Coronavirus

[Chris152]

I am not engaging in the current mudslinging (political or scientific), nascent conspiracy theories or in the simplistic epidemiology that is going on in this thread. Nor am I judging it.

:lol:

 

[Rorschach]

Very interesting bit of news today. I will try and keep it brief and I have changed a few unimportant details to prevent identification as the person who told me is worried about the legal ramifications.

Close family friend (FF) in their late 90's. Dementia but living on their own cared for everyday by their son. Son collapses with brain haemorrhage, goes into hospital in a coma, dies shortly after. FF doesn't really realise they are gone as just thinks they have missed a daily visit, other family members have taken up the slack in the interim. This can't continue so FF is taken into a care home after another week or so. After a couple of weeks in the care home FF, otherwise in excellent health, is admitted to hospital with pneumonia, dies shortly afterwards. Nothing suspicious for us. This is mid February, cause of death listed as pneumonia, not unusual for an elderly person. Funeral held last week.
Word from care home staff after recent events, symptoms before the pneumonia were in line with Coronavirus, several other "inmates" had the similar symptoms in Jan/Feb, a few passed away from pneumonia. None of these deaths listed as coronavirus related, all occurred before the media hype started and first official cases were identified.

Very interesting!

 

[Andy Kev.]

MusicMan,

thanks for the above. It's informative and encouraging.

 

[Jake]

Andy Kev, from my very limited knowledge (I'm a materials scientist not a virologist, I just know some of those working in the field) I think you are probably right about the agreement amongst virologists.

About what though? The make-up of the virus? They've done amazing work (not least in China) on that sort of analysis, and the early stages of looking at cures and vaccines. Super-impressive from the scientific community.

And I do know that the epidemiology is by no means regarded as settled, but as work-in-progress. The methods are quite well-established and not controversial but the parameters and influences are at present best-assumptions, which are refined as more data from the UK and other countries are available.

Again, indisputably and inescapably the case. And they're doing great work, not least in testing each other's assumptions and outputs.

The ONE issue which has arisen was just that: a failure to use best-assumptions for COVID because the Imperial team did not update one of its assumptions made in its flu model to reflect the best assumptions for COVID.

The head of the team admitted this in an interview with the FT. They caught it in after the decision to publish their modelling. Neil Ferguson has been pretty open about that, and then popped up on Twitter last week or so to say by way of explanation that it was an assumption buried in 20k lines of C program he wrote 17 [from memory] years ago. That's a mea culpa in anyone's language.

The mistake is maybe understandable, but should have been checked as it is a key assumption from public health terms given the known empirical experiences in Wuhan and then Lombardy was that the demands were much higher than a flu and the health systems were crashing way beyond capacity.

The bigger issue is the decision making and policy process (which is not a matter of science, nor really of politics although it is inescapably going to be influenced by that, not least in popping up risks such as confirmation bias). As the govt framed its whole mitigation policy around aiming to manage the spread of the disease just below NHS surge capacity, the assumption as to how much demand on the NHS there would be is obviously key and one does not need to be an epidemiologist, virologist or scientist to understand that. It's really just a very basic check that the scientific evidence base on which you are choosing to rely has been prepared with due care and attention without any slip-ups of the sort Neil Ferguson has admitted to.

There is also the question of how best to handle the very large and disparate data sets that are coming out from the different countries. The epidemiological community, which is small but very strong in the UK, is working flat out to refine and improve the models in addition to spending much time advising government bodies. A call has in fact just gone out to the whole of the UK modelling community (all university research teams, all scientists with track record in the field including long-retired ones like myself) to add either specific expertise, cross-disciplinary insights (for example, how very large data sets in other fields are handled) or human and computing resource to help them in this national effort. It is coordinated by the Royal Society. The first aim is to understand the potential effects of the various options for exiting the escalating lock-down strategy in order to make more robust predictions.

All great applaudable stuff, and yes, thank god for the nerds.

 

[lurker]

I have just been reading about past pandemics.
Obviously the plague(s) and Spanish flu are common knowledge
A surprise to me is that there was a flu pandemic in1957-8
Apparently at least a million died worldwide and 14,000 in the uk.

My surprise is that I am pretty sure my parents (and in laws)never discussed this even though they were all very fond of recounting how hard life was “back in the old days “.
I wonder if this is due to our manifold and far reaching forms of communication?

 

[MusicMan]

I was a sufferer in the pandemic of 1957-8. I was at a boarding school of 800 boys, and about 500, as I recall, were ill. I was off for 2 weeks, came back too soon (it was A levels year), and had a frightening standing-up blackout - literally went blind for about a minute, though not unconscious. Scary time. Nobody died though. It didn't enter the narrative the way the 1918 epidemic did, which I often heard about from my father (a pharmacist).

 

[Rorschach]

I have just been reading about past pandemics.
Obviously the plague(s) and Spanish flu are common knowledge
A surprise to me is that there was a flu pandemic in1957-8
Apparently at least a million died worldwide and 14,000 in the uk.

My surprise is that I am pretty sure my parents (and in laws)never discussed this even though they were all very fond of recounting how hard life was “back in the old days “.
I wonder if this is due to our manifold and far reaching forms of communication?

14,000, that's small beans, in 2014/15 nearly 29,000 people died from flu in the UK. Do you remember that causing a lockdown and media outrage?

 

[Jake]

Population is obviously bigger now but PHE reckons seasonal flu kills 17k annually, so 14k then would have been a spike but not that extraordinary.

Pandemic is about international spread not deadliness.

 

[Jake]

14,000, that's small beans, in 2014/15 nearly 29,000 people died from flu in the UK. Do you remember that causing a lockdown and media outrage?

No, but that's because (with the COVID hospitalisation rate assumptions corrected to reflect empirical evidence), the Imperial College team now projects 500k deaths in an unchecked COVID-19 epidemic.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

I have just been reading about past pandemics.
Obviously the plague(s) and Spanish flu are common knowledge
A surprise to me is that there was a flu pandemic in1957-8
Apparently at least a million died worldwide and 14,000 in the uk.

My surprise is that I am pretty sure my parents (and in laws)never discussed this even though they were all very fond of recounting how hard life was “back in the old days “.
I wonder if this is due to our manifold and far reaching forms of communication?

14,000, that's small beans, in 2014/15 nearly 29,000 people died from flu in the UK. Do you remember that causing a lockdown and media outrage?

Well, here's the problem - they almost certainly didn't die of the 'flu - they would have died from the one or two or three or more pre-existing conditions, not the influenza virus itself. Afterwards some epidemiologist would have applied lots of very exciting maths to the data to work out the number of deaths over and above the "normal" level, and given that as a number. The same thing is NOT happening now, as every single Coronavirus death is reported as a death due to Coronavirus, despite the individual having any number of pre-existing conditions. The excess winter deaths are unknown, uncalculated, and unreported. Possibly, as up until now the 'flu season has been very mild, there are not any excess deaths.

 

[Trainee neophyte]

14,000, that's small beans, in 2014/15 nearly 29,000 people died from flu in the UK. Do you remember that causing a lockdown and media outrage?

No, but that's because (with the COVID hospitalisation rate assumptions corrected to reflect empirical evidence), the Imperial College team now projects 500k deaths in an unchecked COVID-19 epidemic.

From the article I keep quoting:

A model from Imperial College London predicted between 250,000 and 500,000 deaths in the UK „from“ Covid-19, but the authors of the study have now conceded that many of these deaths would not be in addition to, but rather part of the normal annual mortality rate, which in the UK is about 600,000 people per year. In other words, excess mortality would remain low.

I'm not saying the above is correct, but it is interesting, and I would like to see anything that dispute it.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51979654

But what is not clear - because the modellers did not map this - is to what extent the deaths would have happened without coronavirus.

Of course, this will never truly be known until the pandemic is over, which is why modelling is very difficult and needs caveats.

Every year more than 500,000 people die in England and Wales - factor in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the figure is around 600,000.

The coronavirus deaths will not be in addition to these, as statistician Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, an expert in public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge, explains.

"There will be substantial overlap in these two groups — many people who die of Covid [the disease caused by coronavirus] would have died anyway within a short period."

 

[Jake]

An interesting perspective, I missed that More or Less.

The Imperial College London modelling suggests that if the virus was allowed to let rip and we did nothing to reduce its impact, around 80% of the population would be expected to get it and around half a million would die. So if everyone got it, around 600,000 would die – which is about the number of people who die each year in the UK. So if everyone got the virus we’d get a year’s worth of death all at once. Of course anything remotely near that would be catastrophic in terms of the stresses on society. This is why dampening down the curve is vital – because although the risks to an individual are low, when you multiply them up over vast numbers of people then the total impact on society is huge, especially when it comes all at once.

This assumes 100% overlap between those who would have died anyway and those who will die from COVID. There's obviously a substantial one given the clear link with age and co-morbidity, but 100% is a punchy assumption, and strikes me as a bit of mathematical musing about individual risk perceptions rather than a detailed substantive analysis.

 

[Rorschach]

Well, here's the problem - they almost certainly didn't die of the 'flu - they would have died from the one or two or three or more pre-existing conditions, not the influenza virus itself. Afterwards some epidemiologist would have applied lots of very exciting maths to the data to work out the number of deaths over and above the "normal" level, and given that as a number. The same thing is NOT happening now, as every single Coronavirus death is reported as a death due to Coronavirus, despite the individual having any number of pre-existing conditions. The excess winter deaths are unknown, uncalculated, and unreported. Possibly, as up until now the 'flu season has been very mild, there are not any excess deaths.

BINGO!

An epidemiologist on the radio last week said this winters flue deaths are one of the lowest on record (so sub 3k I would guess) and even with coronavirus added in we might actually be looking at a very low mortality rate for this year, probably even lower than a bad (20k+) flu year.
The only difference was if left unchecked (i.e no lockdown) there could be a missive spike for March/April, but otherwise deaths would be pretty average.

As I have pointed out before in this thread, 1700 people die in the UK every day (on average), in a month coronavirus has killed just over 1000, of course how many were actually coronavirus directly is unknown, but likely very few.

 

[Jake]

You literally have to disbelieve the evidence of your own eyes to think this is nothing out of the ordinary death toll.

Too much alt-right YouTube bollix for me.

 

[Rorschach]

You literally have to disbelieve the evidence of your own eyes to think this is nothing out of the ordinary death toll.

Too much alt-right YouTube bollix for me.

Happy to be proved wrong (well not really, it would be awful), we'll come back to this comment in a year or so.

 

[ScaredyCat]

As I have pointed out before in this thread, 1700 people die in the UK every day (on average), in a month coronavirus has killed just over 1000, of course how many were actually coronavirus directly is unknown, but likely very few.

Don't get too excited, it's only March.

.

 

[RogerS]

I have just been reading about past pandemics.
Obviously the plague(s) and Spanish flu are common knowledge
A surprise to me is that there was a flu pandemic in1957-8
Apparently at least a million died worldwide and 14,000 in the uk.

My surprise is that I am pretty sure my parents (and in laws)never discussed this even though they were all very fond of recounting how hard life was “back in the old days “.
I wonder if this is due to our manifold and far reaching forms of communication?

14,000, that's small beans, in 2014/15 nearly 29,000 people died from flu in the UK. Do you remember that causing a lockdown and media outrage?

I think that you are letting your own personal position colour your judgement. Have you actually stopped to think what would/will happen without a lockdown ? Do you not read the papers ?

 

[Jake]

An interesting perspective, I missed that More or Less.

The Imperial College London modelling suggests that if the virus was allowed to let rip and we did nothing to reduce its impact, around 80% of the population would be expected to get it and around half a million would die. So if everyone got it, around 600,000 would die – which is about the number of people who die each year in the UK. So if everyone got the virus we’d get a year’s worth of death all at once. Of course anything remotely near that would be catastrophic in terms of the stresses on society. This is why dampening down the curve is vital – because although the risks to an individual are low, when you multiply them up over vast numbers of people then the total impact on society is huge, especially when it comes all at once.

I should have quoted the entire piece. I didn't read it carefully enough to see through the spin TN's variant had placed on it. The paragraphs after the above are as follows (my emphasis)

If the measures we’ve put in place for COVID-19 work, even if we do get up to having hundreds of deaths per day, then the total number of deaths over the whole population might not be much bigger than normal for the year. Because the people who will die with COVID-19 are mostly elderly and have other conditions, many of them are likely to have died within the near future, but COVID-19 is bringing their deaths forward. Many deaths labelled as COVID may normally have been allocated to another cause a few months later on. The degree of overlap is currently uncertain – we can’t know how many of these deaths would have happened anyway...

It’s important we act not because of an individual decision – my own individual risk is quite low, but it is not my risk to me, it is my risk to the people around me which is important, which is why we need social distancing...

Deaths in the UK so far have been increasing about 25% per day – if they were to continue at that rate it would in theory lead to 10,000 deaths per day by mid April. BUT the numbers won’t get that scary precisely because of the steps we are taking to slow the spread of the disease – which is why the measures are so important.”

 

[steve1001]

Good day Gentleman.

My sister and her husband have just arrived back, on a plane, from Australia.
They entered the UK via Heathrow.
They were not tested for temperature or Covid, or looked at by anyone.
They were not quarantined.
They were told to go home and stay at home.
Of course, after coming back from 5 weeks in Australia they had no food. My sister joined the 25 minute queue that snaked around the car parks at the supermarket, shopped, and got food.

The authorities don't seem to be treating this as seriously as they have lead me to beleve. I mean, fresh off the plane and they were not tested! I must be missing something.

Steve (panic buyer and hoarder, and now good for 2 months at home without having to go out for supplies)

 

[RogerS]

Here's an interesting thought. Waitrose (and I assume other supermarkets) are looking to implement some form of priority booking for delivery slots for the elderly and vulnerable saying that they will be using data etc that they and John Lewis hold about their customers.

I have both a Waitrose account and also a John Lewis Partnership credit card. Looking at the questions asked for when applying to open a Waitrose account, DoB does not feature. But it does when applying for the credit card. Simple matter to run check between the two databases to identify those who hold a Waitrose account and are over-70 ?

Mmm...just wonder where that GDPR features?