COVID19

[Woodsey]

...
Any ideas on the 2,500 extra deaths? Other than those attributable to people not seeking medical help because of Covid, you’d surely expect them to go down while we’re mostly locked down safely at home.

Something like this, is the only thing that really makes sense:
(It’s a bit tenuous at this stage but there aren’t many other explanations, are there?)

https://twitter.com/jolyonmaugham/status/1250731649152811008?s=21
(another quite divisive figure)

I'm a bit confused by that report/claim.

The tweet and topic is, "Leaked guidance from an NHS hospital trust reveals doctors are being told they are not required to put COVID-19 on death certificates.".

What a doctor puts on a death certificate is their professional opinion as to the most likely cause of death.

They quote the guidance as saying, ‘Doctors are asked to use the standard MCCD (Medical Certificate of Cause of Death) form to certify death. ‘Pneumonia ‘or ‘community acquired pneumonia’ are acceptable at 1(a) on the MCCD. There is no requirement to write COVID 19 as part of the MCCD. It may be mentioned at 1(b) on the form, should the doctor wish.’

Part a is what do you think is the direct cause of death
Part b is what else do you think might have contributed to the death.

I would read that as the trust making it clear that just because there is a pandemic doctors don't have to put COVID19 down for every respiratory/pneumonia death.

It is a bit 'wrong' as it is a slightly different emphasis to the government's central advice which is more like - if you think it's COVID19 you can put down COVID19.

What confuses me is that this so clearly leaves COVID19 on the death certificate that I don't understand why the "Good Law Project" that started the petition would go ahead with this complaint.

Also, as mentioned before, if doctors weren't putting COVID19 down they would be putting pneumonia down and those figures are only slightly higher than average - well within what you might expect the normal variance to be.

To clarify: if COVID19 is mentioned on any part of the death certificate then it is counted in the ONS figures, so putting it in part 1b wouldn't make a difference to putting it in 1a.

Thanks Jon.

This is a useful explanation.  

I have sifted through death certificates in the distant past as Insurers monitor trends in mortality and causes of death.  It was a very manual process back then and we never had to do it quite so quickly.  There were always grey areas back then with causes of death, so this isn't a new thing. I am never really surprised about people overeact to.   Not everything you see is a Government cover-up, here it is clearly different people interpreting the same words in a slightly different way.  

I'll just add that up until very recently, I'd have been impressed by any insurer who was doing this a couple of months in arrears.   Speed and accuracy aren't going to be comfortable bedfellows.

I thought this was interesting:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040287v1

What did you find interesting in that?
Serious question.

Cutting edge stuff......think most of us were 

[dakky]

Very interesting perspective from someone who seems to know his stuff. Basically saying herd immunity is the correct and only approach. It's 40minutes but quite interesting

"Professor Knut Wittkowski, for twenty years head of The Rockefeller University's Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design, says that social distancing and lockdown is the absolutely worst way to deal with an airborne respiratory virus.

Further, he offers data to show that China and South Korea had already reached their peak number of cases when they instituted their containment measures.  In other words, nature had already achieved, or nearly achieved, herd immunity."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGC5sGdz4kg can't seem to embed it for some reason but there's the link

[Marky147]

Sorted.

Bit of listening with supper. Cheers, dakky

It's the 's' in https that stops it.

[kukushkin88]

...
Any ideas on the 2,500 extra deaths? Other than those attributable to people not seeking medical help because of Covid, you’d surely expect them to go down while we’re mostly locked down safely at home.

Something like this, is the only thing that really makes sense:
(It’s a bit tenuous at this stage but there aren’t many other explanations, are there?)

https://twitter.com/jolyonmaugham/status/1250731649152811008?s=21
(another quite divisive figure)

I'm a bit confused by that report/claim.

The tweet and topic is, "Leaked guidance from an NHS hospital trust reveals doctors are being told they are not required to put COVID-19 on death certificates.".

What a doctor puts on a death certificate is their professional opinion as to the most likely cause of death.

They quote the guidance as saying, ‘Doctors are asked to use the standard MCCD (Medical Certificate of Cause of Death) form to certify death. ‘Pneumonia ‘or ‘community acquired pneumonia’ are acceptable at 1(a) on the MCCD. There is no requirement to write COVID 19 as part of the MCCD. It may be mentioned at 1(b) on the form, should the doctor wish.’

Part a is what do you think is the direct cause of death
Part b is what else do you think might have contributed to the death.

I would read that as the trust making it clear that just because there is a pandemic doctors don't have to put COVID19 down for every respiratory/pneumonia death.

It is a bit 'wrong' as it is a slightly different emphasis to the government's central advice which is more like - if you think it's COVID19 you can put down COVID19.

What confuses me is that this so clearly leaves COVID19 on the death certificate that I don't understand why the "Good Law Project" that started the petition would go ahead with this complaint.

Also, as mentioned before, if doctors weren't putting COVID19 down they would be putting pneumonia down and those figures are only slightly higher than average - well within what you might expect the normal variance to be.

To clarify: if COVID19 is mentioned on any part of the death certificate then it is counted in the ONS figures, so putting it in part 1b wouldn't make a difference to putting it in 1a.

Thanks Jon.

This is a useful explanation. 

I have sifted through death certificates in the distant past as Insurers monitor trends in mortality and causes of death.  It was a very manual process back then and we never had to do it quite so quickly.  There were always grey areas back then with causes of death, so this isn't a new thing. I am never really surprised about people overeact to.   Not everything you see is a Government cover-up, here it is clearly different people interpreting the same words in a slightly different way. 

I'll just add that up until very recently, I'd have been impressed by any insurer who was doing this a couple of months in arrears.   Speed and accuracy aren't going to be comfortable bedfellows.

I thought this was interesting:

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.22.20040287v1

What did you find interesting in that?
Serious question.

I was reading about mortality displacement and came across this, I found it interesting because it links to what Doobs was explaining to me the other day. The whole topic is not something I’ve come across before and while the situation is tragic, I do find it fascinating. It’s probably the only time any of us will live through an event that impacts so many people so profoundly. I have elderly parents and a number of friends who are high risk, so the article certainly has relevance to them. Restarting my own cancer treatment will be dependent on there being a high level of confidence that the situation is (relatively) under control. I find most things on this subject of some interest to me at the moment.

[kukushkin88]

Sorted.

Bit of listening with supper. Cheers, dakky

It's the 's' in https that stops it.

It’s worth noting that he has been prolifically criticised for this, including by his own University:
(Buzzfeed details the list of critics)

https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/27872-rockefeller-university-releases-statement-concerning-dr-knut-wittkowski

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/janelytvynenko/college-fix-coronavirus-herd-immunity

[Marky147]

I was going to post the rockefeller statement when I finished.

He's also way wrong, if he says it's all done here almost, and he was talking 2-3 weeks ago?

[Doobs]

The Sunday Times not so Boris friendly this morning.  10 minute read, but good.

https://archive.is/20200418182037/https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/coronavirus-38-days-when-britain-sleepwalked-into-disaster-hq3b9tlgh

[RickBFA]

My next door but one neighbour is a doctor at Sheffield Children’s Hospital. She was telling me that she has learnt this week that kids don’t have the same receptors in their cells to pick up the virus.

Don’t really understand this but as an example, my wife’s friend and her husband (a GP) have been diagnosed but their three kids have been totally unaffected.

Good morning all,

Big edit on my comment on the first part. Just spoke to my brother in law who is a Professor of Pharmacology, he says the idea is possible but there’s no knowledge of such a thing in the wide (including international) scientific community.

In the second paragraph, it is extremely likely that the children have the disease asymptomatically. Do you know if the parents have actually been tested?

Just watched the Professor from Oxford on Marr Show who is trying to develop a vaccine.

Towards the end of the interview she mentions the reaction in children’s cells to the virus in the respiratory tract. It may clear up the point my neighbour was making.

Still don’t understand it but thought it was interesting in the context of those previous comments.

[kukushkin88]

My next door but one neighbour is a doctor at Sheffield Children’s Hospital. She was telling me that she has learnt this week that kids don’t have the same receptors in their cells to pick up the virus.

Don’t really understand this but as an example, my wife’s friend and her husband (a GP) have been diagnosed but their three kids have been totally unaffected.

Good morning all,

Big edit on my comment on the first part. Just spoke to my brother in law who is a Professor of Pharmacology, he says the idea is possible but there’s no knowledge of such a thing in the wide (including international) scientific community.

In the second paragraph, it is extremely likely that the children have the disease asymptomatically. Do you know if the parents have actually been tested?

Just watched the Professor from Oxford on Marr Show who is trying to develop a vaccine.

Towards the end of the interview she mentions the reaction in children’s cells to the virus in the respiratory tract. It may clear up the point my neighbour was making.

Still don’t understand it but thought it was interesting in the context of those previous comments.

Good morning

👍 I’ll watch it on the i-player later.

[kukushkin88]

Does someone here know why we aren’t doing the things other countries have? I don’t mean the testing or PPE, but widespread temperature-taking and use of apps. I have friends who tell me they can’t go anywhere without their temperature being taken with those forehead guns, and some places require people to take their own temp and upload it from the machine daily. It’s also clear that there are some very clever apps with different-coloured ‘passports’ and contact-tracking. It’s not ground-breaking - countries in Asia have been doing all this for months, and are still doing it. I was expecting to see them here, but I haven’t heard a word about it. Are these things not thought to be effective, or do we know of other reasons why they aren’t happening?

——————————————————————————————————————————————————————————

Having written the above, I did some Googling before posting, and found that the use of apps was in the news yesterday for a couple of reasons, as there are some hurdles to be dealt with and some criteria for their use was published, but none of them seem difficult to overcome.

I also found that there are many apps in development, but every country seems to be developing its own. Outside Asia, it seems that Czech, North Macedonia and Ghana have been first out with theirs, and there are lots of others on the way. I don’t get this either - don’t we just need a couple of systems to start with, rather than everyone making their own? Couldn’t we all have been using the Chinese or Singapore tech for the last two months, and follow on with improvements, rather than starting from scratch and delaying their use?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_apps

A big factor is that we simply don’t have the manpower or organisational infrastructure for lots of this stuff. PHE is a tiny organisation for the size of the country and Local Authorities, where the manpower and infrastructure used to exist, have been on their knees for years. £1.6 billion extra to cover Coronavirus expenses, OK that should be plenty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52329829

Jeremy Farrar was on Sophy Ridge saying something close to this. I imagine there’ll be a transcript of the interview later.

[nirvana]

One of the interesting things about this lockdown is watching celebs still trying to be relevant - must be so hard having to sit indoors and not be written about and photographed all the time. Anyway, drawn by twitter had to watch the Elton 'performance'.  Introduced by the totally irrelevant Victoria Beckham, well at least she didn't try singing, the performance was hilarious - not original to say it but was hilariously bad. Almost as bad as this incredible cover of About a Girl by Wes Mudd.

[Jon MW]

Unusually the government have released a response to the Sunday Times article

https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/04/19/response-to-sunday-times-insight-article/

I think perhaps a mixture of most newspaper articles being pretty vague about their accusations whereas the Sunday Times was making specific points to refute, and that most newspapers aren't worth responding to but the Sunday Times is actually still mildly respectable.

[Marky147]

One of the interesting things about this lockdown is watching celebs still trying to be relevant - must be so hard having to sit indoors and not be written about and photographed all the time. Anyway, drawn by twitter had to watch the Elton 'performance'.  Introduced by the totally irrelevant Victoria Beckham, well at least she didn't try singing, the performance was hilarious - not original to say it but was hilariously bad. Almost as bad as this incredible cover of About a Girl by Wes Mudd.

FYP

[Marky147]

Seen worse, lol.

Go on Rocket!

[kukushkin88]

Unusually the government have released a response to the Sunday Times article

https://healthmedia.blog.gov.uk/2020/04/19/response-to-sunday-times-insight-article/

I think perhaps a mixture of most newspaper articles being pretty vague about their accusations whereas the Sunday Times was making specific points to refute, and that most newspapers aren't worth responding to but the Sunday Times is actually still mildly respectable.

They need to explain why the the civil service issued this statement, without a named author. It’s a political press briefing, you just don’t get civil servants using emotional language like the ‘rebuttals’ do. Part of the explanation should be declaring exactly who wrote it.

The good people at the FT are on the case:

https://twitter.com/davidallengreen/status/1252120640859111425?s=21