The Corona Pandemic

Last night we were shown how you lot live when
a local architect and TV personality aired his new show featuring typical Canadian homes.

In Singapore, we have to check in/out everywhere we go through an App or QR code, we also have a trace app using bluetooth, masks are compulsory etc etc etc… I think while no one measure is perfect, having multiple measures and doing them well, help to bring the numbers down. While these measures are probably not foolproof, not doing them will just make the people sitting ducks.

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Boudica’s also a big fan of our mutual anti-social distancing.

100% this. So many of the defenses are based on knocking back stupid arguments because they know they cannot knock back criticisms made from people who know what they are talking about. Fighting an outbreak of a contagious disease does not have a silver bullet. No serious person who works in this field has ever suggested such a thing exists. That is not an excuse for not having a joined up strategy for combatting the spread of this thing.

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yeah, that still doesn’t lead me to believe that they’ve done a good job of it. Quite te opposite in fact

Reap what you sow etc.

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Exactly, that was sort of my point, maybe the wording was misleading - it was aimed at Harding’s comments above and that general line of argumentation that drives me nuts.

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Hah, probably not typical. But generally speaking, quite a bit larger than a European city flat, to be sure.

I also had the blessing of spending most of June-August at a remote lake with water clean enough to drink, surrounded by quiet forest and the nearest neighbours about 400 meters across the lake. Masks were something we kept in the vehicles.

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Agreed - when they were promising ‘gold standard by October’ or whatever the hell that promise-boast was, they were already failing.

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18000 case and 80 deaths in the uk

I touched on this maybe a week ago and just want to revisit it

The death rate, to the layman like me, seems to hold some ‘positive’ news just based on stats alone.

Trying not to sound callous or tempt fate.

It’s been over two weeks of massive case numbers but the deaths have kept ‘relatively’ low compared to the first wave.

Why is this not even forming part of the discussion. I feel like I’m missing something.

It is or has been the main discussion coming from the politicians. The problem is that the hospitals are filling up alarmingly both in UK and France. This is why the discussion is moving on from deaths.
This has now been made by the media and politicians a political debate. Health workers and experts have been pushed to the rear. From now on it’s just those in power making the decissions and should be them being accountable (however it turns out).
The deaths are not the thing eating up resources so yes it is taking a back seat your right but it wasn’t.

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Because apart from the last 2 days, there is a very clear upward slope to the graph, after a couple of months of much lower numbers. Look at the graph, and it is at least ominous.

Take a look at what is happening in the Czech Republic now, it is terrifying how quickly this can turn.

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Just don’t compare to the UK first wave. There’s quite honestly very little reliable data to take from it.

If we did some seriously crude fag packet calculations that would need a thousand disclaimers (lag, testing quantity and accuracy etc etc) and looked at countries with ageing populations that have reasonably good testing, at least in comparison to UK, I could pick out some countries:

Percentage of deaths Vs confirmed cases*:

Japan 1.8%
Germany 2.63%
France 3.63%
Australia 3.35%
NZ 1.3%
Netherlands 2.8%
Finland 2.6%
Denmark 1.96%
Spain 3.5%
S. Korea 1.77%

Unlike cases which can have massive variations between countries based on clusters, spreading events etc, deaths from covid are quite consistent when comparing countries with similar age structures and good (not necessarily great) testing. The main variations could relate to how guarded the aged or vulnerable were during each outbreak, particular care homes, and how under the pump the health care sector was during the worst weeks. Victoria Aus, France, Spain good examples of this.

But really we are starting to see a trend of between 2-3% of confirmed cases result in deaths.

We already know from excess deaths that UK in particular ‘undersold’ deaths associated with covid far more (only showing about 1/3 of the true count) than any other country. But even with the reported figures, we are looking at 5.8% of cases result in deaths. There are other countries with oddities - Italy 8.5%, Sweden 5.75% for instances.

We are seeing a summer wave in the UK. Cases are high with young people socialising, resulting in spreading to younger people. 2-4 weeks ago, which is the period id expect the deaths for this week to come from, was between 4,300-12,700 cases per day, which results in a percentage of between 2.7% and 0.94%. It’s difficult to know when the cases for this week’s deaths were reported but I’d expect in that range mostly.

You might look at that 0.94% death to cases ratio and think something changed, but I think you can’t look at a summer peak in isolation. The virus is currently spreading through younger people. As the weather cools, we are going to be indoors far more than now, we are going to be socialising with older relatives indoors more. I actually find it quite tragic that we have had a peak at the tail end of summer when it should have been easier to avoid due to being outdoors more and when it shouldn’t be difficult to keep your distance from other people. Humans are very selfish by nature in reality.

In 1-2 months time I expect the averaging out of the death to cases ratio back toward that 2-3% figure if we look at UK data from when we started increasing testing capacity (we’ll always need to ignore that first wave data). You may think that I’m just moving the goal posts but I think it’s still far too early to understand how this winter in the UK is going to unfold.

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I think the fact that in so many places, even still, such caveats have to be understood when interpreting testing data is a pretty great indication of how poorly the response has been handled.

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@Redbj 241 deaths in the UK over the previous 24hrs. That’s was quite a shock to me. We’ll see over time what happens.

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The steepness of the curve is quite scary at the moment.

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Yes number of cases in France and UK is horrific.
It’s so bad I am just hiding away!

As we reach the intersection of the likely mean immunity and the first large population centers which have open media and reasonably robust testing, we are likely to see more and more of these ‘second time’ stories. I doubt they will be stories at all by Christmas.

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I agree. I found the story particularly interesting as being a professional athlete that is competing in the Giro (Italy) he caught it again.

There’s thins interesting juxtaposition between him being in a highly protected and highly tested environment, but was still unable to avoid it. The exposure risk is undoubtedly increased through the event in which he’s competing but they still couldn’t protect him. He’s actually not the first either.

it kind of adds more weight to the segregation / lockdown argument.