COVID19

[Doobs]

Northumbria University has announced major Covid outbreak- 770 students tested positive for the disease, 78 are symptomatic.

Suppose that there is good news in the number of asymptomatic cases, though many of then will turn symptomatic.  

Looking foward to some calcs from the usual professors using this "10%" symptomatic rate and using it with the "80%" immunity rate I read the other day to show that nobody is going to die ever.

Party time.

Am I missing something here? I was under the impression that asymptomatic was much worse because they go out in to the community happily spreading the virus without knowing it?

If you have symptoms you get a test and isolate yourself. If you don't have symptoms you just crack on.

Higher asymptomatic rate means more people have been infected, so less people can get infected in the future.

I don't share others optimism, but looking for positives can't be a bad thing.

In other news. Trump is in hospital.  So he has gone from no symptoms to mild symptoms to fever to hospital in less than 24 hours?  I am not sure what you can make of it, as he has such a record for dishonesty that I am not sure if he is deliberately down playing it, exagerating it, or is just honest at this point.  

Even though Johnson is pretty flakey with the truth, I had way more confidence in the updates we got.    

Anyway Marina Hyde written before he was in hospital https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/02/trump-joked-covid-president-diagnosis-maga-virus

Edit.  And the betfair market has been suspended again.

[Mark_Porter]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-54353697

This article struck a chord with me today. We are due to have our first child in 6 weeks time. This is very "first world problems" but we didn't get the opportunity to go to the scans together or attend any midwife appointment stuff. I am the only person allowed to be at the birth which is the most upsetting - my partner is obviously very nervous and would have felt more comforted to have her mum and family in the room or waiting close by.

No complaints of course but a very strange time to be going through this. Will be a positive end to a crap year. Generation COVID!

[Doobs]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-54353697

This article struck a chord with me today. We are due to have our first child in 6 weeks time. This is very "first world problems" but we didn't get the opportunity to go to the scans together or attend any midwife appointment stuff. I am the only person allowed to be at the birth which is the most upsetting - my partner is obviously very nervous and would have felt more comforted to have her mum and family in the room or waiting close by.

No complaints of course but a very strange time to be going through this. Will be a positive end to a crap year. Generation COVID!

Isn't it normal to have just one other person at the birth?  We had our two in different hospitals and pretty sure that was the rule in both.  The first one we had issues with my access in the earlier stages of the birth too, as my wife had to go into hospital early.  I think both births could be summarised as a fairly long miserable time followed by a short period of great joy.

There is obviously a difference now with the scans and difficulties with seeing ill babies.

Good luck with the birth, hope it goes well.   The first 3 months or so are soon over too, even if it doesn't feel like it at the time.

[4KSuited]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-54353697

This article struck a chord with me today. We are due to have our first child in 6 weeks time. This is very "first world problems" but we didn't get the opportunity to go to the scans together or attend any midwife appointment stuff. I am the only person allowed to be at the birth which is the most upsetting - my partner is obviously very nervous and would have felt more comforted to have her mum and family in the room or waiting close by.

No complaints of course but a very strange time to be going through this. Will be a positive end to a crap year. Generation COVID!

I can second what Doobs has said about “only one in the room”. Having said that, neither set of our parents were either living or in country, so it wasn’t an issue. The thing that springs to my mind is that you’ve probably missed the ante natal classes/meetings: this could in fact be a blessing, lol. In any event, the birth of your first child will be a wonderful & unforgettable experience, regardless of all the background noise. I wish you & your partner all the best of luck. (Especially with the getting some sleep part ;0)

[neeko]

What do we think we know about Covid19 and what is the govt strategy given this info?

IFR = 1.2 (although I have seen figures ranging from 0.7 to 1.6)
IFR increases by age, prior medical issues, poverty / race.
There is no “cure” once you have it, just drugs that can increase your chances of survival  (about a third less deaths)
A small proportion of people who catch it have recurring symptoms in all age groups.
There are vaccines in development but we don’t know how good they will be.
They are not expected to give the recipient immunity from the virus, the first batch may just lower the proportion of deaths.
The virus is spread in the air, in indoor spaces with little ventilation.
Wearing a mask works, washing hands a lot is nice but hygiene theatre.
None of the above is going to change much in the next couple of years.

Mr Johnson was honest enough to say not much will change for 6 months, but there will be little practical difference in Match next year.

This weeks headlines have been the Bond movie pulled because no one is going to the cinema, so they won’t make a profit so they are delaying it. Cineworld are closing as no one is going to the cinema. The 10 pm pubs curfew just kicks people out early from regulated pubs to unregulated households. Young people are ignoring the rule of 6.

The UK govt spending has seen a deficit of 20% of GDP this year, but it can afford it and the percent of GDP spent in interest payments is lower than a decade ago, so more govt spending is not a problem.

If the strategy  is to  shelter people until a vaccine exists that will result in a global level of COVID that is near zero, then we can only start a lockdown for a minimum of 3 years and pay a universal income to all until then. (Not going to happen)

If the plan is to mumble along in the hope that something happens in 6 months time then we can go on as we are.

The public should be told that we are not going to cure this in the short to medium term, and society needs to decide, how it wants to live with the virus, it should be an informed choice.

I have moved to the let young people live there lives, let them play sports go to the pub, have fun. This will cost  many lives, and we will as a society have to try and minimise the deaths of the old / infirm but accept that this is going to be the cost.

I am probably wrong, those in Govt are even older than me so will probably lock the county up for a few years, but the young will just ignore it anyway.

<tl/dr>

[TightEnd]

Cost £12bn
System Test and Trace
Database software: x
Spreadsheet software Excel. each case was a seperate column
Maximum columns reached !

16,000 positive cases unreported


man oh man

[Doobs]

Cost £12bn
System Test and Trace
Database software: x
Spreadsheet software Excel. each case was a seperate column
Maximum columns reached !

16,000 positive cases unreported


man oh man

How did they reach the end for 7 days without noticing?  Wasn't it throwing off errors?   Hard to get the staff with so many unemployed and a budget of only £12bn.

[nirvana]

Cost £12bn
System Test and Trace
Database software: x
Spreadsheet software Excel. each case was a seperate column
Maximum columns reached !

16,000 positive cases unreported


man oh man

How did they reach the end for 7 days without noticing?  Wasn't it throwing off errors?   Hard to get the staff with so many unemployed and a budget of only £12bn.

Haha. Certainly a tight budget. It's bizarre if even close to true. When you consider what's available as standard It solutions and the cheap computing power available I just don't want to believe it.

[Jon MW]

Cost £12bn
System Test and Trace
Database software: x
Spreadsheet software Excel. each case was a seperate column
Maximum columns reached !

16,000 positive cases unreported


man oh man

How did they reach the end for 7 days without noticing?  Wasn't it throwing off errors?   Hard to get the staff with so many unemployed and a budget of only £12bn.

Haha. Certainly a tight budget. It's bizarre if even close to true. When you consider what's available as standard It solutions and the cheap computing power available I just don't want to believe it.

Is it confirmed?

I heard a suggestion that csv files were used for transport and the records were lost because somebody opened them in excel when they should have just been imported into their system.

But that had no sources either so impossible to tell for either story whether it's got any merit or just people working out what "could" have happened given the evidence of the outcome.

[Jon MW]

The BBC have confirmed the story now.

It's not exactly the error Tighty described but it was fundamentally similar other than this was a pretty small part of the system so suggesting they paid £12bn for an excel spreadsheet is probably a little bit misleading

The error was they used the xls format (maximum 65,000 records) rather than the xlsx format (over a million)

The data was provided in csv format but rather than import that into their system they imported it into excel templates then imported those.

I don't really think it's an issue about the pandemic at all - the error occurred in Public Health England - I think it's more of a reflection of public sector inefficiency. A lot of that is down to inefficiency in procurement but things like this show there are also operational inefficiencies.

[Ironside]

Doctors have quashed rumours that John Travolta had Covid, it was just a Saturday night fever, rest assured he is staying alive.
Apparently he had chills that were multipling

[Doobs]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/08/more-than-80-positive-cases-in-covid-study-had-no-core-symptoms

If we accept there are some false positives, then isn't this a bad conclusion?  It may just be that many/most of these people with positives are false positives.

FWIW 115 positives out of 36,000 tests suggest that the false positive rate must be much lower than the often quoted 0.8% (or 4% by some!).

To avoid people making more bad conclusions.  If the infection rate is very low, as it must have been when this survey was done (115/36000 is about .3%) then false positives can be higher than real positives.   If the infection rate is high (say 5% from people with symptoms), then the false positives are not significant, and the vast majority of positives are real positives.   

Also the false positive rate should fall slightly as infections increase, so increasing positives in the population are way more likely to be real increases and not just increasing false positives.  This is because the real number of negative people is falling, and false positives should be in proportion to the real negatives and not the real positives.

[Marky147]

That gave me a headache, and I've not even done any work yet today

[Doobs]

That gave me a headache, and I've not even done any work yet today

Sorry Marky.

[Ironside]

https://twitter.com/FootyAccums/status/1314536791513468928?s=20


and people wonder why pubs are having to close because drinks in social distancing goes out the window