe for pupils and staff to keep us running.

If I'm honest, testing is the strongest protection we have to rely on.

No household mixing indoors? That seems quite a big difference compared to England.

Large parts of England currently have this, eg the NE.

Not allowed to mix outdoors either!

BJ and Gove said people should WFH again if they can