COVID19

[Doobs]

Loads of Covid19 info from the latest @ICNARC report.   If you don't fancy reading the whole 100 pages, then John Actuary has done a summary.  The reports are fascinating, but probably a bit niche for most. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/john_actuary/status/1392737847996715010

Some notes.

London was affected worse of all regions in both waves.  This suggests there wasn't much herd immunity after wave 1.

ICU mortality is significantly worse when ICU units are at capacity.  This shouldn't be a surprise, but this logic seems to have been beyond many (the data from India is showing much higher mortality where hospital capacity is massively stretched).

Mortality is much higher than pneumonia and bad flu outbreaks.   Again I saw it described as bad flu earlier this week by someone with a gazillion followers.

[Marky147]

The grifters must be losing their minds now that things are coming to an end.

Ivor back to his keto bollocks, and the rest of them hopefully all struck off.

[nirvana]

Variants of concern will keep them going for a while

[Marky147]

Variants of concern will keep them going for a while

None of them seem to be able to escape the vaccines, so it shouldn't.

The grifters will be the ones hoping they do, so they can whine if Boris locks Blackburn down for a week.

Think what I've seen said on Twitter by some is the best idea, in they just invite anyone in these cities that wants vaccinating along for their first, and try to stamp it out that way.

Whilst it might be more transmissible, it's generally younger people getting it now, which will lead to more mild cases, and hopefully not impact the NHS too heavily.

All my thoughts, so likely to be way OOL, and I'd probably kill a load of kids if they did it.

[Doobs]

Variants of concern will keep them going for a while

John Burn-Murdoch did a thread about this earlier.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1392541111713939464

Cliffs: Don't worry, be happy

Also some updated stuff on modelling from James Ward

https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1392064380909629448

Cliffs: UK exit Wave expected to have a low number of deaths now, consensus now seems to be less than 10K or so. 

There is lots of really good stuff about at the minute from some of the more informed voices. 

[Doobs]

Having said last week there was a lot of variance in the daily numbers, number of deaths varied between 14 and 17 over the last week in England.  I once saw some Covid death numbers from some dodgy Country (probably Belarus) and it was like someone had put them together who had no idea what randomness looked like, so it would go 4,4,4,4 and then 5,5,5,5 and then 4,4,4,4 and so on.  Anyway, English death numbers were put together by the Belarussian Ministry of Truth last week.  Anyways, normal service is resumed and deaths fell by about 25% last week from about 20 a day to about 15.  I know there are delay in the data, but we are likely to see some single figure death numbers next week.  1 death per week from 200 hospitals probably qualifies as an abundance of caution.   Surely now would be a good time to stop the restrictions Boris, particularly given the personal shitstorm you are in the middle of? damage to the economy?

UK hospitalisations are also falling steadily, down from about 200 a day to about 150

Cases are definitely falling less.  We are starting to see days that are higher than the same day as a week ago.  Overall we are down a little on the week.  A good proportion of these are likely false positives, but trends should be real.  Will just keep an eye on this.

Anyway mostly good news.

Going to talk about Sweden again, as it is a bit interesting, even for those of us who think lockdowns seem to work.

Sweden is hard to follow, as their data is so slow to come through.  I have now got some confidence that their January deaths are now about right, and they had deaths that were about 15% higher than normal.   By comparison UK deaths were 40% higher than normal for the frst 5 weeks of the year.  I think Swedish Covid cases are still increasing, so they are likely to get worse figures for us in March and April (we have had less deaths than expected, so we will be tough to beat), but their vaccine drive has taken off. They have now vaccinated 25% of their population with at least one dose.  I think this is around the level where you see massive reductions in Covid deaths, so they are unlikely to see massive deaths even if cases continue to rise there.  Given they had a better outcome than us over 2020, then they are likely to get a better outcome than the UK overall.

Having said all that, some of the graphs that this thread's favourite bogeyman are clearly nonsense (maybe all?), and there is zero chance that their overall deaths since January 2020 are 0.03% higher than 2019.  Deaths were up 10% over 2020 vs the previous year (I think it was about 8% vs the average of 5 years), so I assume that the data has either been mangled again, or zero consideration has been made for Swedish late reporting.

Anyway Sweden looks like it will be a success story, so I don't see the need to fiddle things.    
  

i didn't do an update last week, but going to do a quick one now.

Deaths have continued to fall by about 20% a week.  There is a lot of variation with low numbers, but we are now seeing less than 10 deaths a day in England on average.

Hospitalisations are down to about 100 a day in the UK.  As I mentioned yesterday, with low cases survival rates are better, so deaths should continue to fall for now.

The number of cases seems to have stopped falling for now, with numbers not much different from a couple of weeks ago and they are likely to be rising if anything.  This is backed up by Zoe App data which is now showing rising cases and an R higher than 1 in most regions.



https://twitter.com/ActuaryByDay/status/1392141771384164356

I think it is inevitable that the UK starts seeing cases rising week by week for some time going forward...  but cases are still tiny overall, and with the vaccination drive still ongoing deaths and hospitalisations are likely to remain low.

[EvilPie]

I think it is inevitable that the UK starts seeing cases rising week by week for some time going forward...  but cases are still tiny overall, and with the vaccination drive still ongoing deaths and hospitalisations are likely to remain low.

Looking at current hospitalisation and death figures surely we can't be far away from just saying it's now no worse than seasonal flu?

Cases have to be irrelevant when you get to the point it doesn't hurt anyone?

I'm talking about the UK internally only by the way, I understand that it's far more complex when looking at it on a global level.

[Doobs]

I think it is inevitable that the UK starts seeing cases rising week by week for some time going forward...  but cases are still tiny overall, and with the vaccination drive still ongoing deaths and hospitalisations are likely to remain low.

Looking at current hospitalisation and death figures surely we can't be far away from just saying it's now no worse than seasonal flu?

Cases have to be irrelevant when you get to the point it doesn't hurt anyone?

I'm talking about the UK internally only by the way, I understand that it's far more complex when looking at it on a global level.

I don't want to say it is going to be no worse than seasonal flu, as without the vaccine it is something like 20 times as deadly.  Having said that, unless Covid19 is likely to cause a significant proportion of all deaths then restrictions should be kept very much to the minimum. 

If they don't reopen completely now, then what are they going to do in a month's time when there may well be double the current cases?   

[nirvana]

Variants of concern will keep them going for a while

John Burn-Murdoch did a thread about this earlier.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1392541111713939464

Cliffs: Don't worry, be happy

Also some updated stuff on modelling from James Ward

https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1392064380909629448

Cliffs: UK exit Wave expected to have a low number of deaths now, consensus now seems to be less than 10K or so. 

There is lots of really good stuff about at the minute from some of the more informed voices. 

Im definitely not concerned but plenty of people will continue to agitate for caution/restrictions because we've done such a poor job of perspective throughout this (both not concerned enough and too concerned)

[Marky147]

Variants of concern will keep them going for a while

John Burn-Murdoch did a thread about this earlier.

https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1392541111713939464

Cliffs: Don't worry, be happy

Also some updated stuff on modelling from James Ward

https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1392064380909629448

Cliffs: UK exit Wave expected to have a low number of deaths now, consensus now seems to be less than 10K or so. 

There is lots of really good stuff about at the minute from some of the more informed voices. 

Im definitely not concerned but plenty of people will continue to agitate for caution/restrictions because we've done such a poor job of perspective throughout this (both not concerned enough and too concerned)

Those ends of the spectrum are the ones that make the most noise, unfortunately.

[Marky147]

This guy's channel is really good, and think I've posted a few videos of his before.

Love watching him pull apart grifters like Ivor etc.

[Doobs]

This guy's channel is really good, and think I've posted a few videos of his before.

Love watching him pull apart grifters like Ivor etc.

very good.


https://twitter.com/cjsnowdon/status/1392900989099954178

Smalley obviously a bigger crank than Ivor these days

[Marky147]

He has always been worse than Ivor, I think.

Ivor wasn't that bad at the start, but he's right over on that side with Smalley, now.

[Marky147]

Good thread from James Ward on things over the next few months.

https://twitter.com/JamesWard73/status/1393932001271554049

Few bumps, but should be ok as long as we crack on 

[StuartHopkin]

Less than 1000 in hospital now.

Going to be very interesting watching the case numbers over the next couple of weeks and how they react to them.