Daily numbers, graphs, analysis thread 25

[BigChocFrenzy]

Welcome to thread 25 of the daily updates

Resource links

UK:
Uk dashboard R, deaths, cases, hospitals, tests - by postcode, 4 nations, English regions, LAs
Interactive 7-day rolling cases map click on map or by postcode
UK govt pressers Slides & data
SAGE Table Interventions with impacts and R
Imperial UK weekly tables & extrapolations LAs, cases / 100k, table, map, hotspots
School statistics Attendance - Tuesdays
ICNRC Intensive Care National Audit & Research reports
UK testing and NHS England track & trace - Thursdays
ONS Roundup deaths, infections & economic reports
ONS England, Wales & NI Infection surveillance report - Fridays
ONS Datasets for surveillance reports
Our World in Data UK test positivity
R estimates & daily growth UK & English regions - Fridays
Modelling real number of UK infections February in first wave

England:
NHS England Hospital activity
NHS England Daily deaths
PHE COVID Clinical Risk Factors Non-respiratory by region, area, district etc
MSAO Map of English cases
Cases Tracker England Local Government
PHE surveillance reports Covid, flu, respiratory diseases - Thursdays
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
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
📈 📉 📊 👍
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Links added to OP:

• SAGE Table of Interventions with impacts and R
• PHE COVID Clinical Risk Factors by region, area

Links changed

• PHE Covid surveillance is now Covid & flu

hmmph

As far as i know - Bluetooth is always on anyway and the app says active and scanning.

How often should it check?

A good positive news thread on ITU admissions and survival rates, also data on which groups are over represented

twitter.com/actuarybyday/status/1317391421851172864?s=21

[quote Eyewhisker]@BigChocFrenzy Because when we report IFR we want this for the population. As you said above, the IFR will vary between countries depending on the age profile of their population.

If you are doing statistical sampling, you adjust for how representative the sample is of the population. I didn’t say remove care home residents, but adjust for it. So if say, care home residents are disproportionate in the sample - and react differently than others - then adjust accordingly. This is exactly what is done with age.

This thread is supposed to be on data and objective. Not performing a valid statistical adjustment for fear of ‘othering’ is putting emotions first.[/quote]
....
Othering is twisting data

There are a certain number of deaths in certain age groups, each of which contain frailer and more vulnerable members
it is part of being human

There is no more justification for saying "only YYY people aged 80+ in care homes died"
than
only "XXX people under 60 with no conditions died"

or maybe "no children without underlying conditions died"

or doing IFR for ages of healthy white people

Having underlying conditions, poorer than average health for your age group, puts you at higher risk

When you are age 80+, poorer than average health also puts you at greater likelihood of being in a care home

Avoiding othering is more about ethics than emotions

➡️ NEW Thread 📊📈📉

https://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/4053359-Daily-numbers-graphs-analysis-thread-26?

Why is it twisting data? The IFR for the over 80s should be the likelihood of anyone over 80 dying if they have caught it. If hypothetically, only care home residents died, an IFR calculated only on care home residents would overstate tell the true risk for the over 80s population.

Frankly, the IFR may already adjust for this. I haven’t looked at the methodology.

The academics who did the years remaining calculation said they should have adjusted for care home residents as the population clearly behaves differently than others of the same age.

You are letting your emotions and fear of ‘othering’ get in the way of objectivity.

And for the last time, care home deaths should be included in the IFR data but proportionately. If (making up numbers here) 25% of infected care home residents die, and 5% of other infected over 80s - and care home residents are 20% of over 80s, then the IFR would be around 9%.

However, if care home deaths were 80% of those over 80s infected just using total deaths among infected over 80s would give you an IFR of 21%.

It really depends what you want from the IFR - should it reflect the likelihood of a person in that age range dying when infected as I had understood - or the fatality rate of those infected even if that is skewed by the almost criminal policy of discharging infected patients into care homes.

@TheSunIsStillShining

Why are cases levelling off? (assume they are) No real measure has been put in place, tests are still very hard to come by (London), no SD, no masks...

slight sidenote: if we thought we can get a hold, there is a rally today with 1000s against lockdown in central london. Just to make sure that we cannot drive down cases efficiently :(

Is that not breaking tier rules? Bloody hell it should be! London really is buggered. It's longer-term economy and the lives and long-term health of it's 9 million residents put at serious risk because of the short-termist greed of a few rich people who live in the shires or tax havens abroad. Khan is doing his best but he's up against it.

Many apologies. I thought it was 40% of ICU admissions under 60, but in fact looking at the slides I think it in fact was 40% general covid admissions under 60..

From the figures on that thread about ICU , it is more like 23 % ICU admissions under 60 (since September).

Prof Vallance was discussing some of the figures while a graph about ICU was showing, which I think might have confused me.

It's ethics, not emotion
and it's also statistics:

You want basically to weight the IFR by taking representative numbers of fit, average & frail people
However, we already know that frailty and underlying conditions massively increase risk in all age groups

So you want to reduce the numbers in each age group by weighting down those who are most likely to die

Should we weight the IFR for children wrt the % of children with underlying health conditions ?
We could get that IFR to almost zero if we did

Or weight the IFR for the middle-aged to only have a representative number with T1, T2, high BP etc

One characteristic of being aged 80+ and frail is that you are more likely to go into a care home
So it is an underlying set of conditions

As far as I can tell, we don't adjust IFR for flu for care homes, and therefore shouldn't do so for covid. Someone with heart disease in their 30s is more likely to be very unwell than someone without, that's what the other risk factors look at. So in keeping with that approach, it might make more sense to include "lives in an institution" as an additional risk factor in its own right. It's hard to separate frailty from increased likelihood of catching covid (with high viral load) for care homes, but perhaps a moot point if we accept both are valid risk factors.

In each age group, the frail and unfit are the most vulnerable both to Covid and to harmful decisions by government

The IFR by age internationally is not skewed by the British government, but many governments made poor decisions for the elderly e.g. Sweden

Still better to take values from Western Europe as a whole,
rather than to say in effect there must be the same number of healthy and vulnerable people in each group as in the general population

We know the most vulnerable are far more likely to die
So you are skewing figures by trying to calculate with samples of the population average for that age

I really feel that banning protest is very dodgy move in a democratic society.

@BigChocFrenzy Please explain why adjusting for the proportion of the population is weighting down. It is simply standard statistical practice. If a group is over - or under - represented in a sample, it is adjusted for.

You acknowledge that IFR need to be adjusted for age. It is exactly the same adjustment.

The IFR is used to calculate what would happen if an entire population got the disease. It should be calculated in a way that is representative of that population.

@MRex

As far as I can tell, we don't adjust IFR for flu for care homes, and therefore shouldn't do so for covid. Someone with heart disease in their 30s is more likely to be very unwell than someone without, that's what the other risk factors look at. So in keeping with that approach, it might make more sense to include "lives in an institution" as an additional risk factor in its own right. It's hard to separate frailty from increased likelihood of catching covid (with high viral load) for care homes, but perhaps a moot point if we accept both are valid risk factors.

... The RKI daily report has a separate row in the table for adults in all institutions: care homes, refugee hostels, homeless hostels prisons, homes for those with severe disabilities etc

However, they just count total numbers and I assume care homes for the elderly dominate
it is difficult to separate being in an institution from vulnerabilities, deprivation etc

Numbers are important, to highlight cockups if nothing else
but I see no purpose in separate IFRs for healthy and vulnerable in each age group
As you say, that could apply to the young just as much

So the IFR would be skewed if it is made representative of the population????????!!!!

@cathyandclare

I really feel that banning protest is very dodgy move in a democratic society.

Interestingly some expert (really can’t recall) on R4 said the same. It’s pretty much key as otherwise new laws can’t be opposed.

@cathyandclare

I really feel that banning protest is very dodgy move in a democratic society.

I agree, but in the middle of a pandemic banning them based on public health reasons seems to be a good choice.

@cathyandclare

I really feel that banning protest is very dodgy move in a democratic society.

Who says ban protest? The manner, yes, but that's because we're in the extraordinary circumstances of a pandemic. Millions of vulnerable people should not be unnecessarily put at increased risk of death, long-term disability, or economic ruin because of mass gatherings.

It's not as if yet another mass gathering protest in London will have any effect. There's a protest there every other day. If the protestors wanted people to take note of whatever they're protesting about they'd go somewhere it would be noticed. The shires perhaps.

Separately re the plight of private renters (btw some, including lodgers, don't even have 6 months protection and can be evicted right now in the run up to winter during the pandemic).

The solution is what we used to have. Housing benefit. As in full housing benefit - that pays the full rent.

Given that outdoors is much less risk than indoors, and socially distanced demonstrations are possible, there are no good grounds to ban demos to my thinking

[quote Eyewhisker]@BigChocFrenzy Please explain why adjusting for the proportion of the population is weighting down. It is simply standard statistical practice. If a group is over - or under - represented in a sample, it is adjusted for.

You acknowledge that IFR need to be adjusted for age. It is exactly the same adjustment.

The IFR is used to calculate what would happen if an entire population got the disease. It should be calculated in a way that is representative of that population.[/quote]
...
because care homes / not care homes is weighting to exclude frailty, which is a key risk factor
They are not independent events

Frailty ==> care home
Frailty ==> higher risk of death

@Eyewhisker - "The IFR is used to calculate what would happen if an entire population got the disease. It should be calculated in a way that is representative of that population."
People in care homes are still members of the population. This is getting a bit dodgy.

@midgebabe

Given that outdoors is much less risk than indoors, and socially distanced demonstrations are possible, there are no good grounds to ban demos to my thinking

I agree.

How can people express dissatisfaction so that their voices are heard?
They can write to MPs- but very few changes have been debated in parliament. A group Zoom call is unlikely to make an impact.