Coronavirus - worldwide spread and control

As much as I have tried I have been unable to find basic statistics for the UK in terms of total deaths for years 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 and so far in 2020.

I am looking for a breakdown for each month in each year like the one previously posted in this thread for Spain.

All I keep getting when I go to the office of national statistics site is some vague statement about how the "death rate was considerably slower in the first few months of 2020 potentially due to a milder winter until the coronavirus deaths kicked in".

 

To me there are several major flaws in the argument.

Health service capacity is not there. In order to achieve what has been achieved staff have had to work with inadequate protection and have died. Normal healthcare has more or less come to a standstill. People wanting treatment for other conditions are also routinely getting infected with Covid19 in hospitals because isolation units are not separate. He appears to have no understanding of health care practicalities.

If the death rate is 0.9% then presumably about 2 million people have been infected - or 3% of the population. That means that to allow the epidemic to play out with the impact on the health service already scene, and not more, would take about 60 months. We have no guarantee that a vaccine will be practicable in less.

So yes, maybe lockdown cannot be sustained but why was it not foreseen that the only way of preventing too long a lockdown was to put in very tight measures early on to keep cases well below levels with a knock-on effect. I do not understand the attribution of cancelled treatments to lockdown. The cancelled treatments are due to the pressure on the service from Covid cases due to lockdown not being enforced.

So I think it likely that all epidemiologists will agree that we have to keep tight restrictions at present but any epidemiologist with any sense would not agree with his logic otherwise or with his earlier modelling conclusions.

After all his decision making has led to about the worst outcome for any country except USA.

 

My state of Queensland, Australia will be relaxing some distancing rules in just under a week, allowing non-essential shopping and some other activities. This follows only three cases in our state in the last day or so, and zero a few days ago. We also have the launch of a mobile phone app which will allow tracing of contacts, everyone who came near you, provided they also have the app and its active. This will allow some automation of contact tracing. I do not think basic social distancing has been lifted.

 

Absolutely. If you were to consider a theoretically perfect lockdown (impossible in practice of course) then after a due lag there would be negligible Covid 19 pressure on the NHS, not the other way round.

 

That summary misses a lot out, so it probably isn't fair to judge Ferguson on that. Ferguson was actually emphasising the strain that hospitals had been under, saying that there were a few individual hospitals that had reached the point where they could not admit anyone else. My impression was that the interviewer was playing down that immediate strain (perhaps playing devil's advocate not very well, perhaps reflecting his own instincts, that could then have shaped his summary). The interviewer (Freddie Sayers) seemed really out of his depth, and as if he was trying to hid the fact he was out of his depth.

It was really hard to judge Ferguson on future plans for Covid-19 as he wasn't getting particularly challenging questions. One worry I got from the interview was the impression that he's very much a team player within the systems of the Establishment, but then I guess that shouldn't be a surprise for someone in his position.

 

In most countries it was, as far as I have seen.
A board form "facts about covid-19" a-swiss-doctor-on-covid-19
the graph is a bit difficult to perceive, but it seems that mortality was rather a bit high (like in the Netherland).


I tried to find a statistic about Belgium, but I couldn´t find any that would include this year.

 

Thanks Leila, that was my mistake. When I first read your post I saw that you had mentioned another study but during the time in took me to read the first study I’d forgotten all about the second study (ME brain)!

I’ve now had a chance to read through Hong Kong study too which is interesting. The science seems pretty clear that infectiousness is highest around the time of symptom onset or soon before and it in then declines over time. However the only thing they say in relation to length of infectiousness is: “Infectiousness was estimated to decline quickly within 7 days”. I might be missing something but I don’t see how they were able to estimate that from the available data and there is no explanation or discussion about it in the paper. Even then it’s only an estimation. So I’m still not satisfied we have enough evidence to support the UK recommended 7-day isolation period.

 

[My bolding]

After taking another look at this paper I noticed that Charlotte Houldcroft made a small but crucial mistake in this interview for The Guardian. The study actually found live virus up until day 8 (not day 7 as stated) suggesting that the subjects in this study were infectious for 8 days after symptom onset. So this study doesn’t actually support the UK recommended 7-day isolation period.

 

New article, currently free to read, in the FT. John Burn-Murdoch is one of the authors. It's chilling.

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported

Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across 14 countries analysed by the FT

https://on.ft.com/2VF4Bfi

 

I get an increasing feeling that decisions are being dictated by events now in the way they should have been originally. The establishment team is still trying to present a united front but whistling in the wind with it. Mark Walport was on the radio saying that the government was doing a Stirling job. He is now sounding like a caricature of the establishment blimp (we were once close colleagues) and I suspect even the average listener would pick that up.

What I found encouraging though, was the statement on BBC News that Boris Johnson was going to try to persuade dissenting voices in the party on Monday that easing lockdown was a bad thing because it would do far more damage to the economy. It actually sounds as if the penny has dropped (or one of them)

 

Yea I listened to a program on Radio 4 "The Inquiry" [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hmzl] and they looked at a parallel fromthe 1918 pandemic; cities which locked down early and hard fared better than those that didn't --- they're economies recovered quicker ---

Shortly after that there was a profile of Matt Hancock [https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hmxq]; his friends did their best to muster a defence --- one commentator said that when there's a crisis and you reach for the levers and find them broken --- hardly his fault. However, there was talk of Conservative MPs who reckon he's undermining the Governments credibility (announcing 100K tests/day, when he can't deliver that +++). So yes perhaps some changes are afoot!

 

Coronavirus: Johnson faces lockdown dilemma as scientists warn over grim data

“The number of new cases of Covid-19 being diagnosed is still much too high to allow any easing of the lockdown soon, leading scientists have warned, as the virus death toll in UK hospitals passed 20,000 on Saturday.

Professor Keith Neal of Nottingham University agreed that the number of patients being taken to hospital with Covid-19 remained far too high. “This daily figure peaked on 5 April with 5,903 cases. This Saturday it stood at 3,583,” he added. This latter figure was boosted by an extra 1,330 new cases of infected care and health workers, which brought Saturday’s overall total to 4,913.

“It has therefore taken three weeks for numbers of hospitalised Covid-19 patients to decline from a daily total of 5,903 to 3,641.”

Professor Paul Hunter, of the University of East Anglia, added: “There is no doubt this rate of decline is disappointing. Certainly it is far too high to consider lifting lockdown restrictions at present. We need to get numbers down to a few hundred new cases a day before we can do that. Such a decline could take months.””

____
Note the numbers quoted above are only new cases in hospitals.. not new cases everywhere. So how are they going to get *total* new cases down low enough to actually lift lockdown?

 

More and more data is coming out of the USA that shows the virus has been spreading much longer, many more were infected, but the death rate is much lower than previously thought. The first death in US was in California (Santa Clara) on Feb 6, but when you take into account incubation and disease duration to death this person might have been infected early January.

My source is a youtuber who is usually reliable, but this is not a scientific source. I am hoping someone knows of better sources.

I also keep hearing that the infection rate is something like 30-50 times higher than we thought, which makes the death rate much lower, only somewhat more dangerous than a bad flu. However the infection rate of this virus may be much higher than we thought and we have no natural immunity. What complicates the infection rate data is the issue that we are presuming the infections started much later than they did.

 

This is quite plausible. Many countries will have limited testing and public health infrastructure. Many cases might be missed over much of the world. Its also likely infections started much earlier, and it spread much further, we just have not done the testing.

 

I couldn't see any criticism of Walport anywhere.

There was this reporting of some of his comments at a few places, eg:

https://www.manchestereveningnews.c...navirus-live-boris-johnson-returning-18151911

I also saw this older one:

https://twitter.com/user/status/1240424048053624832

 

I had seen similar claims to this being made on the basis of a couple of studies that have now attracted a lot of criticism. Maybe this was one of them? https://www.salon.com/2020/04/26/sc...body-study-the-authors-owe-us-all-an-apology/

I've not really been following the details of those debates, and have just been assuming that in the time it would take me to properly understand a study new and more reliable data is likely to have come out anyway!

 

Boris Johnson just gave a statement that sounded cautious about relaxing lockdown, with an intention to avoid a second wave. No detail.