COVID19

[Marky147]

Seen a few 'Will you debate Ivor Cummins' posts start to pop up under John Campbells daily videos.

See Hartley-Brewer retweeting more of his stuff as must watch/read on Twitter, too. Can't remember which, but have seen enough from him this month anyway.

[Doobs]

Seen a few 'Will you debate Ivor Cummins' posts start to pop up under John Campbells daily videos.

See Hartley-Brewer retweeting more of his stuff as must watch/read on Twitter, too. Can't remember which, but have seen enough from him this month anyway.

Debating with him will only give him oxygen, and I can't see any real upside, as a lot of the stuff he says is plausible.  It would probably just come across as a shitshow and both sides will look untrustworthy. The other problem with Cummins and the like is they spend a lot of time accusing the other side of deceit and it is hard for the casual viewer/reader to work out who is lying. 

It is pretty easy to take apart his stuff with more time though.  He was banging on about Sweden again over the last couple of days, with the usual "deaths are falling" graphs.  In reality, Sweden cases and deaths are rising as fast as anywhere in Europe (once the data catches up), so how can these people always show graphs that always go down from Sweden?  This lot have explained it bettter than I can here.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-sweden-death-reporting

TLDR Sweden report on deaths by date of death, not date reported like nearly everyone else in Europe.   Because of the reporting lag, the deaths are always lower than fnal figures for recent days.  I don't know if Cummins realises this, but suspect he has been told it enough times that he should at least have had some doubts about the stuff he publishes. 

You can see the UK deaths on both bases here https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths.  If you click on deaths by date and sort by nation it lets you see how many deaths are from each date right up to Saturday (last reporting date was Sunday).  So if you prepared an England chart for date of death (like Sweden's method), you would see a really low number of deaths at the end (59 on Saturday vs 209 Friday vs 280 Thursday vs 349 Wednesday).  The reality is that England Deaths are have recently beem nearly flat and have been around 350-400 once the reporting lag has fed through), and I don't expect the final Saturday deaths to be far from that.  The reality is that Swden's deaths are likely still rising, as that is what figures from a week or so ago were showing.

I forgot to mention that Toby Young did some back of the envelope maths the other day to show the infection fatality rate of Covid was 0.1% and hence he claimed that it was about the same as seasonal flu.  Unfortunately, he had cocked up his maths and he had actually shown it was about 1% and hence about ten times as deadly as normal flu.  He was forced to correct the maths, but don't think he ever backed down on the claim that mortality was about the same as flu...  FWIW The IFR is probably a bit less than 1% now as treatments have improved, though it is hard to be exact. 

[Doobs]

and on a less serious note...

This is the science we need at times like this.

Scented candles analysis of reviews

https://twitter.com/kate_ptrv/status/1332398737604431874

[Marky147]

I saw that on Saturday, and it did make me chuckle.

As for Cummins, he's obviously very sharp, but has welded himself into Gupta's camp, as mentioned in one of the HB interviews. Not sure what he would debate Cummins on, anyway.

Almost posted under one of the comments that he should debate Stuart McDonald, but I didn't fancy my phone blowing up for the rest of the day.

I guess it's easier to bounce all over the spectrum on this, when nobody is watching. I've gone from 'meh flu', to 'we're in the shit', finally settling somewhere in the middle of that.

[RED-DOG]

Mrs Red went to the dentist today and on the way out found a £30 Covd charge added to her bill.

When she queried it she was told it was because they had to clean the room between patients and it was for her own safety.

She said told them it was ridiculous and refused to pay without seeing the senior partner first.

They said it was OK, she didn't have to pay if she didn't want to.

[Marky147]

#Invalid YouTube Link#

John breaks things down nicely for simpletons like myself

[Doobs]

John breaks things down nicely for simpletons like myself

FYP

[Marky147]

Forgot to take the 's' out, cheers.

[Marky147]

Buckle up, America 

[Doobs]

Another quick update as it is Wednesday.

Deaths were up 20% week on week on the 18 November.  That seems to be just a function of the low number the week previously, and deaths are only up about 5% a week averaging over the 7 days to that date.

On no date has the figure topped 400 a day in England and 500 a day in the UK in total (based on specimen date).  It is possible both will be slightly breached this week once the delayed reporting has worked its way through. 

The 600 death figure from yesterday is likely just a reflection of reporting delays, and I think we have likely passed the date with the highest number of deaths from this wave.  We also had a couple of days in the previous week with less than 20k cases and looking at the reported numbers from the last couple of days it seems likely that the cases are falling siginifcantly.   I'd be much happier if they waited a couple of weeks longer for the cases to decrease further before opening restaurants and pubs, but can't complain about outdoor sports and letting people spectate in smaller numbers.

FWIW I got randomly selected and my negative result took about 72 hours exactly from courier pick up.  I'd say that kind of delay seems consistent with what I see in the case reporting (most around 2 or 3 days after test). 

 

Another update as of yesterday.

I think the numbers are pretty alarming given lockdown has ended already, but guess the fact most of us are in tier 2 or 3 means that things haven't changed much (ie the lockdown/not lockdown states are much closer to each other than they were in March).

Wednesday's number was 15% below last week, but every day between 17 November and 24 November had a higher number of deaths than the same date in the week before.  So I think it is very possible that this was a bit of an outlier and there was zero significant evidence that deaths had begun to fall.  When the first lockdown ended English deaths were down to 31 a day at the effective end (3 July).  This time the number of deaths at lockdown end is likely to be between 300 and 400 a day (I can't say the exact number, as only a small proportion of deaths are reported in the first couple of days).   

The cases figures are more promising with a handful of dates where we have dropped below 15k cases in the UK.  But Monday's number of 17k isn't a whole lot below the 31.5k we hit at peak 4 weeks previously, and we had a couple of days below 20k in that week.  So cases were defintely down since the peak, but were not down by a hugely significant amount (maybe 30% or so).     

I saw someone yesterday suggesting that we were well on the way to wave 3, as we had ended this lockdown too early.  I think a better way of looking at it is that wave 2 isn't really going to end anytime soon and the reality is we bump along at 300 deaths a day until the vaccination rate in the elderly and medical workers becomes significant.  Given that we, and every other Country?) has failed to keep cases/deaths steady over this year, this "plan" seems like some gamble and we may not have reached a wave 2/3 peak yet after all.
 
To balance this, the rest of Europe looks like it is dragging its feet on vaccine approval, so the UK Government may actually be doing something right here.  Assuming that we don't mind the tiny microchips Bill Gates is putting in our arms...

[Marky147]

Get the needles out, and roll on 2022...

[Marky147]

For all the 'DNA changing' panickers

[teddybloat]

Care workers will be receiving the vaccine from Tuesday next week - see attached letter

Incredible achievement.

[Marky147]

Great news, teddy.

Thank goodness we're at the arse end of this year, and a good start to 2021 if things go smoothly.

[teddybloat]

Saturday 11th January: the sequenced genome of COVID 19 is published and distributed worldwide.

China has not yet confirmed human -  human transmission. There are no offical cases in the west. Many believe it will be no worse than flu.

Two days later. One Weekend. Monday 13th: Moderna has completed its vaccine.

A weekend and we have a 95% effective vaccine.

It goes into clinical trials one month later.

Before the year end we have multiple vaccines.

we had a vaccine all along. and it took us a weekend to make.

humans, eh, bloody hell.


https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html

edit: we had a vaccine a month before this thread was started