Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 22

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 22 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
School statistics Attendance
Modelling real number of UK infections February to date
NHS England Hospital activity
NHs England Daily deaths
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
📈 📉 📊 👍

CovidSim (Edinburgh and Imperial University) modelling paper re: lockdown options and second wave:

www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3588

BMJ version of the Edinburgh paper here www.bmj.com/content/bmj/371/bmj.m3588.full.pdf
Worth a read.

@EducatingArti

I don't understand "every infection makes it harder for the virus to find its next victim." Surely the more people infected, the wider the pool of potential next 'victims'?

It's quite important that infection does not appear to confer lasting immunity. So someone who's infected can die or get long covid, and they won't get the infection probably for a few months.

But, after a few months, they then become a potential next victim again, and they might even have a worse time with the infection, as there is some evidence for cumulative adverse effects with reinfection.

It makes it harder for the disease to find its next victim because there are less susceptible people out there. More people have already had it.

@SarahMused

It makes it harder for the disease to find its next victim because there are less susceptible people out there. More people have already had it.

Having had it doesn't seem to confer lasting immunity. So probably no, that's wrong.

@SarahMused

Anyone else reading the newspaper accounts based on the Edinburgh University study that lockdowns cause more deaths in the long term? Is it based on this www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.18.20135004v1.full.pdf which has just been accepted by the BMJ? Counterintuitively they found that shutting schools and universities increases total deaths in the long term. They were tasked to do the research by SAGE and use the Imperial model to forecast possible outcomes. They seem to believe that we have made the situation worse by locking down as we did. Increasing the spread among old and vulnerable instead of healthy people. If they are correct it may well be that those university students are doing us all a big favour at the moment. Every infection makes it harder for the virus to find its next victim.

I have just skim read this.. I may be misunderstanding but it seems to be advocating natural herd immunity as the "end point" solution to the situation which is not accepted as valid/appropriate by the vast majority of scientists in the field.

Very few people appear to have become infected more than once out of the millions around the world that have had it. That‘s the best we have at the moment, we can‘t at the moment, say how long immunity will last. There are no perfect options here, all paths have their downsides but we can‘t only look at direct covid harm. We may have to consider that whatever we do, the result in the long term maybe more or less the same unless or until we get a safe, effective vaccine at least.

I don't think that is the view of the majority of scientists in the field.

I've only flipped though it, but this stood out to me:

Place closures suppress the first wave, but when the interventions are lifted, there is still a large population of people who are susceptible and a substantial number of people who are infected. This then leads to a second wave of infections that can result in more deaths, but at a later time.

So if I understand that right, they're saying that if we'd stayed open they think we'd only have had one wave which would have killed fewer people.
Having suppressed the first wave, then a second wave was inevitable and then in total more people would die.

This seems to be making two assumptions.
Firstly that if we'd let the first wave go, then herd immunity would have been achieved by the end and we wouldn't have a second wave or at least a much lighter second wave.

Well, Sweden looks like it may be heading for a second wave, maybe it will be less than the first, but there's no guarantee that will be the case. The first wave only had one day above 1500 cases, 2nd October, they had over 700. Let's wait and see on that one.

But that's also bypassing that it seems to be that immunity doesn't last. So Let's say we'd had a huge wave in March, now were going into a tiny second wave. By next March it looks like a good proportion of those initially infected could now be susceptible again so, if no vaccine is out by then, could have a good sized third wave.

Secondly it also seems to be assuming we do nothing or little about supressing the second wave.
Which would Mr Johnson be a stupid thing to to do wouldn't it?

I'm also surprised that this was done under the department of "Physics and astronomy" which seems an odd one.

Herd immunity is not a strategy, it is what happens naturally when a disease spreads through a population or when you have a certain percentage vaccinated. You might as well be against gravity. Our mistake is to overestimate the effect we can have on an airborne virus while trying to keep the economy going.

I have read the Edinburgh paper. It makes many interesting points but, once more, doesn't account (or at least doesn't state it does) for the presence of any vulnerable adults in schools (or universities). There at least needs to be a strategy for this, surely? As BCF keeps mentioning, in Germany the CV teachers don't enter the workplace, for example.

They are saying if schools and universities stayed open more healthy young people would have been infected and we would have reached a level where the virus found it more difficult to spread. That would kill less people than allowing older people to be equally likely to catch it as young ones.

twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1313733782235680768?s=19
Here
And here twitter.com/SusanMichie/status/1313860412832731137?s=19
for example

@SarahMused

Herd immunity is not a strategy, it is what happens naturally when a disease spreads through a population or when you have a certain percentage vaccinated. You might as well be against gravity. Our mistake is to overestimate the effect we can have on an airborne virus while trying to keep the economy going.

I think you are aligning yourself with the Barrington Declaration which is rejected by the massive majority of scientists working on Covid19.

Christina Patel tweets...
"I can't even... Scientists aren't divided. There are maybe max 4 or 5 scientists pushing "let the young get it" in the media. On the other "side" are the CMO, CSO, NHS, BMA, WHO, ECDC, CDC, any pretty much any public health expert you care to name."

I think Boris Johnson was quite clear in his speech s few weeks ago. One of the few times I agree with him.

It is simply not possible to separate out the vulnerable and elderly.

We need to find a way to manage this by ticking along, limiting the destruction of the economy, keeping the kids in school and letting people have enough freedoms to make the sacrifices acceptable, and saving as many lives as possible.

Gandhi quote "The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members."

No reputable scientist supports herd immunity it is an inhumane idea.

The only way to separate out vulnerable from non-vulnerable would be to put them in some kind of internment camp because otherwise they are connected with many non-vulnerable people in normal life (their spouses, children etc). What do you do with healthy children of vulnerable parents? Are they to be forcibly separated?. What about those with undiagnosed diabetes?

Any point of contact with the world outside, where covid is raging, would be a risk. What if they need medical care?

What about vulnerable doctors, nurses, teachers?

What will happen to the young if and when there is a vaccine? Will they have to take their risks and get the infection then? Kate Bingham said the government was aiming to vaccinate about 30m people, compared with a UK population of about 67m,if a successful vaccine against Covid-19 was found.

People keep talking about ‘time to vaccinate the whole population’, but that is misguided. There’s going to be no vaccination of people under 18. It’s an adult-only vaccine, for people over 50, focusing on health workers and care home workers and the vulnerable.

www.ft.com/content/d2e00128-7889-4d5d-84a3-43e51355a751

Sorry wrong thread!!!!

@SarahMused

Anyone else reading the newspaper accounts based on the Edinburgh University study that lockdowns cause more deaths in the long term? Is it based on this www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.18.20135004v1.full.pdf which has just been accepted by the BMJ? Counterintuitively they found that shutting schools and universities increases total deaths in the long term. They were tasked to do the research by SAGE and use the Imperial model to forecast possible outcomes. They seem to believe that we have made the situation worse by locking down as we did. Increasing the spread among old and vulnerable instead of healthy people. If they are correct it may well be that those university students are doing us all a big favour at the moment. Every infection makes it harder for the virus to find its next victim.

I think your comments here are rather disingenuous. This study is saying that this is true for a particular computer model where the disease is effectively allowed to flow through the population until natural herd immunity is achieved ( assuming no vaccine) They are looking at different ways of letting it flow. The vast majority of epidemiologists and virologists and other scientists do not agree with this as an approach.

I'm farther skeptical about that Edinburgh report for a few reasons:

1. I've found factual errors in it myself, e.g. Saying the government stopped reporting on ICU beds in March, when the data has been available throughout (links posted up-thread when someone asked), then they haven't accounted for it - when the data existed.
2. It's a model with adjusted parameters; a model can have many factors in it that are incorrect and should not be adjusted without clear input from those who designed the original model as to unintended effects. Page 5 they attempt to explain why wave 2 leads to more deaths (growing to the side wave 1 would have done but add on wave 1), without ever mentioning immunity and its impact, I suggest that's a pretty fucking massive flaw in the model!
3. We already know that model wasn't fully accurate, why would bending it out of shape be better? All a model is, is a set of assumptions, one or many of which can be incorrect or missing. Look at one idiotic example: "These simulations are also initialised so that there are about 10000 deaths by day 100 in all scenarios, presumed to have mostly been infected before the interventions were implemented."
4. They ran a stochastic model 10 times. TEN. It's a stochastic model, this is not a calculation but a way of demonstrating random probability distributions. They should be running millions of iterations before the outcome becomes reliable (this is why we like the actuaries as above, they actually do run millions of iterations).
5. Neither physics nor epidemiology are my field of expertise, but I'll take the opinion of RELEVANT experts, not just anyone hanging around at a university. If an epidemiologist said the astrophysicists were wrong and there was no black hole in the milky way, I wouldn't simply believe him/her, I would look at what physicists had to say, and when they disagreed I would assume the epidemiologist had missed something because it's complex. So, that in reverse.

www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/07/why-herd-immunity-strategy-is-regarded-as-fringe-viewpoint

A good article here regarding herd immunity.
Apparently according to this, a quarter of the UK population would be considered vulnerable with respect to Covid.

www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/live-nottinghamshire-lockdown-tighter-restrictions-4585870

Nothing official yet.

Without mentioning the name of the lunatic to try to preserve sanity in the discussion... Obviously he seems to have recovered from covid-19 and was given the monoclonal antibodies. I've also seen interesting comments that these could be given to elderly if they can't tolerate a vaccine (just everyone? only if ill?). Can we discuss the evidence on them so far please, might they be a game changer?
Looks like there are two types; Regeneron and Eli Lilly. I've only seen limited info so far, happy to read anything others have found?
www.statnews.com/2020/09/29/regenerons-covid-19-antibody-may-help-non-hospitalized-patients-recover-faster-early-data-show/
www.statnews.com/2020/10/07/eli-lilly-monoclonal-antibody-cocktail-covid-19/

ONS report comparing COVID with flu and pneumonia:

More than three times as many deaths were recorded between January and August this year where COVID-19 was the underlying cause compared to influenza and pneumonia

The mortality rate for COVID-19 is also significantly higher than influenza and pneumonia rates for both 2020 and the five-year average

Since 1959, which is when ONS monthly death records began, the number of deaths due to influenza and pneumonia in the first eight months of every year have been lower than the number of COVID-19 deaths seen, so far, in 2020