Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

https://wellcome.ac.uk/press-releas...nched-fill-8bn-shortfall-coronavirus-response

 

Yea but you guys (Australia) tested (to identify the infected/infectious), traced contacts and isolated those with the virus ---- not simply -- stay at home.

 

Yes, and have police out enforcing isolation in some popular public areas, first by warnings but with a few fines. We also banned a lot of travel, and put international travellers in empty hotels with a quarantine order. If you come from overseas you will be quarantined. Its not a prison-style quarantine, but there are heavy fines and imprisonment if you break it.

 

They don't use paired sera in virology any more. They are only used if the first test is negative but the patient is still showing symptoms so a later test is done.

For quite a few years now, antibody tests have been done from single blood samples for Hepatitis ABC and HIV as well as others.

 

Thanks @alex3619 Seems like a pretty good system; particularly if it's only for a couple of years i.e. until they (hopefully) come up with a vaccine.

 

Hepatitis (at least B and C) and HIV are atypical because you are much of the time looking for antibodies at a point distant from any obvious acute illness. There are no fixed points for acute and convalescent samples. It may well be that labs have lost interest in paired sera in general having been outsourced to commercial outfits that are not really interested in keeping an eye on epidemiology. But in the context of an acute illness a single sample is much more likely to be unreliable. In the context of a new illness for which assays have not been refined a single test is highly unlikely to be reliable - as seems to be the case.

 

A scary thought (amongst so many of the other scary thoughts about this!), from the graph and other comments made up-thread, is what if a lot of the severely affected patients who don't recover, actually (and i'm sorry, but I can't think of a gentle way to say this) take a long time to die, with steadily and inexorably declining health until the end, but significantly longer than a week or two. There would then be a significantly longer time lag between contracting the disease and dying from it, and then a sudden rise later on, as a proportion of the higher infection rate from some time previously.

It's a horrible, horrible thought.

 

@Adrian I’m thinking maybe because UK’s lockdown is not as strict as in other countries..What we class as essential and non essential work etc and who is still commuting into work. Schools as well; remaining open. Maybe other things like sanitisation of outdoor areas. Related to testing and tracing? Also we were perhaps later to lockdown (later on our “curve”) than other countries were?

Edit: I really really hope this doesn’t happen though. Maybe it might serve as a wake up call to the govt.

 

I wonder if it is simply that the UK was very slow and unwilling to rapidly enter full emergency mode? Given the nature of exponential growth, each day lost equates to a huge acceleration of final death toll figures. The longer you leave the fire to take hold, the disproportionately harder it becomes to contain.

I can imagine that when this is recent history, modelling will be done for all counties showing what could have reasonably been achieved, if governments had truly heeded genuine best science, compared to what actually happened. Not benefit-of-hindsight recriminations, but benefit of what was fully appreciated at the time, if only those in power would have listened. Some countries will have got things not too wrong, other horrendously wrong. I would be very disappointed if such analyses were not done.

 

There is some modelling of different approaches being done here in Canada. Being a geographically large country many things done at the federal level elsewhere are done provincially here. So different approaches to locking down.

See here for a discussion of how it's played out in the three most affected provinces; BC, Ontario and Quebec:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-ontario-quebec-covid-19-1.5524056

 

All those eastern Canadians on spring break crowded like sardines on a Miami beach was just appalling.

 

I don’t know, I think it may end up being accurate. That is, I wouldn’t be surprised. I think like Barry said, we did enter lockdown much later than other countries had done - and even when we did enter lockdown; it wasn’t even strict - it still isn’t. Still quite a few differences between the UK and the rest of Europe even now.

Then there’s the problem with our health system. Compared to other countries, The fact we have far less ICU beds, ventilators, probably far less doctors & nurses as well, so our capacity will breached much earlier. After that i presume lots of people will die. If you look at the page with the modelling you quoted:

UK:The model shows that the UK will not have enough beds and ICU beds to meet demand, with the shortage peaking at 23,745 ICU beds on April 17,

France: The model shows that France is just passing its peak and will have a total of 15,058 deaths by August 4. The country is expected to have enough total beds to meet demand, but a shortage of 4,330 ICU beds. The forecasts predict 6,091 ICU beds will be needed for COVID-19 patients in France.

Germany: Deaths in Germany are forecast to peak in the third week of April, with an estimated 377 deaths on April 19. The model shows that Germany will have enough beds and ICU beds to meet demand, with the required number of total beds peaking at 12,222 on April 14, and predicts 8,802 total deaths in the country by August 4.

This is something that the UK govt knew. They knew we were starting from a much worse position than most other European countries with the state of the health system. But still they let the situation get worse than most other European countries.

 

That may simply be an artefact of following the curves as they currently are The Italian curves are already going down. The UK curve is trying to go down but has not managed it convincingly yet. If they are using a computer model the chances are they just churn out the 'best fit' for the curve so far. To me this is the idiocy of computer models.

 

Once care home deaths are added in the picture may look very different

https://twitter.com/user/status/1247643321838821378

 

Time lag and differing figures.
Under reporting a potentially huge issue
See whole thread
https://twitter.com/user/status/1247458186300456960