Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 21

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 21 of the daily updates

Resource links:

Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, English regions & LAs
R estimates UK & English regions
Imperial UK weekly LAs, cases / 100k, table, map, hotspots
UK School statistics Attendance
Modelling real number of UK infections February to date
NHS England Hospital activity
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
PHE Surveillance reports & LA Local Watchlist Maps by LSOA
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 GB test positivity etc, DIY country graphs
FT DIY graphs compare deaths, cases, raw / million pop
Alama Personal COVID risk assessment
Local Mobility Reports for countries
UK Highstreet Tracker for cities & large towns Footfall, spend index, workers, visitors, economic recovery

⏭ Our STUDIES Corner ⏮

We welcome factual, data driven and analytical contributions
Please try to keep discussion focused on these
📈 📉 📊 👍

@IloveJKRowling
This is a crossover field between psychology and sociology. The main area of research is called social action theory.
(revisesociology.com/2016/07/13/social-action-theory-a-summary/#:~:text=Unlike%20structural%20theorists%2C%20social%20action,in%20turn%20the%20wider%20society.)

Here's a good first step from J.Hopkins Uni
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/6578/a1ea5374e13047236a6c06a985160f568bc1.pdf
there are references to studies in it that might be worth following up

They should be sense checking it though.
My la had gone down hugely like 50%. Yet had been predicted by imperial to rise.
Now its gone up 11 in the correction. And is up i think 13%.
Logically it didnt make sense for numbers to remain level when schools were in. It seemed unlikely that the 6 and closing at 10pm would effect so quickly as 5d average and up to 14d etc. (It was about 3w from mid march to peak 8 apr.
A lot of our la cases have been schoolkids though only 1 of them this week i think.

Thanks MRex and TheSun that's really helpful I'm going to look into this tonight (when kids are asleep). Will report back if I find anything useful.

@everythingthelighttouches

littleowl1 thank you, that’s very helpful.

That was a question I had actually, when the daily numbers are reported, how far back do they normally go to?

You seem to be indicating 5 days (as you mention going back to 28th) from 3rd Oct reporting. And those before that are the “catch-up “?

Have I understood correctly?

Hi @everythingthelighttouches

They go back all the way to start of the pandemic. Although the most recent 5 days are very volatile. It takes about 5 days for all postive tests from samples taken on any given date to be reported. So for example there are usually less than 100 positive cases for "yesterday" on any given day - but you know to disregard that as it will increase as more results are returned and recorded. That process takes about 5-6 days. It goes through phases. During the summer when things werent so busy, they were pretty much all in within 3 days. But its a lot slower now.

Listening to Tim Spector he is using the ZOE data, both from the app and testing of people who report symptoms ( both the 3 required by the standard testing and others).

@Augustbreeze he's talking about a different source of figures, not the government testing figures, but across the community so I presume Imperial College College/ONS study? Or from the Zoe App itself?
He's usually fairly negative, so I take this as a positive.

@littleowl1 thank you for the table. It’s very concerning that in some of the main hotspots eg Manchester and Liverpool, the cases were being underreported by such an extent. Even more concerning, there are no doubt some areas which were on the watchlist that perhaps should have been put under local restrictions if this data had been available for the surveillance report / at the gold meeting.

@Witchend

I've just looked at the UK page on worldometre. They've reassigned the excess from the 12k yesterday.

It's quite interesting.
22nd September it was just over 5k, the biggest it had been in the second wave.
But then 23rd jumps up to around 7k, where it stays since, barring a low one on 28th. Range, barring 28th, is 6835 to 7701.

Now obviously there may be more to add over the next few days, hopefully not too much, so it might not stay at around 7k and we may see a pattern once that's done.

.... I haven't checked to see whether Worldometers have correctly allocated all the tests found down the back of the PHE sofa

I love your table of councils, littleowl
Very useful

Concerns about the UK's mislaid several thousand cases:

Was the info about those missing positive tests always given to the infected people and to track & trace,
or
were the test results genuinely mislaid for weeks, i.e. so t&t and people who should have isolated have only just been informed
or
a mixture

==> Has anyone read which it was and has a linky, pls ?

They stated that people received their results safely. I'm not sure about T&T

I said somewhere not sure where. Doesnt this affect the data for the surveillance report?

I guess the clusters may or may not be affected depending on if this found data wasnt included anywhere or if they say log clusters in a separate place.

@littleowl1 can I ask (this is a very cheeky question!) if you are being paid to do the work you're doing - and if not, would you consider setting up Crowdfunding so that people can, because that turnaround on that data must have been a massive chunk of your weekend.
Thank you SO MUCH.

@IloveJKRowling
Just some thought on areas you might want to look into as well.

• I can't remember the actual study, but there was one about self-regulation and public health a while back. And the outcome was that self regulation protocols are long to establish.
• We learnt about how different social and psychological constructs and measures are needed in different scenarios: long/short term crisis; public health vr economy crisis. The baseline I can remember was that basically everything depended on 2 factors: 1. how was the crisis defined: long vs short; individual impact vs social impact,... 2. how was the strategy and measures communicated.

I can't remember deliberate wide-spread studies (by the nature of it, it would be hard to design and conduct), but I think there is a lot of analysis on past crisis managements from the 20th century.

The UK has been lacking strategy, clear communication and some messages were -from the beginning- detrimental. As if designed to do the opposite of what they were saying they were trying to achieve. My problem is that if we look at UK comms and actions through the lens of "how would I communicate if I wanted to achieve herd immunity without actually saying so (and with the premise that I have a threshold of infections/deaths that I don't want to tell the public about)" then a lot of things make sense.
If I try to look at it through the lense of "what the fuck are we doing (as a gov strategy)" than it also makes sense. So I get why the conspiracy nuts are drooling all over this.

Interesting points, TheSunIsStillShining. I'm inclined to agree, although I'd rather not!

As just an ordinary member of the public, trying my best to not catch this nasty virus, but balanced with trying to keep up some social contacts and support my community and the businesses therein, I would really just like some good, clear and up-to-date figures on how many cases of Covid there are in my postcode and in the larger local area. It would also help to know if they are concentrated in a particular setting, with which I wouldn't expect to have much contact, or distributed around the community. Then I can judge for myself whether to go out and spend money and try to help keep things going, or keep myself to myself for a while to try not to be one more case and one more possible spreader.

I realise things are complicated, but if the organisation whose job it is to provide figures, and not do much else, can't do so, then how can the public play their part?

You are better tipo just assume anyone could have it.
That one study with 1/200.
The gov figures are basically 100% incorrect.
We would have to assume it represents maybe only 10% of cases. Due to asymptomatic and different symptoms. Then inaccessibility of tests. People who ignore symptoms and those who wont test.
If you look at what happened with trump, many contacts have it too. Whereas here we wouldnt test unless symptoms.

@cathyandclare

They stated that people received their results safely. I'm not sure about T&T

... Yes, but I wasn't sure when those results were delivered And like you, have not heard whether t&t were informed at the time

I think this means the map is wrong?
When I add up all the cases for my borough for the past week (to 29 September) from the map, it comes to 299 cases but the total for the same period on the dashboard is 334. So think the cases have not been allocated by MSOA which makes the map a bit useless...
(There are more than 3 cases in every MSOA in my borough so it’s not because of the 0-2 cases thing)

thesunisStillShining I'd put it down to incompetence rather than some hidden herd immunity plan

Going by the exam fiasco, Brexit unpreparedness etc - incompetence and reacting in a panic to events,
instead of sensible planning for contingencies and being pro-active

Giving key roles and contracts to party hacks without relevant experience or talent was always going to lead to a lot of mistakes and consequent shocks & muddle.

Trump, along with several Republican bigwigs, seems to have been infected at that "superspreader event",
called to announce his SCOTUS nomination.

There were hundreds of people milling around, hugging and talking loudly, hardly any masks
Darwin saying "hold my beer"

The US is not testing enough, according to many public health experts there,
but Trump, Pence and other bigwigs were being tested daily

However, even daily testing isn't enough when people don't SD or wear masks - just that one event was enough

We will not understand Covid until we give up debating it

www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/coronavirus-covid-debate-culture-war-boris-johnson

We have somehow managed to start a culture war about the virus.
That is a sure-fire way to drown out the truth

[quote Cattermole]@littleowl1 can I ask (this is a very cheeky question!) if you are being paid to do the work you're doing - and if not, would you consider setting up Crowdfunding so that people can, because that turnaround on that data must have been a massive chunk of your weekend.
Thank you SO MUCH.[/quote]
I’m not being paid. And, to be honest, I’m on it full time.

DH has paid for all the server costs and The ongoing email costs. I’d hoped to get some corporate sponsorship but haven’t managed it in this environment - so it’s been husband- sponsored so far!

I think I probably will need to make a small charge for the email service to keep it going - £1 or £2 - as every email costs to send (which I didn’t realise at the start).

But I feel very, very strongly about the data being accessible to everyone, even those who can’t afford it so I will keep putting the data on the website so anyone who wants it can access it.

I feel really uncomfortable asking for any money at all but I think it’s the only way to justify the time and the IT costs and email costs.

I’ve been trying to get my head around asking people and I’m nearly there. I just have to do it. I will be a nominal amount but will cover the costs hopefully.

Just doesn’t sit very easily with me.

And thank you for your thanks @Cattermole

@littleowl1 - Wikipedia and the Guardian just take contributions from those willing to provide it. You could do that, then some might be happy to put in extra.

Littleowl As an interim step, you could try adding the "buy me a coffee" facility I've seen on e.g. Richard@RP131 and Garius\and see how it goes

That can help people contribute according to means.