UKH

In reply to Si dH from https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_56-...:

Thanks.  I feel physically uncomfortable looking at the percentage line on Figure 2.  I just don't think the "% SGTF" measure is an analysis that data supports.    The day-of-week effects are clearly dramatic, and with not all labs in the area having SGTF coverage, the potential for conflation is hazardous.

Indeed, sub four-day doubling time in one demographic band for London, and that's despite a baseline number of delta cases pulling the doubling time down (or not, if delta is in rapid decay as we might expect now?)

In reply to Jon Stewart:

Hold on in there for a few days yet.

Hopefully they're not actively trying to get people through the door who don't need it this time around...?  

It'll be very interesting to see how the university sector respond to this in the new year, we know many institutions had the potential for sub-week doubling times even post-vaccination given their sub-standard, rammed accommodation blocks etc.  

I've just been reading this, which I found to be a good summary of various things LSRH (our Twitter explorer) and others have posted:

https://justgivemepositivenews.com/home/fts-data-specialist-john-burn-murdo...

Edit: Jon, it's not bleak!

That's a great collection of material from people who get it IMO.  

I might as well pack up and go home at this point.  Although I am home, because I'm WFH most of the time...  

The FT figures in there showing delta falling and omicron growing are what I've had in mind when I say a doubling time from the "% SGTF" is misleading - even if omicron was not growing (obviously it is!), if delta was falling ,the "% SGTF" measure (% of cases likely to be omicron) would be growing.  With omicron growing, if delta falls, the "% SGTF" measure over-estimates the growth of omicron.  So, hopefully it's at least 3 days.   That's still bonkers, but it's 50% less bonkers.

Hold the line.

youtube.com/watch?v=SCS7Ibuiyak&

Hehe, major deja vu there

Except for this. This I hadn't seen:

"Tomorrow we’ll get new data on hospital pressure, including the breakdown of Covid-positive patients by whether they are being treated primarily for Covid, or only incidentally tested positive."

This is the good news story of the day. 

Thanks, it’s nice when for once, peering into the details makes things  look less bad.

I’ve still decided to start on the Bach Christmas music a few days early. I find you don’t have to be a believer for the optimism to rub off on you at least a bit.

Here's a fag packet calc to throw stones at:

- the 15th December Omicron update states that 60% of London specimens dated 12th and 13th with known S gene data were SGTF.

- the actual numbers reported with known S gene status are only about 10% of the ~27000 cases reported in London for those dates but if we assume the 60% holds true for the capital then that means, of ~27000 cases in those two days, ~ 10000 are still Delta

- a week earlier on the 5th and 6th there were a total of ~ 13000 Delta cases.

- I would conclude that Delta might be falling but might still be fairly flat depending on data uncertainties; it certainly doesn't seem to still be going up (as it undoubtedly was doing in London for the previous several weeks) so that's got to be good.

You might like this

https://mobile.twitter.com/kallmemeg/status/1471063000920559620

Edit: and this https://mobile.twitter.com/trvrb/status/1470420216232374281

Thanks; I tried to do some more robust analysis earlier on, but the day-of-week effects are so large that it's basically futile over such short timescales, and this is a thing that's happening on those timescales.

Lessons for future pandemics:

• Use the same geographic and demographic boundaries for all measures.
• Eliminate day-of-week effects in data by sample date as far as possible.

> it certainly doesn't seem to still be going up (as it undoubtedly was doing in London for the previous several weeks) so that's got to be good.

Indeed; given the lack of apparent cross-immunity when it comes to protection from catching one or the other, a worst-case might be a bifurcation in to two pandemics that overlap; just as measures to control wild-type Covid killed flu off, hopefully measures to control omicron will kill delta off.

(The cross-immunity should be there for severe disease, so after we properly exit the pandemic phase it doesn't matter so much what's circulating)

I think that both she and JBM need to present their graphs with different x-axis scales

No its not really...SA had the same issue but those in hospital with covid were in a minority compared to those because of covid  (and in hospital all the same). Given the state of our NHS capacity any significant hospitalisation increase is a big problem, unless at some point soon a wall is hit. The graph in that twitter post showing hospitalisation at about a third of cases cf delta was the one in the Indie SAGE presentation last Friday I wanted everyone to see (deaths were missing in that presentation, but although tragic, they are pretty much irrelevant to our government planning on pandemic control). The other potential problem from SA is a shift in hospitalisation demographic to a younger age cf their delta experience. Indie SAGE were less worried about a spike in primary school kids than they were the week before (they think possibility an initial very high infection rate in that age group).

Of course we are. We gradually dropped all the SD measures and went back to normal just like everywhere else. Now, there's no intention of reintroducing them because it's a pain in the arse and reduces sales. I thought that the pandemic would change the system of dragging people in just because two years have passed since they last bought glasses, but no. It's always a constant drive to get people in, and it'll continue no matter how bad the pandemic gets because they got away with it last time. 

Again, no incentive not to drive cases up and be a massive part of the problem.

A sub two day doubling time is hard to believe and surely isn’t sustainable for the reasons you’ve outlined. However a doubling time of even say a week would be bad news with current case numbers - unless it’s significantly less severe, which is far from clear yet.

As you say, the data is rather opaque and it’s not clear that it’s doubling as quickly as every two days. An attempt to soften people up for more restrictions? No hints of that from BoJo today though.

Impossible to say whether the increase in LFD +ves is due to more cases or more asymptomatic testing. Probably an element of both.

Re VS’s point. It’s fair to say that a lockdown would cause more cases further down the line. LSHTM modelling suggested that. However boosters are key and we need time for them. In that sense, the position is similar to last December, except that we’ve made much more progress. Still, probably not enough. Lifting restrictions around March say would leave a much better wall of immunity against Omicron. If there’s an exit wave, much better to have it in the summer. Might be time for further boosters by then for the more vulnerable.

In short, restrictions would mitigate the immediate consequences and lead to a better overall outcome.

Went to the Depot tonight. A lot fewer people than usual at 8.30pm (it’s never busy by then anyway). Warmed up double masked then retreated to the empty training area on the mezzanine. Hardly any mask wearing. Wonder where everyone was - staying away or partying? Perhaps the students have broken up. Anyway, felt like an acceptable risk. May be I’m wrong. 

You've replied to something that nobody said again there. "We'll get new data...." is the good news.

Are we to be mind readers? There wasn't any emphasis in what you said on what exactly was the good news in your statement but I assumed some logic in what might be that good news: new data can't ever be simplistically good news...what if we are unlucky and the data is bad news?

I openly prefer more precautionary measures but the SA data as presented by IndieSAGE last Friday seemed to me to both rule out the more apocalyptic views and those who felt we could get thought this without PlanB (before this, I posted on the other channel, to some ridicule, best case it might even have been possible with luck on data and government finally giving a consistent message that plan B light might be enough, equally, worst case, if things looked bad we might need a hard lockdown). Data last week wasn't quite as good as it could have been and the government have got worse again with messaging:  Boris now says we don't need anything more mandated but everything Harris and Whitty say, indicates the opposite without actually being explicit on that (remember Boris must have approved this to a degree..... and everyone now knows this covid passport, so highly contentious on his back benches, is meaningless, as it relies on honestly on LFTs):

Todays Daily Fail headline: "Its Boris vs the Scientists"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-59677053

So party people can have their party and the more cautious can listen to the science and both sides can, if they want, sanctimoniously criticise the other for what is actually deliberate government muddle.

In the end, despite arguments, wintertree's recent summary positions on this double thread are very close to my views. I certainly don''t believe we can say R>4 nor that omicron is doubling every 2 days (or that either of those speculations is even likely). That illustrates a  crucial point: we still don't know enough, but it's sensible to take some precautions given what is certainly very fast case growth and that significant omicron hospitalisations will happen.

Sometimes I think it's helpful to think of different exponentials on a linear scale graph.

Two near vertical lines can start from the same point (known circumstances now) and one near vertical line can have twice the gradient of another, but it doesn't really matter. Doubling time uncertainty or difference in the gradient of a near vertical line doesn't change by much where it intersects with some political*, logistical, testing, economic or hospital bed occupancy limit represented by a horizontal line.

*including number of daily deaths sufficient to overcome a PM's fear of back benchers 

Just the regular kind of reading would be fine. We can all see what the words said but you seem to have read it as "please give us some unfounded specualtion on what the data might contain and then launch into an unrelated rant about the latest axe indie sage has to grind"

Getting these data will be a huge step forward. Knowing how many cases in hospitals are incidental or nosocomial, and maybe even being able to infer the split, is a game-changer in understanding how screwed we are, and will only be more important as daily infections close in on 7 figures.

a thought occurred.. most optimisation processes improve asymptotically. Which means big steps indicate you’re still relatively far from the optimal state. Give the HUGE genetic, antibody neutralisation and ace2 binding changes for Om, it seems likely there will be other quite big changes possible. Eventually they will happen

Some  folk will deny exponentials

and believe in unlikely potentials

yet facing their lure

we do know for sure

they will soon have to face consequenials

You're an intelligent adult, you shouldn't need to be told that such data can be fairly described as important and a huge step forward  but not as good news if it is likely to be bad, unless you want people to assume you are heartless.

Your view on my alleged rant is just an ad hom insult...  deal with what you think is wrong in what I say, so we can debate that.

Indie SAGE had some clear data on SA and London last Friday before anyone else I saw, and those bashing them and missing that, are to me cutting off their nose to spite their face.

Actually, we don't need any more data.  78,000 people per day testing positive and they don't even count somebody who already it that gets it again.  We don't need any more information.  Any sensible, half way moral person would already have locked the f*cker down.

It's like these people want tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of serious illnesses.

As for the bollocks about protecting the economy.  Roughly 1/3 of people who get long Covid are still sick after a year. Roughly 10% of people who get Covid get Long Covid.  Multiply that by 1,000,000 infections a day.   A few weeks of lockdown to get the third jags done and hospitals prepared is peanuts compared to the loss of working days millions of cases of long covid will cause.

I think the SGTF % has been but I wasn't convinced cases data was in the most affected, finer grained units. 

But... the provisional data for London for Dec 13th looks like it's literally going to have doubled in the last 2 days - although looking at breakdown by test type available at the England level, this is at least in part driven by an increase in LFT positives, which themselves look to go with a rising number of LFTs...  So, some of that doubling is increased detection of infection, not increased infection.  

It'll won't be until Saturday that that growth lands in the demographic data....

If that doubling time does't almost immediately relax in London it's a massive red flag; we should start to see the increased precautionary messaging and the WFH shift embodied in the data any day now, and any gains in cases from increased engagement with testing can only sustain a "false" doubling time for a little while.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=region&areaName=...

Having more data is always good news, even if the data itself conveys bad news.

I just don't think hospitalisations data in SA is very relevant to us for reasons I've given before.

London hospitalisations data - hopefully we'll learn that hospitalisations are very low in the people under 40 catching Omicron; but I worry people will take false comfort from that; it's what happens to people aged 40-64 and 65+ that's could quake healthcare, and that data is going to take a lot longer to shape up in to something reliable, as the initial wave is being driven by younger adults. 

I've been thinking over previous conversations on the apparently cyclical nature of the SGTF to date between waves, and on  the different apparent R0 of this and existing common cold level viruses.  

Will we end up with a virus that hops around some fixed set of genetic loci in a cat-and-mouse game with sterilising immunity, but with the more enduring B-memory cell and T-cell immunity having broadened by adulthood to encompass all the loci?  If so, what does its R0 look like in that population?  Is it back down to ~3, or does it stay large?

Or do we end up with a virus that keeps drifting ever further down a one-way street?  Because that doesn't look like an inviting street.

Not initially, but it's quite important to know how severe their symptoms are, 3 times vaxed and it's barely a sniffle, up to a likely icu customer. Granted it's no good locking down too late.

my mother, admittedly old was quite bad with it and it's taken 18-20mths to get to what she considers her aerobic capacity back, lots of short walks etc. 

Of those double vaxed, how many have long covid? Versus just been unhealthy in the first place and now have something to blame? 

Obviously Sturgeon will be closing the pubs there over Xmas and New Years Eve when it's jammed to the rafters? 

Again, different people think in different ways, on a philosophical/semantics point about publicly using the words "good news" for new data, which in this omicron case might be anything from slightly good to quite bad with very serious consequence, I will always see that as quite reasonably generating an avoidable public emotive response and as such it's best not to say it, especially considering no one would have a problem with someone saying new data is useful.

Oh no!  Disaster.

LSRH may know more than I.

I know nothing.

I could speculate that it's to do with the legions of toxic people on twitter who are in a bad place, and who have unleashed all sorts of abuse (far beyond Twitter) on others who've taken a hard, evidence driven line.   Edit: Or as he started to feature in media stories may have tipped his employer over in to action over their social media policy.

I hope it's nothing bad.

'Sterilising immunity', as currently tested, is based on high-affinity antibodies binding to external viral epitopes that prevent successful ACE2 binding and/or internalisation.  The best evidence for broad 'clinical immunity' capable of aborting infections (or at least keeping them sub-clinical) I'm aware of is based on CD8+ Tc cell recognition of internal viral polymerase epitopes.

On the one hand, this seems to offer the possibility of a broad pan-coronavirus vaccine.  On the other, given that several coronaviruses reasonably closely related to SARS-CoV-2 are already endemic, why don't most people have this already?

One answer might be the set of HLA Class 1 molecules most people express don't present these polymerase epitopes to their CD8+ T-cells very efficiently.  A small subset do, but most coronaviruses don't now exert significant selective pressure by killing enough of the pre-reproductive age population (otherwise known as children) to make a difference.  

Thanks.

... and if the repeatedly cycling deletion behind the SGTF can change that affinity, can the virus flip this periodically to spread faster than the fade of antibodies from before the flip would allow?  Del 69-70 is in the RBD I think?  A reversible evasion mechanism?

Yes, what I was wondering is if this class of  post-infection moderating response is enough to pull estimates of R0 on other existing viruses down once the T-cell exposure has happened across the full range of configurations the virus might hypothetically jump around between (that is, assuming variants end up a finite pool, moving around it to keep moving away from sterilising antibodies).  If this downstream immunity can moderate the effective R number by moderating the level of infection, do we end up with a situation where R0 measures for existing, somewhat comparable viruses are really measures of R where there's this level of immunity against their range of configurations?  

Or in another sense, once the T-cells have seen a bunch of different variants of this new virus, do we end up with moderating immunity that effectively lowers R0 vs the cohort now?  Or perhaps "how endemic are we really vs something in circulation for decades?" 

Or is this virus just fundamentally way more transmissible than pre-existing respiratory viruses?  Given that the others have had decades to work on transmission, what's different here? 

One part of my thought I'm not clear on - if the more variation proof T-cells trigger memory B cells back in to antibody production, then do we get antibodies against all previously seen variants emerging and hanging around for moths after each re-infection, regardless of its variant flavour?

That sounds like a particularly tough thing to try and address pharmacologically?

I bet more than 78,000 people a day would test positive for the common cold in winter, but we don't lock down for that. We do need more information - we need to know how that translates into hospital stays and deaths.

Me too... thanks for the reply.

We know what impact the common cold has and so can ignore it. Here we dont and waiting until the evidence has been gathered has a rather obvious disadvantage if the answer isnt the one we are hoping for.

I'm seeing a lot of people getting nervous and cancelling stuff right now. Are we back in the situation where the government (and particularly the Tory backbenchers who the government need to appease) are well behind the public mood in terms of the need for caution? Or are they just hoping that people will stay at home of their own accord and leave hospitality and retail businesses bleeding money, rather than making the government pick up the bill by mandating another partial or complete lockdown?

Always dangerous to assume that the people you personally encounter are representative of the public as a whole. I definitely reckon there's an element of letting people take their own precautions so that the government doesn't have to compensate damaged businesses, but there will still be a sizeable cohort of people who would vehemently oppose any more restrictions. Plenty of folk seizing on any suggestion that Omicron might be more mild to suggest we can definitely ignore it altogether, even here.

I literally joined twitter a week or two ago, just to read his and a couple of other people's take on covid. Turns out twitter is an even greater stinking cesspit than I feared. 

I read yesterday that he posted something along the lines that it wasn't worth all the abuse prior to disappearing...but I didn't see it first hand, so not sure if true

You mean like neutrino oscillations? 

It is indeed that. He left due to the abuse

Yes, although perhaps more intentional (as much as agency can be ascribed to evolution) and less likely to drive a wave of scientific thinking that the sun has shut down, we're all going to die in 20,000 years and we just don't know it yet.

As Dave Garnet's posts make clear, I haven't got the immunology to really thrash out a solid, testable theory here, but it seems to be in the interests of the virus to keep evading the sterilising immunity, and pogoing between different sides of a state-space on the RBD configuration is one mechanism for that; if the sterilising efficacy of a B-cell response fades over X months, the virus can get twice as much spread in if it jumps between one of two stale configurations every X/2 months.  Now....  the deletion presumably happens a lot more easily than its restoration (more options for the later), so presumably this is more a case that variants of each type remain in low level circulation somewhere globally, and a sort of natural phase-locking occurs between which one is prevalent and recently refreshed B-cell immunity.

Hell of a theory, no idea if it's total bullshit or not.  The Intel Tick/Tock model applied to viral development...

Not the first.  Another victory for the idiots.

I know what you mean, but this is a bit broader than just "stuff I've heard from my mates" - it's also looking at stuff like the news about Boohoo being hit by a surge of party-dresses being returned, talk about whether Premiership matches should be called off this weekend, pub and restaurant owners on Twitter talking about their reduced trade / cancellations and so on...

Interesting contrast over travel, with France slamming the doors down on the UK over Omicron as the UK opens up.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59679861

Ourworldindata's "Omicron Variant (Share)" plot suggests that France is about 1.8x ahead of the UK in terms of % cases, with case rates comparable but exponentially rising (before Omicron) higher hospitalisation rates higher and exponentially rising (before Omicron).

Does the metaphor about horses and stable doors work across the channel?  

In reply to RamblinDave:

Lots of news reports about cancellations and also reductions in London Underground footfall. As you note, if it's not mandated, neither insurers nor government can be asked to foot the bill. and it appeases the growing number of rebels.  I look forwards to Jonathan Pie's take on it all.  At least a lot of surviving hospitality has adapted to take-away trade so has more of a shot this time.

Re hospital cases. Yes it’s important to understand with Covid or from Covid but it’s also important to consider the total number. Being with Covid and something else can have a significant negative impact on the outcome of that something else. That is certainly the case for surgery, especially for more vulnerable people. So yes and no. 

I tend to agree. Boris again saying today there should be no additional measures. He’ll get his bodies in the street wish soon enough. 

Mondays are always higher but still…

Indeed; it's about double the previous Monday's level, so a doubling time of 7-days by that measure.  As we're seeing a sudden up tick it's probably somewhere in the middle, around 3-4 days.

It says a lot when the good news is that real doubling times are probably around 3-4 days, not sub 2-days...

I've been wondering about the lack of UK news on the MSD anti-viral since it's approval, and the news in the stats on their second tranche of trial results being very disappointing, and the very close-run FDA vote on its approval stateside.  Looks like we're going to run a post-approval trial of the compound which is interesting [1]

Meanwhile, there's some more promising data on the Pfizer antiviral[2].  By targeting the viral protease and not the viral polymerase it appears to have less issues of mutagenicity against the host, and its trials data is holding up better.  The UK has placed an order, and I've seen articles from November stating it's going/gone for MHRA approval, but I haven't found a primary source for this. 

Some interesting reading from NERVTAG over anti-viral resistance [3] - good to see up-front thought being given to the issue, although how well the enhanced monitoring they suggest fits with at-home use and a giant wave of infection...

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59681571
[2] https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/12/pfizers-anti-covid-drug-still-looks...
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/nervtag-antiviral-drug-resistanc...

In reply to thread:

Some plots below...

• The doubling time in the most rapidly growing age-range in London's cases seems to be levelling of at around 4 days, presumably each day it is more representative of omicron than delta.  We'll see how that holds up over the coming days.
• All ages are now seeing clearly rising cases in London, with a second peak in the rate constant plot shaping up around adults ages 60 ± 10 years.  I wonder if this is downstream transmission in relatives of the range 20-35 years where the early, very fast growth landed. 
• The demographic splits plot for London is interesting - it looks to me like the new restrictions and building immunity sent delta in to decay for a few days in school-aged children and now household infection is taking over.  Rock around the portable HEPA filter this Christmas.
• England level PCR cases continue to see sorter doubling times; mostly driven by London so far, but looking at the dashboard, East Midlands, East of England, North West and South East regions are all having the big growth trend land in their provisional leading edge.  The rest can't be far behind - the North East and South West seem least impacted, for now.
  • Hopefully none of these regions will see such short doubling times as London, having the process really kick off after more 3rd doses, restrictions and precautionary behaviour have landed.
• Another stand-out day for 3rd doses in the vaccine program - almost three quarters of a million.  Two more days of data ahead in the first week to have the opened up booking system and resources are still being thrown at it... 

Such a scary mix of good, bad and what the f*ck news: 3/4 million jabs in a day but record cases again ......and another Boris party (this one in May 2020).

Q My house is on fire, what do we do?

A We do need more information - we need to know how that translates into hospital stays and deaths.

Sometimes time for decision making is a luxury we do not have.

Mainwood is back.

(For info, I don't actually have a tw&tter account and no intention of obtaining one. Nitter. Use nitter.)

"Meanwhile, there's some more promising data on the Pfizer. "

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-regulator-says-pfizers-anti-covid-p...

Things must be serious if the EMA are making immediate decisions instead of waiting for their next scheduled meeting in two weeks time.  Let us hope the EU shows similar haste in their procurement program.

In reply to Longsufferingropeholder:

I think mainwood could set Twitter to only allow his contacts to reply?  One way to limit the abuse.

In reply to Offwidth:

You missed a bit of good news - doubling time in cases seem to have maxed out at about 4 days.  Hurrah. So only 13x as much Covid by year’s end, not 181x as much.  Kind of hopeful even the 4 days is never going to make it through to top level cases….

I'm still not convinced of that high a doubling time as case numbers are not very high majority omicron yet.... but equally I'm not convinced of sub 2 day.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

Most regional doubling times are sub 2 days, several places about 1.5 days

Personally I think any doubling time estimate based on young adults is likely to be pessimistic. They always seem to move fastest due to having greater mixing and much lower vax rates (1/2/booster) than older groups. If young adults do eventually settle at 4 days then older adults will be slower.

I'd like to see the calculations behind those regional doubling time numbers. On the face of it, looking at the SGTF data presented in the same paper, they are baloney. Maybe it's down to how noisy they are, or day of week effects.

Appendix 3 gives a method but not with enough detail to recreate it.

I agree; I had wondered if they were measuring it from the % SGTF which is compromised by the rate delta is falling, but appendix 3 suggests I was wrong there.

Noise unlikely to be correlated towards baloney in all regions; day of week effects clearly visible in the data.  Regional plots all end on Dec 13, a Monday, which is when the weekend reporting spike lands. 

Measuring a doubling time on only a week of data with a Monday at the leading edge is fraught.  Eyeballing figure 2 suggests about 3.5 days to me, or sub 2-days if you just look at the last three days - weekend depression and Monday high.  

Baloney correlated noise! That’s a new one for the review comments..

I got a review today pointing out that Kolmogorov-Smirnov is not spelt Smirnoff and that is in fact vodka. Literally.

my draft response points out that the man is question would have used the Cyrillic and either anglicised transliteration is a bastardisation. I may change that before I submit corrections.. maybe.

My ambition is to one day find a field to work in where Kolmogorov doesn’t come up as a major pillar of the theory used.

Perhaps reforesting lowland wastes?

Good luck. I’ve tried three so far to no avail. 
 

I suspect the aforementioned test would be rather good for establishing whether the biodiversity of said rewilding was distinguishable from actual wilderness.. 

I rather fancy my role as a person with an electric quad bike and trailer loaded with saplings, a shovel, a marmalade sandwich, a thermos of hot squash and a simple say digging holes and putting trees in them.

No point running those statistical tests until long after I’m dead, the result is a forgone conclusion for probably 50 years minimum.

When the earth and heavens crumble and the last black holes equilibrate into the photon sea, statistical mechanics will forever reign.

edit: oh wait.. kolmogorov entropy.. damn.

edit: I’m going to need a Smirnoff!

Euler did everything in my field. Nothing named after Kolmogorov. 

Doubling times measured from the data in the linked daily omicron overview.  

Counts were measured from figure 2 by measuring the height of the graphical bars in pixels and converting to people using the y-axis as a scale (I know, I know...).  Exponential curves were fit to the last N data points for all possible values of N>1 and the resultant doubling times are shown.  The fitting was done using linear least squares to the log of the data, so that there is no numerical bias towards larger datapoints.  The power of maths then gives a doubling time from that.

Depending on the time period picked, we can get anywhere from a 1.5 day to 3.2 day doubling time out of the data by this method.  This method is pretty noddy compared to the not-fully-specified one used in the report, but it gives an indication of the importance of day-of-week effects which can produce a factor of over 2x difference in the measurement.

Depending on how they determine their error signal, their measurements could be more biassed towards the last few days of data - as the second plot of fitting to the actuals (not log data) shows, this tends to give shorter doubling times as the fit is pushed to miss earlier data points, because deviating from the later (larger) points dominates the error signal, and so the fit ends up matching the weekend sampling anomaly over earlier points.

I'd really hoped that the labs using the actual, human supplied test day instead of entry in to the lab system was going to fix this weekend sampling issue, but not a lot seems to have changed.

In a sane world, understanding these things in less than 14 days wouldn't matter, but when you've got a sub 4-day doubling time, it suddenly becomes kind of important...

Edit: Appendix 3 states - with my emphasis  "The plot was produced fitting a GAM (generalized additive model) with a Negative Binomial error structure to positivity within the sample of tests that detect SGTF from NPEx.".  

Moving past the North American spelling, the use of "positivity" has me wondering.  What do they actually mean?

• If they also have the number of tests conducted, then they can reasonably nullify day-of-week effects by using positivity, however that number is not presented and so those calculations can't be independently done.  But, why would positivity ever be used to measure doubling instead of actuals?  Positivity has a flexible relationship to actual infections for all sorts of reasons.
• ... perhaps ... I have this nagging doubt about how the black line on Figure 2 is the % of positive test results with SGTF and not the "classic" positivity (% of all tests conducted).   This would show a much faster doubling time if used as the source for analysis, as it's also including what I suspect is a decay of delta cases.

I'm really not sure what's going on with their analysis; it would be good to see a bit more specificity in the method and the actual datasets used.  Sub 2-day doubling times still feels like a stretch to me, but perhaps I'm missing something.   Or is that a squeeze?

I expect (sincerely hope) that doubling day estimates linked above would use symptom onset date NOT reported date (or specimen date), so wouldn't need to account for day of week effects.

It’s definitely a v in Russian. It got converted to ff for marketing purposes - it’s actually French spelling, so not anglicised. However the Russian pronunciation is actually somewhere between f and v. In Russian it’s CMI/IPHOB. The B is a v. And the I/I is the closest I could get to a backwards N which is actually an i. 

Huh, I basically think of him as the zero-one identity guy from measure theory.

I can still remember the outline of the proof of that one at almost 20 years distance, in fact. The law states that if an event relating to an infinite sequence of random trials satisfies a certain condition, then the probability of the event is either one or zero (but doesn't specify which). The proof basically demonstrates that the event is probabilistically independent of itself, and hence P(e) = P(e n e) = P(e)P(e), implying that P(e) = 1 or 0.

I think this point was raised some time early April 2020...

I see it in more simple terms.  This thing is doubling every two days and we are in a race between jags and the hockey stick point where the doubling is happening on big numbers.   The smart thing is to act fast to slow it down: that buys time to get jags done and time to collect data to see how dangerous it actually is.

Sturgeon can't print money.  Sunak can.  She's asked him to restore the furlough scheme. But your point is valid, Scotland needs independence in order to have the powers needed to protect itself like a sensible modern country.

I don't necessarily think it will be jammed to the rafters at New Year.   I live in the centre of town and it was a hell of a lot quieter today than it was a week ago. 

If the thing doubles every two days and it takes 10 days to put someone in hospital then by the time you collect the information your problem is 32x worse.

So the smart thing is to act first and collect the information after you have slowed it down.  If it turns out it wasn't necessary you've slowed the economy for 10 days and you've reduced an already too high burden on the NHS.  If you get it wrong in the opposite direction you are going to lose many times that amount of working days to sickness.

Although I broadly agree, the biggest economic cost by far is if you are too late with restrictions and forced into a hard lockdown. The link of restrictions to economic and social harm isn't a trade-off, its a direct correlation. We only have restrictions because of a public health need, notably a serious risk of NHS overload.

At least Sturgeon and Drayford are trying to get support for businesses impacted by the latest omicron wave, how many more good viable businesses will go to the wall with this dithering from Boris?

Or maybe she's sitting on the fence waiting to see what London does, then if required she'll make her announcement the day before, and her supporters will lap it up as strong decisive leadership. 

It's obvious what she's doing there's no secret.  She's trying to influence the Tories to restore furlough so she can do a lockdown without destroying businesses.  She has a call with Boris tomorrow and she's briefing her desire for furlough to be restored to the press.

If Scotland was independent we'd already have a lockdown, the delay is because the Tories control the money.

I have a somewhat harsher economic view on the position. There are 1.2 million unfilled job vacanices in the market at the moment , alot are not in hospitality.Does the treasury  need another  expensive furlough ( and it is ball park estimated at £7 bn for furlough fraud - I have seen high numbers of £17 bn-  from last time)  to finance..

Vat reduction and business rates- yes.Do something on loan repayments.Furlough--- I would question that.

There were too many dodgy practises by less than straight business owners ( you reap what you sow).

if the job vacancies position was the other way round, then maybe.

Anecdata: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/16/annihilated-businesses-hard-h...

Rock and a hard place for hospitality, isn’t it?

Lots of promising anecdata out there; I saw some over the London Underground footfall as well.  I keep finding and loosing a link to government statistics on road traffic levels…

I used to teach it with a slide picture of a   kalashnikov (AK47) + bottle of Smirnoff to get them to remember it !

You need to stack the cost of a few weeks of furlough for hospitality and other personal-contact industries up against the cost of days lost to Long Covid, and the cost of hospital and ICU treatment and the subsequent time off work which could potentially be avoided by holding off  Omicron until the third jags go in and take effect.

You also need to think about the health risk to vaccinators.  It's one thing doing that job when Covid levels are relatively low. Quite another doing it right in the middle of a huge wave of infection. They are asking people who've left the active health service to come back as volunteers, part of asking people to volunteer should be trying to minimise the risk to them.

This is so good it deserves a place here

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/16/boris-johnson-go-out-catch...

Growing hospital pressures from staff absence due to covid.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/dec/17/hospitals-in-england-draw-u...

You suggested upthread that because Nicola can't print money like Rishi, she couldnt do furlough. It's far from clear that in an independent Scotland she would have that facility either. 

So far from Westminster being the fly in the ointment of Nicola's desire to lockdown, it looks like she's actually relied on the significant borrowing power of the UK/pound for previous furloughs.

She could presumably lock down tomorrow if she wanted but she's done the same calculation as Boris and come to the same conclusion.

In terms of her trying to 'influence' the Tories, how do you think she'll do that? Almost every post you've ever typed on this forum bemoans the fact that Scotland is ignored and Westminster doesnt care about you.

Edit:typo

Indie SAGE this week: lots on Omicron (at the start) and London (at the end)

youtube.com/watch?v=MjU6zwL_4GU&

The evidence is still saying 80%+ are hospitalised due to covid and the "with covid" figures include the hospital infected (increasing fast in London due to Omicrom).

Two issues not really discussed here are:

PCR testing is the highest ever and return dates within a day are dropping fast so case information will soon be at least an extra day delayed on average.

London is being hit hard and it's the region with lowest vaccination and booster rates (with a 20% disparity between least and most deprived areas).

Case data has been seeing extra delays for a while now.

While we are sharing YouTube links, I just watched the latest Zoe update, which is interesting as their data is based on reported symptoms and it is definitely not going up so precipitously as the dashboard data. Some positive nuggets in here:

youtube.com/watch?v=kF79-XprdfU&

Sometimes needs a bit of caution definitely worth a brief watch.

Sure, IndieSAGE have a plot and the situation is getting worse more quickly. I guess the point is if cases double a couple more times in four or five days the timeliness of the  system will crumble.

Thanks, I'd seen Zoe. ONS was also out today (next week will be the start of the more interesting data on changes).

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/con...

and some less positive ones: 

Modelling suggests rapid spread of Omicron in England but same severity as Delta: 

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/232698/modelling-suggests-rapid-spread-omic...

I haven't read the report itself, just the summary that you linked. But hopefully "no evidence of Omicron having lower severity than Delta" isn't quite the same thing as "same severity as Delta". Absence of evidence not evidence of absence.

Edit: To be clear, I'm not maintaining that it's definitely much less severe than Delta, just clinging onto some hope that the situation might not be quite as dire as it could potentially be.

Yes, I don't think it's as bad as the conclusions some are jumping too.  Ultimately, we'll know once we know.  Most (by no means all) of the people being infected by Omicron appear to be adults with so much immunity they couldn't catch Delta at all upon exposure.

I can't see the scientific advisors as having supported the last few weeks of policy if they expected the hospitalisation rate to be comparable to Delta.  There is data on what fraction T-cell recognition from vaccines is broken by Omicron; it wasn't a high fraction that was broken.  

I could guess what the bods are thinking and modelling.  I'm still not panicking or despairing just yet, but this is very high stakes stuff.

Time will tell.

In reply to thread:

Plot updates:

Plot 18 - regional rate constants:

• London continues to experience shorter doubling times - presumably as the omicron cases come to dominate the measurements over existing levels of delta.
•  Looking ahead of the data used for this plot in to the provisional zone of dashboard cases data, using the week-on-week method applied to Dec 7th and data for Dec 14th, the doubling time is down to 4.4 days.  Still far behind the sub 2-day times quoted for SGTF data, despite the near certitude omicron is now dominating London cases.  Something is still not adding up with those estimates IMO.  Regardless, it's top level cases that are going to feed through to hospitalisations, and they are not doubling anywhere near every 2 days.   
• Hospitalisations in London are doubling much more slowly than cases.  That could still change, but we're seeing a big demographic shift to younger adults - adults who were mostly so immune they weren't even catching delta it seems - so hopefully this disparity with hospitalisations continues.  We really want to watch another week of data to see all the lag flush through from omicron taking over however.  
• The rate of decay of deaths in all regions appears to be accelerating - although this is in the provisional zone where reporting lag can cause false signals.  Or it could be the sheer quantity of 3rd doses that's flowing in to people is having a dramatic effect.  If this turns out to be real, it underscores the need to stay within healthcare bounds, as hospitalisations aren't showing a corresponding fall, suggesting their help is needed in achieving this fall. Or the disparity could signal a reporting lag issue.  
• Growth hasn't really landed in other regions yet on this plot - although looking at the 3 most recent and provisional days of cases at the regional level in the dashboard, it's clearly here - just not yet in to the regional data - which lags by 3 days - yet.

Plot D1.c - London demographic rate constants

• This stops 5 days in the past so it's more lagged than other plots; this is due to choices in the government dashboard over where to cut data off.  
• No sign (yet) of the rate constant continuing to get worse for the fastest growing ages, if anything it may have backed off a bit over the last few days - measurements at the leading edge are twitchy to noise and day-of-week effects however.
• The slices through time from this plot show that there is a worsening (faster) growth rate in almost all adult ages, the older few bins are subject to a lot of noise.  
  • Critically, growth in the older bands where most hospitalisations come from is much milder, doubling at between 1.5 and 3 weeks - although that growth rate also looks to be getting worse for now.

So, a bit of perspective:

• The doubling time in cases isn't looking as apocalyptic as 2-days even as omicron takes over, even if we look at the fastest growing age bins in the fastest growing region.  It's more like 4 days (shows how messed up the situation is that 4 days constitutes good news...)
• Hospitalisations are currently doubling much more slowly (1.5 weeks)
• Cases in older adults are currently doubling much more slowly (1.5 weeks to 3 weeks across the ages)
• Other regions are going to see omicron break through to dominance later than London, meaning more of the policy changes and mass individual precautionary measures should manifest in regional growth rates.  Also schools closing
  • But - the undergraduates are streaming all over the country now...  Dig out the garden tents as with their quarantine last winter?  It'll be an improvement over many of the halls of residence...
• However, hospitals are still under immense pressure from the log jams and are having a rising pressure from the wave of absences this wave of infection is triggering, and admissions are going to go up.  I know I'm abso-bloody-lutely exhausted by the last 18 months, and I know that all things considered I've had a cushty time of it.   One way or another, this can't go on much longer for many people.

Still - Black Eye Friday!  Be good people, or it's a very long wait in A&E...

A friend got tested on Wednesday and has only just received his positive result.

The week-on-week method rate constant for England is heading for the skies, and it's doing so much more rapidly than when delta landed earlier in the year.

The plot showing the passband values (how far they are from a rolling average, and with some soothing reducing day-to-day noise) for temperature and rate constant is interesting.  The last cold spell around the end of November saw cases remain in decay despite it being a strong cold spell - that's the last blue shaded part - I really do think this was it, the moment immunity built to the point it could't spread in the last susceptible demographic bands (which were themselves forcing cases in parental ages), and we were going to see delta pack itself up.  That collapse of delta could be what's driving a more rapid doubling time in terms of how quickly omicron rose up the SGTF data.  Perhaps.

Now, we see the rate is rocketing up, despite what's looking like a big warm spell.  Unusually changes from this variant are happening so fast they land in the weather passband.  

The bad news is that we're seeing this rapid spread whilst the weather is knocking rate constants down a bit over where they'll be in a week or so as the warm spell segues in to the next cold spell (White Christmas!?!?).  Hopefully all the policy, messaging and 3rd doses will more than compensate for that.  All the more reason to get behind the Chris Witty side of the last briefing.  That's upset some of the gutter press, the has.  Perhaps they should be more upset that the government aren't getting behind affected industries.

While there's a slight lull in conversation, just gonna say..... Ivermectin anyone? Vitamin D? No, me neither. Well, vitamin D yes, but not for covid.

I’m well down on Vitamin D, hoping to catch some winter sun this weekend.

Ivermectin is an interesting one; if has shown efficacy in some early lab tests but only at concentrations that are going to poison humans.  It literally has been poisoning some lately in the USA. [1]  At human-safe levels it’s not been showing efficacy against covid despite the massive campaign to build a conspiracy around it.

Still, where there’s efficacy in a cell culture assay (that’s not afflicted by organ level toxicity), there’s a mechanism of action. If you can identify that MOA, you can try and get your very clever chemists to produce a much less toxic molecule that acts on the same target.  Some really interesting reading on that here [2] and I wonder how much stuff like this fed in to a rational drug discovery approach in the design of Paxlovid.  

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2021/09/04/1034217306...1639782541134

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-020-01577-x

Edit: one poster keeps suggesting simulation is going to take over even human testing in drug discovery and speed things up; to give an idea how far there is to go, it’s interesting to look at what the authors have to say about comparing their simulations of the drug acting on a single target with a lab assay (safety testing in silico would need to test against every target in a human…)

In the current study, we did not find any correlation between the in vitro results of selected drugs and their computational inhibition constants. Even though, computational studies are being widely used to predict the initial protein-drug interactions, in vitro screening of the drugs is necessary to confirm the inhibitory activities of the drugs.

There is a long road ahead for in silico methods.  A long and data hungry road.

Edit: the bar chart figures have a compound called “GC327” that appears to be almost totally effective.  I can find no other references to this compound in the paper and no references on line, but Google directs me to a page on Paxlovid.  The editor should have called them out on not describing the compound, but then again they let them off with using “Log concentration” on an axis that shows actual values on a log spacing, not log values…. This compound has really piqued my curiosity now…!

Couple of things. 

SAGE advocating going back to measures which were in place from March or from mid April. Otherwise estimating 3k admissions per day (doesn’t say for how long or what the CI is). 
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59707252

Boosters only 80-85% effective against sever disease from Omicron. Early study so let’s hope it’s too pessimistic. Otherwise that’s pretty bad news for hospitalisations. 
 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-59696499

Also a question for the thread. When will we see hospitalisations go up significantly? The big jump in case numbers by date reported was this Monday. My understanding is it’s a week to two weeks from symptoms to hospitalisation or recovery. Monday’s specimen date could be people developing symptoms over the preceding weekend. So I’d expect a significant uptick from about Monday next week. Don’t think hospitalisations are reported over the weekend anyway. Conversely, if we don’t see a significant uptick by this time next week, we could perhaps be more hopeful?

I know it’s not as simple as cases are going up in younger people first and they aren’t likely to be hospitalised in the first place.

I think because of this, it will take at least an extra week over your date above before we can have any confidence in approximate hospitalisation rates that could be reached based on real world data. Perhaps much longer, especially if the case rate doesn't start moving up fast in older ages. Of course this would be a good thing - it might start to show that boosters with 75% efficacy (vs 2 doses with very little) can bring r down from 4 or 5 in young adults to 1 or 1.5 in older adults (eg.) Long way to go still.

Of note, we are already no longer following the curve of hospitalisations predicted by the recent LSHTM modelling except somewhere close to the best case analysis. I suspect this is to to with demographics but unfortunately it will be probably be misinterpreted.

Right because obviously small states within the EU like Ireland can't do lockdowns. 

Obviously only the English have the massive borrowing power and financial acumen necessary.  That'll be why the UK's Covid deaths over the course of the pandemic are so much lower than other advanced countries.  Oh wait, they aren't.  

She could order a lockdown but she wouldn't be able to fund furlough or any intensive form of business support unless England did something similar.  Scotland's budget is based on England's budget so her policies are indirectly controlled by England.  

It is possible that this will turn out to be more about money than lockdown.  Omicron is getting so scary that people and businesses are starting to lock themselves down.  That means businesses which can't operate without customer contact will be screwed.  The question is whether the state should support them by making it financially easy to shut down for a few weeks or whether the state should save its money and let them fail or take on more debt.  

Her calculation is that Johnson's anti-lockdown position in the face of Omicron is so stupid that he'll have no choice but to abandon it because the English will demand it.  She's just trying to accelerate it.

SA delay was about a week but much easier to see as their curve wasn't sitting on top of high delta levels.

Admissions are clearly significant in SA although at roughly a third per case of the equivalent previous peak  (OWiD current average cases are about a fifth above the previous peak levels and most recent admissions data.. almost a week old ....is already approaching half of the previous peak level).

I’m not sure the UK government can afford another lockdown at the moment to be honest.

Inflation at 5%, interest rates rising, signs of weakening demand for UK GILTS.

Lockdown is far from the optimal public health intervention that the guardian headbangers make it out to be.

Still totally depressed with endless newspaper articles from the usual suspects about unaffordable lockdowns and trade-offs of covid health vs economic and social damage. 

It's been obvious from the beginning there is simply no choice but to lockdown if things become so bad in the data that that is what we need to do protect the NHS from overload. Any delay makes the problem and resulting damage worse. There is no trade-off it's a correlation.

Yes, but of course the UK Government can afford not to have a lockdown and just let a couple of million people catch Covid before they get their third jag.  Because that is obviously free since none of them are going to need expensive ICU treatment or medicines and none of them are going to get long covid and be off work for a long time.

The countries who did best in previous waves locked down faster and as a result didn't have to lock down as long and had fewer deaths and hospitalisations.   The Tories really need to stop designing policy to please innumerate morons and the Daily Mail and start working the maths.

Because these c*nts did Brexit and then they f*cked up on Covid to a disgraceful extent.

Doing f*ck all while cases double in two days is not a spectacularly successful strategy either.

Cases aren’t doubling every two day though, are they?

They're getting close to that in young adults in London; young adults who weren’t catching delta at all due to their high immunity.  So far we’re not seeing doubling times in actual cases much worse than 4 days even as the majority of cases shift to omicron in London.  With an exponential that difference compounds dramatically; a 90x increase by year end if doubling every 2 days, a 9.5x increase if doubling every four days.

On the face of it, a 9.5x increase sounds terrifying, but even that 4 day doubling time is currently confined to young adults who were contributing very low hospitalisation rates under delta.

We’re clearly in a very precarious position, but that’s no excuse to go off the hysterical deep end.

We’re also not doing “f*ck all”, there are a lot of changes going on to reduce the spread, and schools just closed.  We may not be doing enough, but that’s very different to “f*ck all”. 

I’d like to see more - in particular closures in vertical pubs and clubs, with financial support for a week either side of Christmas.  I see the Welsh government is closing nightclubs, shows how a devolved government has freedom to act.

I think its going to be close to the wire; many reasonable people view the current situation as dangerously irresponsible, but it’s nowhere near to the apocalypse level you’ve been suggesting.

Hopefully you can understand the cost of providing treatment is a drop in the ocean compared to providing blanket support for a lockdown. Millions vs Billions.

The workers out of the workforce claim is the stronger argument. It doesn’t stack up over any sensible timeframe, but it’s the better argument (just do the maths on total cost of lockdown vs number of days in lockdown).

This is one of the weirdest arguments that I keep seeing pushed on UKC. “Lockdowns are good for the economy”. There was 1 paper that was published in 2020 about GDP growth rates and Covid measures which concluded that countries that locked down earlier and harder did better. It’s important to note this completely ignored how the lockdowns were funded. Somehow this was jumped on by the guardian and it even found it’s way into Covid fact checkers. It’s nonsense. Economic data has been revised and no one else has come to the same conclusion. If you factor in the scarring from the debt we’ve taken on it’s clear that the debt alone will kill tens of thousands of people.

The USA has inflation of c.7%, Germany is c.5%. I didn’t realise they’d left the EU too.

I agree. But the default strategy can’t always be lockdown given the massive cost and the limited benefit when everyone vulnerable is boosted.

Lockdown will demonstrate a failure of government policy, again. They've had the whole year to prepare. All the billions spaffed away could've been used to reduce the risks of any respiratory illnesses spreading - grants for improved ventilation and air filtration, trying to move away from presenteeism with better sickness pay etc.

As it stands I felt we hadn't really learnt anything coming into the winter period - people going into work with coughs, packed social spaces with poor ventilation etc. There's been no attempt to "learn to live with it", just "ignore it and hope it'll go away". 

I'd agree we can poorly afford it. I also think it would be the end of Boris Johnson's premiership so it will be resisted at all costs.

Yes, all this talk of learning to live with the virus, and healthcare is going in to winter in a badly curated way, and the progress on ventilation has been disappointing at best; still no clear guidance on the use of HEPA or biocidial UV systems within passively ventilated spaces and woefully unclear guidance on their use in mechanical ventilation systems.  Half a million households with vulnerable people living in fuel poverty (not going to open windows on a cold day) could have had a portable HEPA filter for the money pissed away on the dodgy private PCR lab alone.

Learning to live with the virus mostly appears to consist of gaslighting the public in to thinking their accepting restrictive control measures and overwhelmed healthcare is about the greater good, and not picking up the pieces of an incapable government who have squandered much of the 22 months they’ve had to learn to live with the virus, as well as subsiding their rundown of healthcare.

What a shitshow.

edit: whoops, there I go getting political again.  I’ll be wintertree_in_northumberland faster than you can say ******* ******* **** ******* **** ******* tories.

I suspect there's some confusion over doubling times for omicron, and for overall cases. The last UKHSA summary gives sub-2 day doubling times for omicron pretty much everywhere; closer to 32 hours in Yorkshire and the NE:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

I'm not convinced super stringent restrictions are the optimal strategy this time either. Leaders should be doing a lot more than distancing themselves from the scientists' pleas for common sense, that's incredibly shitty even for this lot, but the money we'd spend on a lockdown would undoubtedly have more effect if we used a tiny fraction of it to pay everyone to stop what they're doing for an hour and man the vaccination centres. Or just get vaccinated. Or ventilate places better. Or anything else that makes a difference to transmission. This isn't march 2020. We've learned things since then. Or at least we should have.

Also not convinced every business that existed in 2019 has a future now. People keep saying "when the x industry recovers...". Well, I hope travel doesn't, now we all know how to use zoom. And it's pretty clear we won't need as many sit down restaurants, because though things will swing back a bit the maniacs on delivery scooters will retain a good chunk of that market. There'll be other, better examples. The world has changed. Most sensible, pragmatic views expect probably another couple of on and off years of life like this. Preserving everything as it was doesn't really make sense. Especially facing huge labour shortages in loads of key areas. Not sure who gets to decide what we'll need and not need going forward, or how long market forces would take to figure it out, but it won't be the same as before we hit pause the first time.

I have some confusion with regards that document you linked!  I can’t get sub 2-day doubling times out of their top level SGTF case numbers (backed out of figure 2) except by careful alignment to the weekend sampling low or by including the very first data points above the baseline - now out of date in terms of doubling times

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/covid_plotting_56_continued-742...

I also don’t understand what the “positivity” they refer to in appendix 3 as the basis of the calculations means; using conventional positivity (of all tests) would be very unorthodox and bizarre.  If they mean (SGTF detections)/(all detections) that’s biased to shorter doubling times if delta is falling (reasonably expected with increased restrictions and faster 3rd doses) until it’s mostly omicron and then it becomes information free.

Top level cases definitely aren’t doubling as fast, nor those broken down to the most rapidly growing age and geographic bin, but if omicron was really doubling this fast then we’d expect top level cases to tend to the sub 2-day doubling time as omicron rapidly takes over control of the top level.   But the individual doubling time curves for any age bin in London don’t to my eye look to be heading for a sub 2-day asymptote.

My best guess is that this doubling time may have happened fleetingly before people started responding, but that proving it is fraught given the massive day-of-week effects and how to measure it you need two successive days without any bias landing at the right moment in time.

I can’t square everything of, but I don’t have a full specification of the method used in that document, I don’t have regional level data, and my measurements start with the height of bars in a screenshot which further degraded things…

It’s going to really suck if I turn out to be wrong…

I’m hoping the UKHSA document gets updated today so I can run the analysis again with the weekend low in the middle, and as there’ll be enough days to do some week-on-week analysis.

Jon Read suggested the analysis might be by symptom date as a way of resolving day of week effects, that could be what I’m missing…. 

https://nitter.pussthecat.org/BristOliver

(Much easier to read on nitter, so I'll link there from now on, but sometimes you may have to switch instances)

Our local Tory MP is one of the "cant do anything as it might jeopardise our freedoms like those horrible socialists want..." brigade. I thought I disliked her as much as was possible already.  I was wrong.....

Indeed.

Doubling time of SGTF % is not doubling time of omicron cases however.

Conflated if delta is falling.

If delta falling, information inferred from SGTF % implies faster doubling of omicron than actual omicron cases.

Delta looked to be giving up just as omicron landed; tougher omicron measures and more boosters final nail in delta coffin?

SGTF % derived measures to be treated with skepticism.

If omicron cases doubling every 2 days, asymptotes in rate constant measurements of fastest growing age/location subset must be 2 days.  The power of maths.

Crude analysis of asymptotes and crude analysis of actual SGTF cases suggest doubling time not sub 2 days, but over 2 days.  May be as much as 3.5 and growing.  Difference compounds very rapidly.

Want to see UKHSA actuals data on SGTF and their best analysis of actuals.  If this is case already (unclear, hunch says no) want to see it spelt out in simple words in daily report.

Much confusion here.

Confusion bad.

I find it hard to believe that after nearly 2 years of this, there are people that still think lockdowns are a choice.

And indeed Susan Hopkins said reliable data won’t be available until after Xmas or more likely NY. Demographics is an interesting point. If most of the cases currently are in younger people, they will indeed be mostly mild. At a guess, extra admissions in the 100s but not 1,000s. By the time there’s significant seep through, boosters might provide sufficient defence to again keep extra admissions below the 1,000s.

That’s an optimistic view and by the time we find out it will already be too late if it’s not looking so good. It seems clear to me that more restrictions have been required for some time. Some noise in the papers about restrictions after Xmas. I went for the 26th earlier. 

Indeed but only significant if Delta is falling significantly. If it’s 10-20% a week as we’ve seen previously, so say 3% a day, it won’t have that much of an impact on the doubling time, although can’t do the maths in my head.

Of course it can. Edit - but a full lockdown isn’t needed anyway. Certain sectors do need to be closed or heavily restricted but we don’t necessarily need to close everything that was closed last time. The issue at the moment is effective lockdown by stealth without any government support. That’s what will make businesses go bust and inflict real damage in the economy. As we’ve seen, lockdowns with government support have caused limited scarring on the economy - it has bounced back quickly. A bit too quickly in fact, hence the current inflation. 

Austerity is what kills people but if you think that Tory austerity really has anything to do with the level or national debt, you are deluded. It’s an ideological choice to have a low spend, low tax state (I know taxes are at the highest level since whenever but they’re still relatively low compared to say the Nordics and compared to where they need to be to deal with an ageing and not particularly healthy population).

Delta likely to plummet as all this kicks in.

• Delta could barely grow before omicron.
• Immunity levels rising significantly from recent delta infection and vaccination.
• Control measures rising significantly.
• People being more precautionary than control measures
• Schools out for Winter

(Delta unlikely to fall much from infection induced cross-immunity from omicron.  Because omicron escapes delta immunity-against-infection and cross-immunity is a two way door.  Let's hope cross-immunity against serous illness less compromised as expected) 

SGTF% never really appropriate measure to use?

• SGTF% dubious insight going forwards from early days of data as very low absolute numbers, control measures not kicked in.
• SGTF% not meaningful insight into omicron growth when delta falling which appears to be more recent data.
• Wintertree not clear if UKHSA reports using %SGTF or actuals.  Clarification would be nice (someone reading please ask colleagues nicely)

Wintertree did a bad thing and digitised the plot from from the latest omicron daily report using mad image analysis skills to measure height of bars.  

• Delta now falling, has 5.5 day halving time over last 5 days of data
  • Yes, noisy, but actuals and so manifests in actual %SGTF numbers

Wintertree not think %SGTF appropriate measure going forwards.

• Significant noise on both SG+ and SG- measures
• Delta (SG+) likely falling now
• Including Delta (SG+) just adds confusion

%SGTF conflation from falling delta likely worse conflation outside of London and South East as restrictions, end of term, precautionary messaging more synchronised than rise to prominence of Omicron

%SGTF tells us how fast omicron supplanting delta, not how fast omicron rising.

Will update plots and my noddy doubling time analysis when next UKHSA report out.

I imagine Delta is falling significantly now but the 2 day doubling time was first noted on Monday, which would have been based on infections before WFH etc was brought in. However, as you say, numbers were low and therefore able to grow quickly as well as being harder to estimate. Your second set of bullet points is key I think 

Same as you and others, I somewhat doubt it’s been as rapid as that. However, as you’ve said, it’s a reflection of the current situation that we’re sort of saying, oh it’s not as bad as 2 days, it might only be 4 days… Even a week would be bad news with current case levels but at least it gives the booster programme more time. 

Yes. SGTF% is not the measure to get hung up on. Violently agreeing with reach other here.

Irt Misha:

Hospitalisation numbers are going to be misleading, if you want them to show what you're looking for, for ages. Choose your lag, choose your ihr. One doubling time off and you're out by a factor 2. Using a guess at either to infer the other at the moment is a fool's errand.

Agree re IHR but the shape of the hospitalisation curve will be instructive. Also of course hospitalisations don’t equal occupancy as it depends on severity. 

I see it as far simpler than that.

The early data says you are 85% less likely to get severe symptoms if you have the booster jag.

Therefore we want to get the booster jags plus 14 days in as many people as possible before they catch this Omicron thing.   That is going to save a fortune in treatment costs and lost working days due to illness as well as reducing deaths.

It is pretty clear that unless we slow it down the Omicron wave is going to win the race. Which means millions of people having 6x as large a risk of serious disease than they would have had if we'd managed to get them their jag first.

It is also totally clear that if the number of Omicron cases hit anything like what is predicted things will grind to a halt because so many people will be sick at once.  That includes the vaccination program as well as healthcare and quite possibly deliveries to supermarkets.

The downside risks are so much larger than the cost of caution it should be a no brainer.  A couple of weeks of tough restrictions to collect more data, figure out what is going on, and keep the jags going at a fast rate followed by a review would be sensible.

It'll be easy to see whatever you want to see in it.

Too many conflations. Demographics, vaccination status, length of stay, lag from infection, nosocomial infections......... Be very careful and get a second and third opinion on any conclusions.

You surprise me.

Very early data. Very. And really indications are that it kicks in well in a week, not two. And most of the oldies have had theirs already, so now we're taking bigger bites out of transmission.

Worth taking the next step in complexity now and then.

By far the simplest and safest thing is to react fast to get in a situation where you have the luxury of time to figure out all the nuances and get more accurate bounds on the key data.

First slow it down, then do the complex analysis, and if it says it is all OK then open up again.  You've lost very little and at the very least you've taken some pressure off the NHS and flattened the curve a little.

True but at the end of the day the hospitalisation numbers are the first signs of healthcare stress, so that’s what we’ll have available to ponder. All the factors you mention will conflate into the curve, the only question is how steep / steepening it will be. Per my earlier posts, I’d expect the numbers to grow from next week but we won’t have a half-decent idea until after Xmas. 

Agree, lighter measures earlier on makes sense. Of course that would in itself complicate the analysis but right now anything to slow it down is a good thing. Plan B should have been brought in as soon as alarms started sounding (along with a temporary border closure with very limited exceptions - which could have been lifted by now) and we should already be in Plan C. Instead we might end up in a relatively hard lockdown for longer than necessary… 

If you add austerity to the damage picture the last time the UK had good financial control and policy you could thank Gordon Brown for that   

There’s still a 400bn gap to close. You can pay it off by reducing spending or increasing taxes - whatever your political preference is. Either way it’s a heck of a lot of money and the taxes rises/ spending cuts will have a real world public health impact (and it will be big).

I just find it very curious that those who scream the loudest that “austerity kills” are broadly the same group of people now saying “lockdown everything and spend whatever it takes”. The cognitive disconnect is just amazing.

There is a possibility that Pillar 1 currently gives a higher percentage of sequencing compared to Pillar 2 tests and, because of a relative lower proportion of omicron in Pillar 1,  omicron growth rates could be underestimated. I'm sticking at somewhere between 2 and 4.

If omicron symptoms are mild and 'cold like' for many, a large proportion of the infected population might not even be considering tests. That's not necessarily bad news as growth will start to brake infection at some point and increasing mild infection numbers will help achieve that.

The idea people like me want lockdowns is ludicrous... I wanted almost cost free mild restrictions in the autumn, that would have turned a delta plateau into decline.... giving the NHS a bit of a break before winter... I wanted Plan B earlier in the omicron outbreak as it was not costed as being very damaging to the economy and omicron data from SA indicates a clear risk, irrespective of its size (even smallish increases are bad in an NHS negligently left in the current trouble it is under). We only need lockdown when data is so bad  that we know hospitals will be overwhelmed (because previous policy has failed), and at that point calling it earlier is better in public health terms and is less economically and socially damaging as a smaller peak takes less time to drop back to levels where we can start to open up again.  Despite howls of indignation that restrictions would not be tolerated the large majority of  people seem to be tolerating them and most now expect this wave will be highest next month, so change back won't happen fast. Things are so bad in hospitality with very  limited restrictions in England that the chancellor is back early from the US and being asked for urgent sector help.

On business I accept the 2019 situation isn't where we will be at the exit to the pandemic. I won't cry if a few airlines go bust (other than for people losing jobs....as that economic loss is a trade-off with what we need to do to meet urgent climate change needs) but in hospitality if we face losing good restaurants, cafes and pubs that have been robust enough to survive this far, because the chancellor is playing miser, I will be very pissed off. Loss of many good, financially viable places that add to our economy, employment and enjoyment of life, due to 'penny pinching', would be a disaster

I just realised what day it is. I hope you're not.... I mean... I hope you're.... I mean, I don't know what to say really. If there ever was a week to draw a cock on it and do something else with your weekend, this is probably it. Be reassured that expectations can be managed.

At the risk of diverting the thread, there’s a lot more to it than reducing spending or increasing taxes. There are  also economic growth and inflation, which both have a significant impact on debt as a % of GDP (400 out of say 1,000 is not the same as 400 out of say 2,000). I’m not a proponent of MMT but we don’t need to pay that debt back today or even over the next 10 years.

Nor is there any suggestion that this would cost another 300bn. The economy has already adapted to the pandemic, so would require less support for a start. Nor do we need to shut everything down right now (but it might come to that later on if we do nothing…). However targeted measures like more sick pay for those self isolating and sectoral furlough, rates relief and so on would make a lot of sense over the next 2-3 months. It would also be required for a much shorter time period this time round as we are in a very different place to a year ago in terms of vaccine rollout.

Delaying measures on the grounds of economic / fiscal cost is incredibly short sighted. I’d have thought most people will have realised this by now. 

I'm pretty sure I never said small states can't do lockdowns. Your claim was that Nicola can't print money like Rishi so can't lockdown. I suggested as an independent state that would probably still be the case. Maybe respond to that point rather than one I didn't make.

I said UK, not England, and never made any mention of financial acumen. The UK has a good credit rating and this is an advantage for borrowing. I've literally no idea why you are talking about number of covid deaths.

Scotland has devolved income tax powers and borrowing facility doesn't it? Could that borrowing facility be used to cover the costs up front? I really don't know what's allowed and what isn't.

She could order lockdown without furlough too, but at the minute she's concluded the cost to business isn't worth it.

Its a tricky one for sure. Difficult calculation that I have no where near enough data (or probably talent) to make a judgement

Could be, although someone more cynical might say that her calculation is that she can call for it all day long knowing it won't happen ,and will score political points without ever having to worry about where the money is gonna come from...and please don't just say the BoE printing money, because that is not consequence free.

Just googling to remind myself what SGTF means, I found a report from 29th November, stating 11 SGTF-confirmed omicron cases. So that's 18 days ago. Yesterday, there were 95k new covid cases. It is reported that omicron is now the dominant strain, so let's say 50k omicron cases.

18 days at a 2 day doubling time is 9 doublings: 512x.

512*11 ~ 6k

We'd need another three doublings to get it in the ball park of 50k. Obviously, the early figure of 11 cases is likely to be very uncertain.

Another crude, fag-packet analysis, but I'm not sure it points to a doubling time of more than two days...

Even for fag packet maths, that's an extremely dubious starting point.

I agree. But how dubious does it have to be to get us a doubling time more than two days?

For a doubling time of more than two days, that figure of 11 (which is already too small by a factor of ten to give at least two days) would have to be much bigger. A three day doubling time would require it to be 780.

- First known Omicron case in UK was on 16/11. There were very likely some earlier cases that we don't know about given limited sequencing coverage but you could calculate an estimate for 29/11 using that as your starting point and you'd be a bit closer.

-(edit) - thing is, time and again through this pandemic we have seen initial fast exponential rates moderate themselves quite quickly, in situations without new restrictions. There is no reason not to expect the same here. So I don't think calculating a doubling time using data from November, or even now, is particularly useful because you can guarantee it isn't constant.

Well if it's confirmed cases of Omicron then it is, by definition, only a small subset of actual cases. So it's guaranteed to be an underestimate. Out by less than an order of magnitude seems very unlikely. Significantly more than that highly probable. And your endpoint is largely plucked out of thin air as well.

If you allow the 400bn to impact the real world.  If you think you'll fix that via balancing spending and a bit taxation you are going to be very disappointed, and probably very poor for a very long time.. you also need productivity increases and a >0 % inflation rate to erode it.  

The two key policies of the government in the last 13 years have been austerity, which have reduced productivity, reduced growth and put the UK into a nice stagflated condition.  The current government have , at this point , abandoned this, but have been kaiboshed by Covid, and thanks to dithering about locking down, have messed things up a bit more.  They've also added in a Brexit just to damage the economy a little bit more , for no real positive gain.  I would fear that once Boris is booted out we'll be back to austerity light as the current chancellor is going to effectively asset strip a distressed economy.

The cognitive disconnectto me seems to be those that insist on the conservatives being the party of good government, rather than people who seem intent on trashing long term improvement in the interests of answering short term dog whistle economic policy.  The only 'ray of light' is that with an inflation rate of 5% plus you'll soon have an interest rate high enough to erode debt, though the damage to the poor, the not so poor and a lot of small businesses will be immense

One big flaw in that is that only a minority of labs can detect the SGTF so that number of 11 is a gross under estimate.

Another is that very rapid doubling times have never held up for long, breaking way before a simple SIE model of spread would have them breaking.

Yesterday, we saw the highest daily figures we have ever had. For the second day running. Let's hope the doubling rate slows down soon.

I'll look forward to your more scientific analyses later today.

The idea that allowing a few million people to get Omicron before they get their 3rd jag and therefore are at 6x higher risk of serious disease than they would be a few weeks later after getting the jag is going to save money is ludicrous.

A night in an ICU bed costs the NHS about £1,200.  Recovery from serious illness which requires ICU treatment is prolonged and involves other costs to the NHS.  And then you have long covid and other covid related problems.   The number of working days lost to unnecessary disease will far exceed the number of days lost to keep the infection rate under control until the jags go in.

Sure, and there’ll be a few more days like this locked in to the data I’d expect, but still not rising anywhere near sub 2-day doubling times and I’m far from convinced the SGTF data really supports that either.

Asia maybe, but I don't think any country in Northern or Western Europe will grow their way out of debt in the next few decades, probably never. 

Restrictions have to be a balance, but I don't mean needless deaths. Lockdowns should have the biggest impact on the spread, for the least amount of financial pain. A few less pubs in the future isn't a bad thing for the populations long term health! 

How many double jabbed folk are in icu?

How many double or triple jabbed have long covid?

At some point, a country has to generate money to pay for all this, there will always be some who aren't recently boosted if it becomes a recurring theme. 

Lockdown the unvaxed, they have the highest likelihood of being most ill, it's just sensible profiling. 

There's a world of difference between (a) locking people down to preserve universal healthcare in the face of an unknown risk and (b) locking popped down to save the taxpayer money on healthcare in the face of a nearly two-year old risk with well known mitigation measures.

You appear to be arguing to lock people down to save money at this point.  Just think how else we could save some money by restricting people...

Slippery slope, isn't it?  Lockdown was supported because there was no alternative when it came to preserving universal healthcare.  If it comes to that point again this year, so-be-it, and whilst some (myself included) will regard that as a failure of state to prepare for this winter, the needs must as the devil drives.

But limiting people's behaviour to prevent them exposing themselves to a risk that might cost the NHS money?  That's an entirely different proposition.

Isn’t that next weekend?  Will post on the Friday or Sunday I think.  Kind of a more informative update than tonight’s I think.

Been out far from technology today enjoying the optics of ice and fog.  Also watching coots try and walk on ice, which is a hoot.

I'm not arguing to lock people down to save money.

I'm arguing that people who think the government will save money by not locking down for a few weeks until the jags go in have not thought through the costs of additional and unnecessary disease.

What I'm arguing for is mitigation measures sufficient to hold off the hockey-stick phase of Omicron for a few weeks.  In Germany you don't get into a non essential shop without an FFP2 mask and a vaccine passport or test certificate. 

If we don't do something fast my bet is that in a couple of weeks we will get a full on lockdown and it will take longer to come out of it.  Just like last year.

tom_in_edinburgh: (previous message)

Nothing else in your post was about preserving healthcare either, it was about consequences on the economy of illness.

The last time I checked, we don't force people to stay home to step them from becoming less economically productive.

Which in itself hinges on "cost" and not "preserving universal healthcare".  These are very different arguments.

In Germany they have had such poor demographic uptake of the vaccine in some areas and have limited post-vaccination spree of delta so much that they have enough holes in their population wide immunity to crash healthcare multiple times over with delta, let alone with omicron.  Their pre-omicron control measures are in large part a reflection of the poor state of their immunity in the face of a virus that isn't going away.

Our situation is quite different to Germany.  Not worse in all ways, not better in all ways. Different.

We have done lots of things.  More are in effect happening now.  Cases are still doubling much more slowly in ages susceptible to hospitalisation.

A high stakes situation that could yet go south very rapidly, but a much more complicated one than this time last year.

I'm not entirely sure you have either. I mean, not disagreeing with your point, ill health is expensive, but a trivially quick sum would have told you the £1200 quid you quote above works out at £6m a day total for every ICU bed in the land. You couldn't furlough McDonalds for that.

This is the argument (although a little concerned by this "hockey-stick phase" terminology. Have you still not grasped exponentials?) for restrictions. It's to delay and spread in time some of the cases so you don't overrun the hospitals. You still have to deal with most of those cases at some point, unless we stay shut down until some deus ex machina therapeutic comes along, as it will eventually reach almost everyone. So most of the long covid and the ICU days are going to show up on the bill either way.

Probably, yeah.

A bit besides the point but this winds me up to. There is no 'hockey stick'.

Are you saying exponential curves dont look a bit like hockeysticks? They do to me, a little. ( I know the phrase cam from climate stuff, which is different)

They do, but go find one somewhere and point at "the hockey stick point", then zoom in on it, and zoom in on it again, and zoom in on it again, and let me know how that goes.

Of course I f*cking grasp exponentials.  I am using the 'hockey stick' terminology to make a point and if you look at what the graph of infections looks like it is descriptive.

If, as the initial data says, a 3rd dose of vaccine reduces serious disease by 85% you absolutely will have fewer ICU and hospital days and almost certainly long covid days if you get people vaccinated before it goes crazy.

Let's also be absolutely clear that what I am saying is very close to what SAGE are recommending and what many countries are already doing.  The people who are out of step on this are England and the Tories.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-59713503

I somehow doubt this will be the first hard lockdown of the winter.

No, but very interesting to watch.

The big question - can a lockdown stop Omicron will be answered.

Using the term hockey stick, especially the way Tom does, implies there is an inflection point. An exponential curve does not have an inflection point. it's a crap and misleading analogy.

Exponentials - denying the hockey stick is as dumb as denying a straight line on a log graph. Have you still not grasped that the same data looks different on different graphs?

Bad times for anywhere forced in to lockdown by delta a few weeks ago.  I’m amazed France aren’t doing more right now.  

Depends what "stop Omicron" means, amongst other things. I could see different outcomes if you looked at cases, hospitalisations, deaths and healthcare overload, due to the interaction with boosters, with age groups (young people more prevalent in the groups that will be able to lockdown least well, speculating?) and all the rest.

It doesn’t have an inflection point in the linear domain either.  Hockey stick is not a very appropriate analogy for cases IMO.  I was more thinking of the moment the shark jumps out of the water on the ride at universal studios.  Except it’s got rockets on and keeps rising, pulling a giant, tapering, ever widening iceberg behind it.  Which just goes to show why it’s worth using a few more precise words to avoid crap analogies.  

The rate constant plots are having more genuine hockey stick moments right now, but TiE doesn’t look at those because apparently they’re a source of English pro-Tory bias.

Cases. Can it stop exponential growth of cases.

I’ve got a fiver on with myself that it can’t, but will be interesting to see what happens.

There is point depending how you mess with scales that the increase in cases will increase faster than time, granted it's easy to pick scales to give any desired impression. If you have say cases per day and count them in increments of 1million, you'll have a virtually flat line, or the opposite if you count tens of cases.

I've an eye on Canada and Italy. They're coming with us through this.
Asia though.....

Yes……

Asia…

Buy gold folks. The worlds factory is about to go up in smoke.

Even China can only defy gravity for so long.

Is this a valid definition of inflection point?

An inflection point, or point of inflection, is a point on a curve where the curve crosses its tangent at that point.

I don't see any point on a field hockey stick or ice hockey stick that matches that definition but I'm not very familiar with either sport.

A hockey stick has a convex outer side, I don't see an infection point where that side becomes the inside of a curve. Unless the hockey stick analogy includes following the convex curved tips at each end to the concave inner side even though nobody thinks of a hockey stick curve as enclosing an area like a side view of a real hockey stick with two round ends.

If it existed, I expect most of Europe has passed that point already, it's just a question of how far up things progress before tailing off, be that a banana shaped or parabolic curve. 

You might be right - they were already struggling with Delta weren't they? (I forget who was and wasn't in western Europe, it feels a long time ago already, but were they one of the ones that had tightened restrictions in November and got riots?)

Of all people I'm surprised to see you using cases as the metric of interest. I would have assumed that Netherlands like most other places (outside China?) had accepted endemic as the only end game in town, in which case I would have thought either overload or deaths would be the metric by which they measure success, with cases "just" being a partially correlated and more immediate data point to assess the direction and gradient of travel.

Ok, fair point but I think as a shorthand for "cases go from insignificant to overwhelmingly very quickly " it's ok.

Stop - no. Delay and flatten the curve - yes. 

PANIC: 

UK scientists: bring in curbs now or face up to 2m daily Covid infections as Omicron spreads

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/18/uk-scientists-curbs-covid-inf...

I’m worried. Where’s CP57? Is WT ok? Has he done a Mainwood? 

I've been sitting by the stove reading a book.  

The only chance I have to not post utter gibberish is to write it out, put it down for a few hours and do something else instead, and then read/edit it...  Spent much of the day out enjoying the inversion conditions so was pretty late to write it...

Wrong.

When we were dealing with Delta and it was clearly getting into the flat part at the top of an S curve I thought the rate constant plots were less useful because the main thing of interest was the absolute level.

Now we are into Omicron and it is showing clear exponential behaviour they are very useful as they were during the earlier phases of previous waves.

wintertree:

The rate constant plots are having more genuine hockey stick moments right now, but TiE doesn’t look at those because apparently they’re a source of English pro-Tory bias.

tom_in_edinburgh:

Let's see why you're wrong...

tom_in_edinburgh a few weeks back [1]:

Okay, you didn't link that particular post to Tory bias, that was a couple of posts later and in various other plots over the months....  

You've said this before but I can't make head nor tails of what you think it means.  I don't think it's an appropriate interpretation of where we were, and nor did it nullify the use of rate constants as a barometer of change that was mathematically invariant of absolute number.

Well, not of cases, because it's bereft of context on testing rates and fatality rates.  Particularly pertinent now as we hurtle towards saturation of testing capacity meaning they're not even going to serve as a useful barometer of change unless we dial back the conditions used for PCR testing...

[1] https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_49-...