Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 24

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 24 of the daily updates

Resource links

UK:
Uk dashboard deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - 4 nations, English regions & LAs
UK govt pressers Slides & data
R estimates UK & English regions
Imperial UK weekly LAs, cases / 100k, table, map, hotspots
School statistics Attendance
ICNRC Intensive Care National Audit & Research reports
NHS t&t England & UK testing Weekly stats
Datasets for ONS surveillance reports
ONS Roundup deaths, infections & economic reports
Modelling real number of UK infections February to date

England:
NHS England Hospital activity
NHS England Daily deaths
MSAO Map of English cases
Cases Tracker England Local Government
ONS England infection surveillance report each Friday
ONS MSAO Map English deaths
PHE Surveillance reports & LA Local Watchlist Maps by LSOA
PHE surveillance reports Covid, flu, respiratory diseases
CovidMessenger live update by council district in England

Scotland, Wales, NI:
Scot gov Daily data
Scotland TravellingTabby LAs, care homes, hospitals, tests, t&t
PH Wales LAs, tests, ONS deaths
NI Dashboard

Miscell:
Zoe Uk data
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
📈 📉 📊 👍

@SheepandCow

What are the class sizes like in Germany?

In any event, Germany has contained Covid far more successfully than the UK. Lower number of cases when they opened up (from lockdown), early treatment for those who got ill - and of course their very good test, track, and trace.

We sent children back when our cases were much higher than Germany's - and with no working test, track, and trace system.

Germany also has a lot more ICU beds than us. Don't they have about double the number of the rest of Europe put together? Perhaps not quite that many but definitely many more than us.

.... Prokup has said they have 25-28 per class in her Berlin secondary but OECD claims the nationside average is 21 in primary, 14 in secondary ==> Safe to say they are a bit lower than the UK, but I'm not certain how much

The health service runs with massive spare capacity, including ICU - they took in hundreds of patients from other EU countries in the 1st wave and still had loads of space
Currently ICU nationally has over 30% empty beds, > 10,000
Rationing, queues, postcode lottery etc have never been part of the German health system

Mass testing, track & trace systems were already in place before March, with a network of 200 state & private labs
The 16 states are pretty autonomous wrt domestic affairs, each with their own parliament and health minister.
There are 401 administrative districts who would control public health on the ground, each with their own budget and manpower

There are 15,000 soldiers allocated as backup, for medical support / transport, track & trace,
but only 1,400 so far needed
Air force personnel & planes also available

@MarshaBradyo

Oaktree again I’m not for closing sectors. I’ve never got in with that pubs v schools stuff that goes on in here.

Yes cutting down indoor socialisation is hard but keep outdoor can mean you can see family.

Wfh is easy and makes sense.

We have been doing all this and the cases are still rising

@wintertravel1980

...those SAGE documents definitely acknowledge the huge role schools (especially secondaries) play in transmission.

Not exactly - it looks like SAGE could not decide whether they have got "moderate" or "low" confidence in the effectiveness of the measure. From the NPIs table (the school section)

Moderate impact. Closing all schools associated with a reduction in R of 0.2-~0.5 . Moderate confidence. Closure of secondary schools may be more effective (reduction in R of ~0.35) as link more households, higher numbers of contacts within schools and transmission to/from younger children may be more limited. Overall, low confidence, as unclear how much schools may contribute to community transmission.

From another document reviewed on the same date:

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/925854/S0769_Summary_of_effectiveness_and_harms_of_NPIs.pdf

It is still not clear to what extent (if any) schools magnify transmission in communities rather than reflect the prevalence within the community

What utter nonsense. Kids are not some different magical species. How are they getting away with this drivel.

Sorry - know not strictly a fact based comment 😬

But surely scientists should be looking for evidence - testing more school children and researching symptoms more prevalent in children - instead of just looking the other way.

Germany seems to more efficient. I'm sure in March posters from Germany said, people coming in on flights had to give details of where they were going in case...

They are organised and have more efficiency. They also have a fabulous health care system. They seem to be able to deal with things far more quickly, not like our slow clunky systems where problems accumulate.
Obviously they seem to be able to test and trace better too.
And dare I say it... But with the constant emphasis on cleaning will they be better at cleaning?

X post with big choc, but big choc put all the details in. 😂

What utter nonsense. Kids are not some different magical species. How are they getting away with this drivel.

The virus does affect children differently. It’s not certain with spread, some theories, but with risk it is lower.

Rather arrogant to assume that the Deputy CMO, the scientists & doctors working for the govt, most scientists & doctors from around the world are all talking "drivel"
just because they don't say what you want them to

Stats from all countries, including those where schools didn't close, are that children are at absolutely tiny risk of death or serious illness from Covid compared to adults

There is a physical reason for children not catching / spreading Covid as much as adults:

Coronaviruses enters a cell via the cell's ACE2 receptor.
ACE2 expression is very low in younger children and only increases at puberty, increasing through the teens to reach adult levels (age this happens varying according to the individual)

From what I have gleaned, smaller dc react differently to it but can carry huge viral loads in their nose, similar to the load seen in icu patients. So how do teaches fare being exposed to that? In winter...

Then older dc 13 on ward, start to react like adults and we see the shoot up in older dc.

Again, x post with the details.

e.g. Check out the figures I posted for Germany, for cases, hospitalisations & deaths of children & staff,
with schools reopening in August and childcare from 2 June

e.g. check out Sweden's dashboard, which has age ranges for cases & deaths

@Autumngoldleaf

Again, x post with the details.

... Hygeine has always been pretty good at schools from what I am told Kids are trained more in that It helps that they start school at age 6, rising 7 and are expected to be more independent

How are cinemas different from a potential transmission perspective than schools? Cinemas have spacing, better vent. than most schools (as they usually have no windows), and ppl max of 2.5hrs in the same space.
And yet face coverings are mandatory by law there.

I get the notion of reducing potential transmission everywhere else and hope the kids will be okay, but it still feels like one rule for this, another for that, and another for something else.

I don't want schools to close, but what is happening is a mass experiment set up by a bunch of idiots and some well meaning scientist who value their salary more than lives.
If they really wanted schools to stay open and confidence and trust from the public they would answer simple questions like this. Or make it transparent where the thresholds for tiers are. Or not lose 16k test in the folds of the curtain.
And also there are so many alternatives that could be considered for schools, some more radical than others. But even the unions are sitting on their hands. They, together with the gov had 6 months to come up with ideas, solutions.

• pt school
• online
• suspended school registration - make sure the kid has the place s/he got x years ago + this should be expanded to private schools as well.
• no fines for not sending kids in -- but track their progress. [This could have been done even through Khan academy as a technical platform, so setup time/cost would have been minimal]
• german style: ecv teachers teach ecv kids online (together with kid not losing normal space)

and yes, gov should be footing the bill. From the 12billion to serco a lot of kid related provisions could have been finance. And still would have left over for care homes and even some for artists most likely.

We are a bunch of common people and yet we come up with ideas and mostly: questions! Is there really no agency in this country to do this on an institutional level and look for answers? It's really not that hard....

@BigChocFrenzy
UK school nose hygiene is almost non-existent. They may get kids to wash their hands, but using tissues is rare. Most primaries (and we tried 4) don't have class tissue, so if parent forgets than there is none.
In hungary we had a rota of which parent buys the month's tissues (no comment), and I tried to do the same here, but got the tissues sent back home. Outside things were not allowed.

Closure of secondary schools may be more effective (reduction in R of ~0.35) as link more households, higher numbers of contacts within schools and transmission to/from younger children may be more limited.

Two of the three things they mention there are not specifically age related, so I wonder how they fit in with the different age groups within secondary? The second one would apply to all year groups from about 9/10 upwards when options become relevant. I'm not sure what they mean by 'link more households' - just that secondary schools are bigger and so kids from more households are there?

Reduction in Rt of 0.2-0.4 if all who can work from home do so.

When is this reduction relative to - normal life when 'all who can work from home' were still in their offices? Relative to right now when many people are already wfh? How much of this reduction have we already had and how much is still available?

I know this is a data thread and I know this counts as anecdata but I would like to share what is currently happening at a GM school I work at.

The school is about 900 kids and 100staff and for the first few weeks we had 1 or 2 cases in a year group and the bubble sent home. We had about 5 or 6 cases in the first 2 or 3 week then we started getting other cases in the school bubbles who were sent home up so the bubbles had to stay off a bit longer. Up until last week it felt like things had settled down there were fewer kids isolating with cold like coughs and fewer cases and then isolating only close contacts based on seating plans and friendship groups meant most kids were in.

I feel like this has ultimately not helped though as starting at the tail end of last week we have 20% of teachers off multiple staff testing positive each day and now had to send year groups home again because of 5 or 6 cases in a year group. It's looks like we may struggle to stay open until half term.

I worry there are loads of asymptomatic cases being missed and there needs to be more proactive testing. There have been 10 cases today alone which is a rate far higher than the general community. I am in a lockdown area so community rates are around 0.4% new infections in a week.

Right now it feels like all staff in the school will be infected by Xmas if not before. most will be fine but I really worry about vulnerable colleagues. At the start of the year I'd expect mobile testing would be sent in. Right now I'm guessing we'll be left to soldier on as best we can.

Another idea on how to gather meaningful insight into secondary kid's networks:
Set up a research project that only aims at doing network and cluster analysis. Create a game which is based on proximity (think pokemon go).
Then overlay this data with country's PHE/covid infection data (a).

1. ask specific schools to take part in the research by helping with "spreading the word" and other incentives (early result access for instance) + create in-game and ou-of-game incentives for families and kids.
2. make it clear that although demographic data is collected, at which point it becomes anonymized
3. make it transparent how the collected data flows through where and who has what access

(a) after overlaying covid test result data with the game's data infected people should only come up with demographic data/anonymized.

After a month or so it should yield first results that could be used to form hypothesis(es) that than could be the basis of other types of research.

Today is another day, other data, but until then let's start the day with some fun. A comment on the new 3-tier system (not mine):

TShrapnelCarruthers
5 hours ago
15

Tier 1 - Fucked
Tier 2 - Significantly fucked
Tier 3 - Unbelievably fucked

Although others suggested Tier 1 could be Less Fucked Than Planned.
Goodnight/good morning :)

It feels frustrating trying to understand the data when the government doesn't seem to be engaging with it! Still, I will place mark and try to keep up.

Walksen, that sounds horrendous. Yet again, we teachers at the coal face, with COVID established in our schools, have more than “weak to moderate” confidence that rapid spread is occurring within them.

Do we have any stats on how many are now working from home? Boris was not very encouraging about this when it was half heartedly announced a few weeks ago. However, the roads do seem a bit quieter?

I do think more studies need to be done into schools. I don't think the scientist were accused of talking drivel upthread, it was the poster (a bit harsh!) but I d agree there are an awful lot of probable/possible/low confidence, might and mays in the 'evidence' on schools so it is not a data rich field. That does feel like 'looking the other way'. I am sure Sage would like some juicy data but it isn't being very pursued. This is also true of other things, I am sure. What they don't seem in doubt about is the high impact short sharp shock closures would have, which would include school closures. I do think they might be coming in the NW : there is , after all, a DfE document that does allow for this.

The impact on society may well be high for prolonged school closure but even that is in clouded words. Because we have a government usually disinterested in this kind of issue. there have been very very few prior studies into this kind of thing. The only robust study into the impact of education disruption on children was done in NZ, under very different circumstances but it did show remarkably little impact on children and families. The mythological 'learning loss' of the summer holidays was debunked years ago.

R4 is rather stark this morning.

Piggy I agree re DfE document allowing for it.

On learning loss - perhaps one issue is the widening gap. With some students falling three months behind it gets harder to deal with the longer home learning is relied upon.

One thing about Germany that I haven’t seen mentioned - they financially support people who are self isolating. In the uk we only have 18% of people self isolating when they have symptoms. Part of that is (I suspect) the uk culture of presenteeism. But I’d bet significant money that more people would comply if they were paid for it and their job was safe.

I am concerned about the learning gap : but I am also concerned that statements are being made about impact on education with little to no investigation of whether it has widened or not. It is almost inevitably going to happen, but that may not be in its entirety down to lack of in school learning- increasing poverty and joblessness will also have a large impact. And that learning gap will widen more if the government countenance regional part or full closures, especially at year11.

Unless one is actually in education, I think you ahve little to no real idea of exactly how chaotic and short termist the DfE is under the leadership especially of Williamson and Gibb. Everything they research is ideological and there is increasing cronyism in appointments. The refusal to really creatively think through assessment because of steadfast ideology is a huge part of the problem.

LittleOwl love the update. I hadn’t known what tier I was on until this morning

Just as a side note, a lot of universities actually went back this weekend, so this is still an issue bubbling : keeping an eye on Lincoln, for example, as I get Little Owl's stats. This is already climbing since about 5 weeks ago but be interesting to see whether it shoots up. Small city, two universities. DS said Morrisons was absolutely heaving on Sunday.