[DomCum]Just use your common sense and do it, if you’ve not been exposed to a potential infection source for a week beforehand you’re very unlikley to have the virus. Unless you’re one of the little people, in which case stay at home, prole[/DomCum]

Having re-read that, it’s actaully more sensible than what Dom **** did…

Sorry to hear you’re caught up in this.

Out of interest, what’s your experience and views as to why Leicester has had this problem?

I’ve not yet seen any “nasty racial” elements being bandied around though?

Chats between colleagues who have been in the office and one or two ‘nudge-nudge’ Facebook posts. Nothing overt, obvs.

@MoreCashThanDash to be honest I don’t know, I think you may have touched on some of the reasons on the previous page which would make sense.

@dannyh would probably put it much better than me, he only lives 5 ish miles away from me. fortunately for him out side the red zone so he’ll still be enjoying tomorrow nights bike ride!

Quite. Scotland’s figure’s have been largely on a par with the UK average. A little better than England, worse than Wales and NI. Also up there with the worst of Europe, too (Somewhere around Spain and Belgium IIRC).

According to the govt:

England 287 cases/100,000 people
NI 259
Scotland 291
Wales 501

IIRC at the height of this, and for a fair few weeks after, our daily deaths were fairly reflective of Englands, in terms of population, ie not far off 1/10th of their number

Yes normalised data wise.

But lower absolute number coupled with a more sparse populous stacked the odds in our favour.

Can’t book for august 1st yet Colin, only the next 2 weeks is available on a rolling basis, you’ll need to wait til around the end of July.

Yeah. I saw that. Can’t really plan much on that basis. Still, by August we might even be allowed to see MiL in the nursing home.

Mr monk – workdometers data always has outliers that make no sense. That 280 deaths on the 23 June skews the figures. Look on the data feed under the graph for 23 Jun and it explains 100+ extra old deaths included that day.

Use the gov.uk Covid tracker for better data. It also shows positive tests by specimen data, revealing the actual daily cases at 200 ish, rather than the 1000+ reported in the figures, which includes test results of specimens as far back as March!

@dannyh would probably put it much better than me, he only lives 5 ish miles away from me. fortunately for him out side the red zone so he’ll still be enjoying tomorrow nights bike ride!

What Sam means is I frequently have bouts of verbal diarrhoea.

Reasons for Leicester being a hotspot right now?

To be honest, I’m not sure (but how could I be).

I would put forward a few theories, but that is all they are:

Tight knit communities within the city. I would suspect the proportion of households with 3-4 generations under the same roof is as high as anywhere in the country.

Bridgen (I used to spit on the ground at the mention of that name, but it is unhygienic) may have a point about dodgy knock off garment factories. If you are employed by a dodgy employer they aren’t going to give a shit about safety.

Houses in Multiple Occupancy are prevalent in the city. Possibly linked to iffy employers.

Not masses of outdoor space in the surrounding areas so there are major daytripper hotspots just outside Leicester.

See, told you he’d have better ideas than me 🙂

See, told you he’d have better ideas than me

It doesn’t make them right, though!

FWIW I reckon there will be a significant number of nobheads who think “**** it, I’m off for a pint” over the weekend and drive out into surrounding villages and towns.

Leicester is 600,000 give or take. If 1% are nobheads then that is 6,000 nobheads potentially breaking the rules and heading in my direction!

Might as well get a pint in while out testing your eyesight.

this is what leicester council were complaining about

But the govt is sitting on a much more complete dataset including pillar 2, which tells a completely different story

More than 90% of new cases in Leicester are now under pillar 2, yet these numbers are not public. If you’re a local biz owner in Leicester, you only see the blue. pic.twitter.com/aZY20EuOGc

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) June 30, 2020

What’s pillar 2 then? Going by the pillar 2 data, Leicester isn’t so much in a 2nd wave, but still in a huge 1st wave.

That 280 thing in the worldometer data was when the govt slipped another 100 deaths back into the “historic” figures rather than the daily value. I don’t know where the extra 100 deaths came from but they were distributed over the past several months whereas the daily values are usually mostly within the past few days.

Pillar 1 carried out in PHE labs and should be hospital patients & staff

Pillar 2 in the privatecentres set up in MK, including machines theyve taken from universities (we kinda want ours back now) and should be public, key workers & families

The government arent explaining what is done where on who

making it very hard for Local authorities to fiure out where their problems are

tho Cummings mates at Palatir & Faculty are given this data to model the pandemic, but its not shared with LAs, GPs, even local MPs

Thanks Kimbers.

That 280 thing in the worldometer data was when the govt slipped another 100 deaths back into the “historic” figures rather than the daily value.

thanks captain, that explains all

worldometers have previously done periodic cleanups after these bonus drops have happened

And, what NBITF said, that data for Leicester looks problematic. Of course in typical Boris Administration style, we essentially don’t have the faintest idea of what any given person is supposed to do because of the “local lockdown” – apart from not get their hair cut and not send the kids to school. Everyone will be straight to a pub outside the city limits come Saturday.

How on earth can local responses be properly planned and explained to the public (so that they accept them) locally (remember, no national daily briefing now) if kept only in the centralised system?!?

You use the words “properly planned” as if they are a concept this administration gives a flying chuff about.

Two words, minister, “plausible deniability”.

Death levels now back to normal?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53233066

Now i’m not going to suggest that the virus has gone away, but are the people now dying from this the ones who would have probably died of some other disease in this period?

Not necessarily. It could easily be completely different people. The social distancing measures may have reduced (as well as in some cases adding to) deaths by all sorts of unrelated causes. You can’t simplistically say that the people dying of this Coronavirus now would have been dying now anyway, far from it.

Yes, all-cause mortality is back to historic baseline. I use ten-year mean. There are a couple of outliers (45-64 and 65-75), but the numbers are now modest. The question now is whether they will dip below baseline (subjects would have died anyway) or remain above (life expectancy has fallen). Personally, I suspect the former.

Proportion of positive tests is what really matters in pillar 1 and 2 data. I have some analyses of lower tier authority data that identified Leicestershire as a hot spot, but there are others.

Proportion of positive tests is what really matters in pillar 1 and 2 data.

Is that proportion of tests, or proportion of people tested?

Shocking headline from the BBC, sends completely the wrong message “deaths back to normal- everybody crack on”

We’ve been quick to criticise poor government communication, but the media have been giving it the full “Squirrel!” as well.

Leicester may have more underlying respiratory issues too. I recall a news article from a few years ago that identified air pollution in Leicester as one of the worst places in the country.

EDIT : 9th worst in Europe BBC News

Air quality isn’t great in Southampton either, between all the personal vehicles and the cruise ships, Woolston area by the water has been worst hit by covid-19.

BBC should be shot for that “just flu bro” headline, some don’t need much encouragement to pretend this pandemic is over, when the truth is far closer to us being on a knife edge.

Proportion of tests.

If you test more people you will find more cases 😉 But whether that means more transmission or more finding is moot. The harder endpoints are hospital admissions (same fraction will always report for hospital) and eventual deaths (same proportion of hospitalised patients still die). Deaths are declining to a few hundred/week now. That’s the hardest endpoint. Other-cause deaths must be lower because the expected number of people are dying.

The harder endpoints are hospital admissions (same fraction will always report for hospital) and eventual deaths (same proportion of hospitalised patients still die).

As I understand it from a BBC report the other day, the number of Covid patients dying in hospital has dropped from 6% to 1%. Various reasons were put forward, including people being admitted earlier in the illness now there is more capacity, and treatment being more effective.

So do those kind of factors knock out your “same proportion” hypothesis?

Not really, the ons prevalence data looks at 20k tests. We might be admitting a few percentage points more patients, but deaths are deaths, survival from the ITU is not great (25-33% die). And the elderly don’t find their way into them in the first instance. Nursing home mortality is declining. That’s a key barometer outside of the community.

Hi @TiRed firstly as I’ve not said it at any point, thanks for all your contribution to the thread.

Secondly, if you have the right data, what’s the chances of this Leicester lockdown only lasting two weeks. I could care less about pubs, shops etc. But chucking the bike in the car is generally what I live for! Bit of a longshot I know!

Other-cause deaths must be lower because the expected number of people are dying.

Negative consequences of lockdown , including people scared away with cancer, heart disease etc now abating

But pubs still closed, traffic still lower, millions not commuting to work, less opportunity to get run over etc and lockdown is also protecting us from other diseases that we might normally encounter

So is that the entire population of Leicester nipping round to Dominic Cummings’ mum and dad’s then?

So the US has bought up the entire world supply of Remdesivir (Yay for capitalism!)

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/30/us-buys-up-world-stock-of-key-covid-19-drug

Has this been established as actually useful in ARDS?

Has this been established as actually useful in ARDS?

My colleagues on covid wards said that with dexamethasone it’s been really good

Bind for UK, at this point sensible thing would be to just by cheap from Asia, but UK pharma companies would hit the roof

So the US has bought up the entire world supply of Remdesivir (Yay for capitalism!)

I really wouldn’t be too upset. The patients in whom it seems to work need to be mild/moderate, O2 >94% on room air and treated early. It’s an IV drug with daily infusions. You would not be admitted to a U.K. hospital with those symptoms so you wouldn’t get it anyway. It doesn’t do much for the sickest patients.

In fact,I’m very skeptical that it’s doing anything. And it’s my day job to test these things! Now dexamethasone, that’s a different matter. As will be tocilizumab/sarilumab in the most severe patients. The anti-Covid antibodies will also be along soon. I have a lot more faith in those.

not moving on I see

molgrips
Subscriber
Quite. Scotland’s figure’s have been largely on a par with the UK average. A little better than England, worse than Wales and NI. Also up there with the worst of Europe, too (Somewhere around Spain and Belgium IIRC).

According to the govt:

England 287 cases/100,000 people
NI 259
Scotland 291
Wales 501

I think using case numbers in isolation is a bit skewed you need to look at cases/deaths/testing, and that’ll give you a more accurate gauge?

Cases
Eng 160,587 / 55.98m * 100k = 286 per 100k

Ni 5,760 / 1.882 * 100k = 306 per 100k

Sco 18,251 / 5.454m * 100k = 334 per 100k

Wal 15,743 / 3.136m * 100k = 502 per 100k

Deaths
Eng 39,187 / 55.98m * 100k = 70 per 100k

Ni 551 / 1.882 * 100k = 29 per 100k

Sco 2,482 / 5.454m * 100k = 45 per 100k

1,510 / 3.136m * 100k = 48 per 100k

Testing
Eng 2,293,944 / 55.98m * 100k = 4097 per 100k

Ni 101,506 / 1.882 * 100k = 5393 per 100k

Sco 272,561 / 5.454m * 100k = 4997 per 100k

Wal 182,303 / 3.136m * 100k = 5813 per 100k

I used the numbers from here.

https://coronavirus-staging.data.gov.uk/testing

ps confirmed cases only obv. doesn’t include the excess deaths from ONS/NRS/NISRA

You can’t simplistically say that the people dying of this Coronavirus now would have been dying now anyway, far from it.

I listened to an interesting episode of More or Less on R4 a couple of weeks ago. I expect you can still stream it. Hosted by Tim Harford (economics/stats guy) his guest speaker was an actuary.

They were talking about whether it is true to say “the majority of deaths are in older/vulnerable people who would have died soon anyway”

By relating it to life expectancy stats for people of various ages/conditions that make them higher risk, they disproved this theory.

One of the examples was (from memory) a man in his 80s, overweight, smoker, heart condition. The insurance world (callous as this sounds) still puts his life expectancy at over 5 years, so while someone might say “he’d have died in a couple of months anyway” it’s statistically unlikely.

So is that the entire population of Leicester nipping round to Dominic Cummings’ mum and dad’s then?

Nope, they’ll satisfy themselves with travelling 5-10 miles outside the city and descending on pubs in the surrounding towns and villages like a plague of locusts.

If the police are on the lookout they can also increase their drink-drive arrest rates into the bargain.