Look at my graphic ^^^^^^^^ – S Korea testing a smaller proportion of population than the uk now.

Best to look at testing vs. deaths to get an idea of how thoroughly testing has been implemented.

Quick calculation, Korea has tested 2400 people per CV death. UK has tested 30 people per CV death.

Therefore Korea has tested 80x more extensively than the UK. (In relation to the size of their epidemic)

We are only really testing people who have severe illness and end up in hospital.

Korea were testing everyone with symptoms however mild and also in some cases all their close contacts.

These are questions, not statements, so no shouting please.
Did we get the timing of the lockdown wrong?

Yes, absolutely. The whole concept of ‘timing’ is only relevant if you are trying to achieve herd immunity.

Despite the government claiming they abandoned this strategy after massive condemnation from around the world, they continued to crap on about getting the timing right. Essentially they wanted to get the fire started and let it burn through the population at a controlled rate within the capacity of the NHS.

I can only assume they thought there was extensive asymptomatic infection (despite the WHO saying otherwise) and therefore the mortality was a lot lower than it appeared. If they could get it through 60% of the population in a few months with only 20K deaths (similar to a bad flu year) they probably thought this was acceptable to save the economy and see the virus off.

Unfortunately we’ll likely have 40K dead and only 4-5% infected after this first peak, so nowhere close to herd immunity so those 40K people will have been sacrificed in vain. Essentially we’ll just be getting back to where we were end of February.

When something is doubling every 2 days, a 10 day delay in lockdown means deaths/infection will be 32x worse. The government and their advisors massively f*cked up.

I saw Hancock was raging against the fact that “everybody wants to know what the future looks like” when asked wtaf the government’s plan is here. Beyond “uh, keep everyone locked up and wait for a sign”. No suggestion that they have a target or guideline of when might be the right time to take the next step, or what that step might be. Or even a sodding clue, beyond pushing Brexit as some sort of natural corollary.

I’m fairly immune to most of the grade A incompetence and f*ckwittery of politicians now, but this anger at the media asking for some sort of semblance of a plan really p*ssed me off.

While I share your frustration, I can see why the government might be reluctant to reveal its strategy.

It’s the modus operandi of the press to get politicians to commit to things then unearth these commitments weeks or months later and castigate them for failing to deliver. This is why it’s difficult to get straight answers out of politicians most of the time.

This scrutiny is mostly totally justified, but in the case of this pandemic, one of my fears is we back them into revealing a strategy that they then feel compelled to stick to through fear of being accused of doing a u-turn even if the latest knowledge might suggest a different approach would be better. Dogmatic thinking definitely must be avoided.

Ultimately things aren’t going back to normal until we have a vaccine. I guess the question is where they are going to set the balance point on the numbers of deaths vs the economy over the next 12-18months until the vaccine is ready.

I’m pretty sure Viruses can survive years in freezers. It’s entirely possible someone took something out of a freezer with it on. Plus CV symptoms != CV.

True indeed. The main point of interest in my post was Italy has decided 14 days of isolation With covid symptoms wasn’t enough, so they are increasing to 28 days (we are 7 days!)

Just got off a work conf call with my EU colleagues…….

Two interesting points came up from my Italian/French work mates.

1. Italy has just increased the time people need to self isolate at home if they have symptoms from 14 days to 28 days. They were staggered when I told them in the UK it is 7 days.

2. Apparently a French aircraft carrier set out to sea last month with no contact with the outside world. All crew fit and healthy on departure. People subsequently developed covid symptoms, however not until they had been at sea for 21 days.

My guess would be the more multi variate the model the greater the uncertainty becomes to the point the information becomes a bit pointless. Like the stuff the other day saying school closures have little effect.

Could just be a coefficient that has been derived empirically to model the variance in human interaction.

E.g final infection rate = k(1-1/R0)

Maybe model ‘k’ on swine flu or any other novel infections that have occurred in recent times?

If it has a case reproductive ratio of even 2, then that’s 50% endemic infection. We aren’t there but testing would help. I also believe that social distancing is VERY efficient, probably more than the models predict. The standard logistic model is not the best description of the data, providing support for reduced contact transmission.

@TiRed Do we have more advanced models that take into account the differences in human behaviour across a population when calculating final infection levels. I understand how R0=2 —> 50% infection, but wouldn’t this only apply if all the possibly infectious subjects all behaved the same I.e. they all had the same number of interactions with each other. It might work for organisms in a petri dish or maybe even a population of rabbits, but humans have quite different levels of social interaction / hygiene levels.

So what I’m saying is could the apparent R0 at the start of an outbreak be skewed by the people who have a lot more social interaction and therefore once they are infected/immune the spread would slow more dramatically than predicted by the maths that assumes the population has an equal amount of social interaction. If this was the case could the virus fizzle out at a level of infection much lower than 60%?

Just curious.

Two interesting facts among those experts – the guy from Stanford is right, case fatality rate is most definitely less than 1% (as it was on the cruise ship of more elderly passengers), and the virologist who states that in those infected, SARS-COV-1 was more pathogenic as it targeted the deep lung alveoli, rather than the upper respiratory tract. That said, my deep lungs are hurting after two weeks and I still feel a bit breathless. Get it deep, like SARS-COV-1, and it will not be nice. It’s not influenza, there is no background residual immunity.

So some basic assumptions:

A) If the Case Fatality Rate is 0.1% (1 in 1000 cases die) – probably reasonable lower bound.
B) If 60% catch it – it is very transmissible under normal contacts could be as high as 80%!
C) If 80% are asymptomatic (slight cough, easily confused with other bugs at this time of year)

Then…

Deaths = 60 million x 0.6 x (1-0.8) (cases) x 0.001 = 7200 deaths

We are well above that number, so which assumption is incorrect? Answer… We don’t actually know because we don’t have solid testing data for A), B) or C)

You are the Government, you have had planning in place for an influenza pandemic for about 20 years. Sirens are ringing in countries with similar if not better healthcare systems than the NHS. What would you do?

A few points…
I believe they gave the diamond princess passengers remdesivir. Great for the passengers, but sadly clouds any data that would have been useful in understanding CFR.

I also don’t buy the 80% asymptomatic assumption, they found it was around 20% in Korea who tested widely.

Also isn’t your CFR of 0.1% already taking into account the 80% asymptomatic assumption?

Personally I think the actual CFR will likely be 1-2% when all said and done.

Assuming 1.5%, then…

66M x 0.6 x (1-0.2) x 0.015 = 475K dead ie we are only 9/475 = 1.9% of the way through.

You just change the email in the Contact details.

Oh! I copied the wrong link sorry.
https://beta.support.xbox.com/help/Account-Profile/manage-account/change-email-sign-in-for-microsoft-account

Unfortunately it looks like doing it that way deletes the account you are transferring from.

I want to keep my old email and set that account up for myself with a new gamertag, but transfer my sons gamertag with his associated friends and game progress to a new email I have created for him, linked to the family account.

Thanks, but I’m not looking to change the billing details etc, I just want to transfer his gamer tag to his own email so he doesn’t lose his friends etc.

EDIT: ignore my comments, was thinking about the split of deaths. Not woken up yet.

The FDA approved this yesterday for patients under a single-patient Investigational New Drug Process. This is unprecedented.

https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/investigational-new-drug-ind-or-device-exemption-ide-process-cber/investigational-covid-19-convalescent-plasma-emergency-inds

Very interesting!

I wonder how much plasma you would need for this to be effective. Might need a unfeasibly large number of donors to vaccine the whole country, also there would be safety concerns in doing that.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2236544-coronavirus-are-there-two-strains-and-is-one-more-deadly/

Not 40 mind you.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/24/iceland-scientists-found-40-mutations-of-the-coronavirus-report-says/

Still awaiting peer review though

Apparently a home testing kit is due to be released ‘in days’ – potential game-changer, you’ll finally be able to find out easily whether you’ve had the virus and, reading the article, most likely if you have it too:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/25/uk-coronavirus-mass-home-testing-to-be-made-available-within-days

Good news, but a concern I have with this is it will allow people who can’t be arsed to comply with the lockdown to say they have tested themselves and have had it, therefore immune and are therefore fine to go to the pub etc.

Also I read somewhere scientists have identified 40 different strains, would it be guaranteed if you had caught one strain you would also be immune to the other 39?

What matters is not the case fatality rate (CFR), what matters is the relative rate of growth of deaths vs cases. We can’t know the CFR because the denominator is not measured. From global data, assuming about 10-15% of cases are reported, and a two-week period from infection to eventual death, the global CFR is <1%.

In Germany the rate of growth of deaths is tracking cases (parallel on a semi-log plot). And in Spain, UK and Italy it does not.

@Tired – genuinely interested what you think the true fatality rate is from this and the level of asymptomatic/mild infection that is missed.

From listening to the CMO/CSO I get the feeling they believe there is a very large number of undetected cases in the China data that I guess they made based their decisions on. This would imply the Infection fatality rate is way lower than the CFR and the infectiousness R0 is way higher. I guess that could have driven the herd immunity strategy as the death rate would be much lower than the data suggests and the infectiousness would be higher making containment more difficult.

My concern is the WHO said they didn’t find evidence of widespread asymptomatic transmission/ missed infections and surely if there was a lot of asymptomatic transmission their contract tracing would have found it, or they wouldn’t have been able to contain it.

If there isn’t a lot of missed infections then this virus may be more dangerous than they believe. If this is the case we might be in a situation in a few months when they are expecting say 40-50% of the population to be infected based on the deaths/hospital admissions and the R0 to drop and new cases reduce as immunity builds, however if they got it wrong and only 4-5% are infected at that point then there will still be a lot more people that need to die/get infected before we have immunity.

If you look at cases 10 days ago for the UK (590) versus today’s deaths (281) that gives a CFR of errrr… .

I think the Germans’ own expalanations are more plausible, Mudmuncher. More people tested, younger population infected.

Just be patient, it’ll all come out in the statistical wash. For now just keep 1.5m or preferably 2m away from people. That’s what I’ve taken on board from Merkel’s speech. A bit more distance makes a giant difference.

Yes, I think the discrepancy is down to the more extensive testing in Germany. We aren’t testing suspect cases unless they are serious enough to end up in hospital so it’s meaningless to compare the CFRs between countries also there is the lag in death from infection and missing infections.

Its interesting to read the discrepancies between the UK 4.6% and Germany 0.3% of those dying with corvid19.
At the moment the UK is adding to the corvid19 fatality list anybody who dies with the virus, unlike Germany who are only recording those dying as a result of the virus.

You can’t really work out CFR until all cases are concluded as many of the infected will go on and die. The deaths that are occurring now are from infections that happened 1-2 weeks ago. If you look at cases in Germany 10 days ago (1567) vs today’s deaths (92) that gives a CFR of 5.9%. Obviously they’ll miss a cases which will tend to bring the death rate down.

Once we have demonstrated that we can effectively separate the two populations, govt policies will be used to turn on the taps and allow an increased rate of infection amongst the low risk group (as exceedence of the ICU capacity is unlikely to be exceeded).

No this won’t work.

ICU is already pretty much full.

Deaths and therefore real cases are doubling every 2 days.

Due to the circa 14 day lag from infection, incubation, sickness, deterioration, needing ICU the NHS is effectively doomed to be overwhelmed already, even if nobody gets infected from now on.

Not just a little overwhelmed either, 2^7 = 128x overwhelmed.

Lockdown needs to happen Monday

Lockdown needed to happen about 2 weeks ago!

@bikebouy and the other ignorant selfish people who believe it won’t impact them please listen to this humbling account from an A&E doc on what awaits us ….

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0877mb2

If it continues to double every 2 days we’ll have 128x more deaths/cases in just 14 days. If the ICUs are getting close to full now it will be ugly.

I think the flattening the peak has nothing to do with NHS capacity more making sure they can dispose of the bodies.

Can anyone remember when Italy imposed the stricter measures, school closures etc.

I was getting optimistic that the new cases had levelled off the last 4 days, but another jump today, so maybe they were just hitting the limit of the daily tests and have increased capacity.

That’s also a massive difference between asymptomatic infections (about half) on the ship, and the town in Italy (about 90%).

I’m not sure about his maths, and it would seem the rest of the world isn’t, too.

The cruise ship maintained an overall fatality of 0.91%.

The cruise ship over 70s demographic, fatality rate was 7.3%

Other thing with the cruise ship they gave the infected the antiviral remdesivir as part of an experimental trial, so no way of knowing if that skewed the data.

What they say is it will overwhelm the NHS that’s been made clear, you have noticed they’re cancelling none urgent surgery from next month. They’re trying to contain the virus the best they can to a point when the NHS is in a better position. They’ve made that very clear.

That isn’t what Vallance was saying yesterday when Jeremy Hunt was questioning him. The point I’m making is I think he still wants this to work it’s way through the population or at least some of it to reduce the R0. He actually said again yesterday he believed it couldn’t be contained (despite the success China has had).

Anyone else thinking Valance hasn’t really abandoned his “herd immunity” strategy. If they were serious about suppressing this they would be throwing the brakes on hard now.

Suspect they are trying to keep the schools open as long as possible to get the kids infected as they are unlikely to present in ICU. Trouble is nobody knows about the long term health implications – pulmonary fibrosis etc. And in the coming weeks they will be infecting their parents/grandparents.

Suspect their lacklustre responses is going to overwhelm the NHS by a fair margin in a couple of weeks, despite what they say.

Patrick Vallance being questioned now on bbc news24

Keep in mind the imperial report didn’t factor in the increased death rate of the ICU beds being not available for 7 out 8 that needed them! So would be a lot higher than 250K if You factor nhs capacity.

It also says we need to act now with the schools.

From what I’ve seen over the last 3-4 weeks is a huge amount of people in denial as to the seriousness of this, despite the available evidence and seeing what is going on in Italy.

I’m wondering if they are intentionally holding back a bit so the ICU beds do run out and a few younger people do die in hospital corridors, so people take the containment measures seriously.

tpbiker
Member
The most sobering article I’ve read yet..
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-nhs-doctor-warns-we-are-already-at-breaking-point-11958542

Deeply worrying!

I think most people grasp that, for the 96% majority, it’s a relatively mild illness which might cause them a bit of inconvenience if they get it. The problem is that the same majority also have someone close who would fall into that 4%.

Where did you get the 96% have it mild from?

WHO is saying 80% mild, 20% needing hospitalisation.

Leaked PHE document saying 15% need hospitalisation.

The problem is if it takes off in the numbers the government is expecting the vast majority won’t get access to healthcare.

Look at all the resources China threw at this, building extra hospitals, drafting in thousands of extra doctors and nurses from other provinces and they only had 0.0056% of their population infected and they still became overwhelmed in Wuhan.

Bojo is planning 60-80% of the population getting this, 7.9M serious enough needing hospitalisation. Assuming people need a 1 week stay (some will need a month), we could maybe treat 500K in a year based on the circa 10K free beds we have.

That is 7.4M people in a very sticky situation.

Don’t think S Korea is done with this. Average age of their patients is low compared with others, hence 0.7% CFR. When it gets into their elderly groups, we’ll see how they get on.

Scroll down and look at new cases/day, looks nailed to me
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/

Footflaps I prefer deaths to cases because of differences in testing between countries. I did use a simple lag time model to predict deaths from past cases a week ago, which works very well indeed for projection, except the U.K. has changed testing. Then I looked at growth rate of any country compared to all others. Based on that, UK, France and Italy are all trending on the mean doubling time. South Korea and even the US are doing well for now. If we see 100 cases By Tuesday, I’m concerned we are off the curve.

It’s relatively rudimentary compared to my past efforts, but so much is not known (like incubation time, infectiousness even immunity.

Reducing contacts, will definitely reduce transmission though. Whether it reduces the overall numbers infected is still moot. But incidence will be lower.

I agree deaths are more accurate than cases albeit with the lag, but I guess you also need to be wary of the Fatality rate which will vary depending where a country is in an outbreak. I.e might be 1-2% in early stages, but 7-8% once the ventilators run out.

That guardian link is the first I’ve seen to admit 1% mortality rate means 1/2million deaths.

Government reckon they can get it to 0.6% , & just 1/3rd million .

Let’s hope so, NHS in theory is highly centralised & well placed to manage the crisis, but obviously staffing & bed shortages are going to be big factors in keeping mortality rate down

Err no!

Might be 1% for cases 0-10,000, but for cases 10K to 50M it will be 5-10%+

Just to repeat, they are saying 7.9M will need hospitalisation.

Let’s say they can get an even distribution and each person has a 2 week stay, they’ll need 300k beds/fortnight. We currently have 8K free beds and 1K ICU.

Whitty was mentioning the 1% and 80% infection on the news briefing, the 2 are mutually incompatible, it was at this point I realised he was either an idiot or a liar.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/15/uk-coronavirus-crisis-to-last-until-spring-2021-and-could-see-79m-hospitalised

From a maths perspective…..

Say if you accepted 3 months of lockdown over the next 6 months, due to the exponential growth, surely the lowest level of infection would result if you lockdown on and off every 2 weeks. E.g. 2 weeks lockdown, 2 weeks less stringent, alternating back and forth, rather than waiting 3 months when we have millions of cases then implementing 3 months of continuous lockdown?

It’s clear they have put the economy ahead of the lives of the people, but this economic strategy is also flawed….

We rely so much on trade with other countries so we need to be in step with what they are doing.

If Bojo let’s this rip through the population thinking he can get the economy back on track in 6 months he might struggle if the other countries in the world that we trade with are all on lockdown having prioritised their people over the economy.

If we even get near to a fraction of that or people believe it’s the policy of the government I think we can expect much bigger problems. It’s bad enough trying to deal with the virus and economic impact, imagine trying to deal with social disorder and mass panic at the same time?

This is why they need to get a grip on the comms, and be completely transparent on what they’re doing, and what’s happening on the ground. Instead we have them blustering on the Andrew Marr show and leaking policy to Robert Peston.

They’re not even testing people at home with symptons so they can’t tell people what the situation is, so the vacuum is filled with rumour and speculation, which could very quickly turn into paranoia, suspicion, anxiety and panic. South Korea are getting this right. We are currently doing the opposite.

+1, the problem is we are only really measuring deaths now which lag infections by 2 weeks. By the time deaths get high, even if they put the brakes on hard, due to the exponential growth it could be too late.

2 weeks ago we had 28 cases. Now 1140, that is a 40 fold increase. Not a big deal when the numbers are low, but if repeated once we have more infection it will be ugly.

If they throw the brakes on at say 1000 deaths, it could possible rise to 40K deaths before the rate starts to reduce

Chatting to my friend in Belgium this morning about how the more extreme measures are being taken by the people. He said everyone is on board with it and realises the gravity of the situation.

Also they are genuinely amazed the U.K. isn’t taking this seriously

Essentially, I wouldn’t take a gamble on the herd immunity plan.

100% agree. We don’t want to find out this doesn’t work after we have wiped out 2-3million people.

Also there is no knowledge if 2nd and 3rd infections become progressively more dangerous. There seems to be a concern about pulmonary fibrosis even in mild cases. That might mean increasing mortality the second time you get it. Infecting 50M people when this is unknown is madness

Herd immunity…

It’s just dangerous nonsense. Drop it. The government have.

Have the government officially said they are dropping this strategy?

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-millions-of-britons-will-need-to-contract-covid-19-for-herd-immunity-11956793

Just watching S Korean foreign minister on Marr. She’s mighty impressive. Interesting they are not locking down but monitoring through phone apps and treating/isolating as soon as people become ill.

Plan based on super connected and disciplined population. S Korea rate of new infections falling

Yes, I think Korea have shown this can be done in a democratic country through extensive testing and containment. We have a blueprint for something that will work with minimal deaths, but Bojo wants to proceed with getting us all infected.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-korea/
Interesting graph of the daily cases in Korea.

It has been dropping for 10 days now from 850/day, to 76 today.