The Coronavirus Discussion Thread.

80% of UK cases come from a strain that first appeared in Spain in June !

https://twitter.com/rowlsmanthorpe/status/1322136294793904130

Always thought it was mad that the gov wasn't quarantining people coming back from Spain/Italy/China etc. The fact that they weren't even testing them at the airports is just criminal negligence surely?

Always thought it was mad that the gov wasn’t quarantining people coming back from Spain/Italy/China etc. The fact that they weren’t even testing them at the airports is just criminal negligence surely?

Not that I'm remotely defending the incompetent bellends we have in nominal charge of this country but did the tests actually exist then? Did the UK have any of them?

There was supposed to be some form of quarantine wasn't there? I recall pictures of coaches with a police escort taking a whole load of people from Heathrow to some "camp" (old military base maybe?) up near Liverpool for 2 weeks quarantining which even back then seemed rather insane to be transporting potentially infectious people around the country...

is just criminal negligence surely?

Just add it to the list.

but did the tests actually exist then? Did the UK have any of them?

It apparently first appeared in June. We certainly had tests back then.

I recall pictures of coaches with a police escort taking a whole load of people from Heathrow to some “camp” (old military base maybe?) up near Liverpool for 2 weeks quarantining

They were Brits who had been working in China - not general bods returning from holiday.

There was supposed to be some form of quarantine wasn’t there? I recall pictures of coaches with a police escort taking a whole load of people from Heathrow to some “camp”

I think @frankconway has it, people who'd been working in Wuhan. I do remember that.

And yes, everyone else literally just getting off planes and straight onto trains, buses, the tube etc to wander anywhere they wanted.

For too long humans have defied nature. We’ve pushed the boundaries of survival far beyond natural limits. We’re living far beyond the age we should.
Nature abhors aborations and will seek to resume balance. Laws of natural selection and survival of the fittest keep populations of all species healthy and viable. Here we are presented with a classic example of a balancing act by nature that will select out the less healthy and older members of a society to maintain the health and ability to survive for the more viable specimens, I.e. the ones that will reproduce.

Very true, except for the concept of an intelligent nature doing this maliciously...

I am sadly a massive hypocrite, having had life saving surgery as an infant (which wouldnt have been possible 30 years prior) and being so blind (since my teenage years) as to be totally useless to any society prior to the invention of glasses.

While as a society we may be using technology to improve our health and lives immeasurably, but on a biological level we are hindering ourselves. There is almost no barrier or risk to reproduction in modern western society. How many people under say 35 or 40 do you personally know that have died?

Hence our spiralling population in the last half a century, which is thankfully starting to slow down, but not yet decrease.

Aside from natural infertility (and even that we have partial solutions to) anyone is capable of reproducing. there will be very little actual beneficial evolution of the species from here on out.

Reading the comments on my local news facebook is like a window into insanity. These conspiracy nuts telling me the numbers ate made up to scare people etc, who do they think is wanting to scare them and why? I'd ask them but dont want to get drawn into telling some random how stupid they are when I might meet them again at parents evening or something!!

When I see posts like that, they get put into my avoid as much as possible list, also known as plague rat list.
if they are thinking like that then i see them as being more likely to be carriers and risk of infecting me.

Tourists coming back from Spain are being blamed for 80% of UK cases

Spain you say? 🤐

Tourists coming back from Spain are being blamed for 80% of UK cases

I bet the Spanish are blaming the Brits for bringing it in first!!

@TiRed, my model doesn't have any loss of immunity right now (I'm about to put it in) but I'm pretty confident this won't have had any noticeable effect at the population scale so far unless it's extremely rapid and widespread which seems unlikely. If all the March cohort had lost all immunity there would have been tens of thousands of reinfections and even though most will not be formally identified as such, there would be a *lot* of anecdotes.

So yesterday REACT say R is up to 1.6 (a bogus analysis based on a silly fit to a very short time series), and today SAGE say it's down to 1.1-1.3, which is erring in the opposite direction. Their growth rate estimates of 2-4% per day seem very optimistic to me. But more generally, what a hopeless shower our "expert epidemiologists" are, to come up with such wildly different estimates for the same system.

It's amusing also to contrast the MRC-BSU forecast issued on the 12th Oct with that of the 26th. Their predictions for English deaths on the 26th Oct are 241-696 and and 160-244 respectively (this is date-of-death numbers which are not finalised yet). There's a theoretical chance they will both validate but I wouldn't bet much on it!

Reading the comments on my local news facebook is like a window into insanity. These conspiracy nuts telling me the numbers ate made up to scare people etc,

There was one post I saw that had managed to contradict itself in the first two paragraphs where it claimed firstly that it was all a hoax manufactured by Government to control the sheeple and then that it was caused by 5G.

There was one post I saw that had managed to contradict itself in the first two paragraphs where it claimed firstly that it was all a hoax manufactured by Government to control the sheeple and then that it was caused by 5G.

my MIL believes it is both made in a lab in a plot by the chinese government, and simultaneously a horrific consequence of people eating meat (she's a life long vegetarian).

She did manage to space these two opinions out a bit more than adjacent paragraphs though.

Reading the comments on my local news facebook is like a window into insanit

Derbyshire Police put a message up on FB asking parents to try and talk to their teenagers to try and stick to the rule of 6 and reduce spread of the infection. It was clear they know it's impossible to stop and impossible for them to enforce effectively, but fair play, they'd asked nicely.

Of all the places to kick off an "the Police have no right to restrict my liberties rant", their own FB page seems a pretty dumb place to start. But having seen the shit they were getting when they published the results of their crackdown this week on uninsured cars, I'm not surprised. Being a dick on social media should be a capital offence. The gene pool would thank us for it.

Really shocking scenes from Nottingham last night though, idiots partying before Tier 3 kicked in. Lightened only by my son suggesting that if the BBC had done their risk assessment properly before sending a reporter into St Anns, they'd have realised it was a job for Orla Guerin, with her "PRESS" body armour and helmet 🙂

But having seen the shit they were getting when they published the results of their crackdown this week on uninsured cars, I’m not surprised

Some people on this forum struggle with the concept of car insurance, opening it up to the opinions of anyone with a facebook account is a recipe for disaster.

Really shocking scenes from Nottingham last night though, idiots partying before Tier 3 kicked in.

A friend's son has just gone back to uni (final year), was in a shared house with a few other final year students. He was there about 3 days before moving back home when he found out they're having a Halloween Party this weekend; friends round, sleepover, the whole lot.

This is in an already Tier 3 city. He wasn't prepared to put up either with the risk of infection or the risk of the party being broken up by police and ending up with a £10k fine.

thecaptain
Free Member

So yesterday REACT say R is up to 1.6 (a bogus analysis based on a silly fit to a very short time series), and today SAGE say it’s down to 1.1-1.3

The covid zoe people are saying R=1.1 and doubling rate is 28 days.

https://covid.joinzoe.com/post/covid-rates-are-not-surging

...and before @TiRed jumps up and down about it, the issue is not the R number per se but the doubling time/growth rate that underpins its estimation. These doubling times are also explicitly presented by the different groups and differ wildly.

Indeed, the disparity in doubling times is driven by the data streams used and the lag distributions assigned to them. I focus on hospital admissions because these are the cleanest signal, and derive doubling times from the data (not a model). I ignore cases completely now. I don't estimate R as the generation time is largely uncertain too!

there would be a *lot* of anecdotes.

Completely agree, I am sure there is some protection afforded by past infection.

A_A, my response on lockdownsceptics to the same comments about the unreliability of the "made up data"

The strongest prediction for significant immunity is that release of lockdown would lead to continued sustained low levels of new cases, hospitalisations and deaths. Indeed it would also predict that areas with the highest previous infectious burden would have the slowest rate of growth once constraints are relaxed as there are fewer people to spread the infection to.

What we see is the opposite – relaxing constraints leads to an increases in hospital admissions. That increase began earlier in the year than typical influenza, with fastest rates in areas in the lowest Tier (1) and slowing rates in areas in highest Tier (3). I know these are uncomfortable facts (down button below), and the signal is obscured by some frenzy over the testing reliability and positivity of “cases”. But step back, look at the burden of healthcare and the likely consequences.

The hard facts are than a lot more people are being admitted to hospitals in October that met the same diagnostic criteria as they did two months ago. The time for these admissions to double has been about two weeks (less in Tier 1, more in Tier 3). The increase is several months earlier than typically noted for respiratory diseases. The North began from a higher absolute number, but the growth has been quite similar. Nowhere has seen a fall in admissions per day.

Sadly, about 1/6 of these admissions will die. That number is better than it used to be. But before they die they will occupy HDU/ITU beds that would normally be used for routine care. That care will now be suspended until admissions start to stabilise or fall.

There is no evidence from this course of events of the role played by immunity. I wish there were. There is evidence of better management leading to reduced mortality (a huge success). But as the ITUs fill up, younger and younger people will be denied the likely treatment they require and the average age of death will fall. We should be thankful at least, that unlike influenza, there is not the additional significant paediatric burden on healthcare

Hopefully it still goes without saying on here that R=1 is a disaster for us. We need the R rate constantly and significantly well below 1, for a good long spell, to get the actual numbers down... But half the chat I see on social media etc for Scotland is like "the number is almost down to 1, why do we still have such a DRACONIAN lockdown" (ie, the pub is shut)

SAGE have finally noticed that the second wave is coming faster than they had anticipated.

It's only 3 months ago that I pointed out the same thing.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-54750775

(To be fair, their minutes are from 2 weeks ago, so they are only about 10 weeks behind me, rather than 12.)

SAGE have finally noticed that the second wave is coming faster than they had anticipated.

Tbh I think the only folk surprised by that were sage and the government

Ideally one would like R<1. But R=1 and a low absolute number means manageable healthcare and some flex for the inevitable fluctuations. The big challenge is that estimation of R in Tier 3 regions still suggests R>1 and growing transmission. That may be manageable, and indeed sustainable, with compensatory periods of closure (school holidays) but it is undesirable. Schools are the real issue here. Education open implies R>1. But education needs to stay open.

BBC also reporting that SAGE have decalred that the current situation is "significantly worse than the reasonable worst case scenario", and that this "reasonable worst case" assumed a case rate about 20% as much as it is today.

Quite a lot of things to unpick in that, I reckon.

Tbh I think the only folk surprised by that were sage and the government

If I am honest, I am relatively pleased that the doubling time is what it is. I wasn't in the least bit surprised, the null is 3 days!!! There is some evidence that the Tier measures may be having an effect. Tier 1 is certainly more rapid than Tier 3. The basic fact is that the North was already too high when we unlocked because it was always lagging the South.

I view education as the largest challenge. That and trying to achieve the potential reductions in transmission that testing has to offer.

So what's the course of action then? An English Circuit Break? How's that going to work when us lot in Wales will be coming out of ours? Will schools have to close for longer?

They've missed the boat (again!) and the consequences are going to be much, much worse than they should be or have been imagined.

A serious question now: Where the **** is Boris?

Yes I am very angry.

They’ve missed the boat (again!) and the consequences are going to be much, much worse than they should be or have been imagined.

A serious question now: Where the **** is Boris?

It's déjà vu all over again!

Well he can't come to Wales and hide in the same fridge again, the factory is shut due to a Covid outbreak!!

The basic fact is that the North was already too high when we unlocked because it was always lagging the South

Locked the South too late and unlocked the North too early. Lose:Lose

Good job that's not going to be repeated this time round, hey ?

New national lockdown on it's way next week - according to The Times.

Techie people.

I downloaded the German covid app when I was in Germany. It’s still running in my phone and telling me I’m low risk (it’s not wrong - I’m doing everything I can to avoid being inside with people outside of my household).

I’m guessing that Apple phones are all running the same core detection system so doesn’t really matter what human language / country I’m in. Or is this overly optimistic?

Leaked to Times. Announcement on Monday. They have all weekend to gauge response and decide what they actually are going to do.

And the Mail:

https://twitter.com/sophyridgesky/status/1322300519856115724?s=21

So judging by the way they're testing the reactions to what they may do:

It’s déjà vu all over again!

Leak to favoured press, if it goes down badly just drop it. If it sticks, run with it and act like the announcement is amazing and exactly the right thing to do and the timing is impeccable.

If we use the same timeline when is Cummings due an 'eye test' and can we make sure everyone he passes has their phone recording at the time?

Again: where the **** is Boris?

Or is this overly optimistic?

It is. While it’s completely possible for the apps to work across borders (the Scottish app has been updated to work in Ireland and France recently IIRC) there is nothing in place for the German app to work here, or for our App to work there (or anywhere) yet. It’s flaky enough here… that needs sorting first.

Edit: just checked… it’s just NI and Jersey sharing with Scotland so far… but the intention (at the Scotland end) is for England&Wales, Ireland, France etc to join as well. I wouldn’t hold your breath about England&Wales being soon. Can’t find anything about Germany.

Here's all of the front pages...
https://www.tomorrowspapers.co.uk

This is the absolute definition of insanity.

JP

^^ I agree, should have happened weeks back but will now be more severe and last longer.

Yes, I know that's not what you meant JJ.

Still, got to be better than wearing a mask etc eh? Civ libs etc....

I agree, should have happened weeks back but will now be more sever and last longer.

https://twitter.com/spittingcat/status/1321502243691106311?s=20

Well if it doesn’t include school closures, you know what Tier 5 is going to be. I have never made recommendations, only provided analyses. But the picture looks reasonably clear. One hopes that the picture is sinking in.

We know four things from the epidemic curves (deaths, cases, admissions…)

Without any intervention the epidemic of cases and deaths doubles every 2-3 days (in multiple countries)

With lockdown restrictions and education closed, the epidemic halves every 14-21 days

With current restrictions and education open, the epidemic doubles every 10-14 days

There is a lag of about a week between actions and new cases, and another week from hospital admissions to deaths.

From this it’s relatively straightforward to infer the likely effects of lockdown, circuit breakers and so on.

Remember “a day’s delay, a week you’ll pay”? It’s a little better than that. But not much. We’re not even at evens - two weeks off for two weeks growth 🙁

Choosing not to synchronise half term with any "lock down" or circuit breaker reduces its effectiveness enormously. Who made that choice on behalf of England?