UKH

We have some fine analytical minds on here, so I thought it would be instructive to have a long term thread to consider the current status of Covid in terms of the hard figures related to hospitalisations and deaths. I would suggest we ignore the red herring of cases unless someone can put up a compelling argument for inclusion.

Up to date figures can be found here...

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/healthcare

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/deaths

Now it would seem to me that there is a distinctly linear progression of daily hospitalisation numbers since 1 Sep rather than an exponential rise anticipated. For death rates it is not so clear given statistical noise.

Interestingly there has been a dip in both trends in the last week. What's going on?

In reply to Removed User:

I just had a look at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/healthcare

As at 15:00 29th Sept:

The last Scottish data included was 16th Sept, the last Welsh data was 24th and the last Northern Ireland data 25th.

This might explain some of the very recent drop-off you pointed out.

In reply to DundeeDave:

Forgive my very blunt question, and I am not necessarily speaking against the currently lockdown measures but..... why can anyone explain why all this fuss for 13 deaths a day?

When we were experiencing 300 deaths a day, and it was coming to a point where hospitals wouldn't cope I totally get it.  But cases are rising, deaths aren't. Even hospital admissions aren't. There doesn't seem to be the same chance of overrunning the NHS or reaching that number of deaths. I understand there is a 2 week lag.... but that doesnt seem to have materialised.

At what point will everyone, including the most stalwart lockdowner, decide that a base level of infections/ deaths is just the new norm, al la every other communicable disease.

Genuinely trying to understand, however I expect many many downvotes

In reply to Removed User:

Keep in mind that over a less than half it's doubling period, an exponential looks very much like a linear fit - Taylor's theorem and all that.   I haven't plotted any hospitalisation data yet, but I'll add it to my script and hopefully come back with some plots tonight after the evening data update.

There is often a big reporting lag around weekends, leading to dips in the data by reporting data.  Data is also given by actual date in a different plot and that is the one to look at - with the understanding that the most recent 6 day's data is provisional (for cases, I haven't looked at the size of the provisional window for hospitalisations or deaths).

Detected infections gives us a minimum bound for what's going on with actual infections.  I agree however it's misleading as it's not directly related to what will trigger lockdown (hospitalisations, which includes age effects not apparent in simple case numbers), and there is additional variability from meltdowns and capacity issues in testing.  But, critically, testing and cases is also 2-3 weeks ahead of deaths and so it's worth considering what that minimum bound implies about future deaths.  Taken together, I think we're 5-6 weeks from a mandatory lockdown if the community transmission isn't significantly reduced by the most recent and near-future measures and the more that advanced information can inform policy and behaviour, the better our chances of avoiding another incredibly harmful lockdown.

In reply to La benya:

Are you not answering your own question?The numbers are being kept down by the measures that are in existence or are being introduced.

In reply to La benya:

Hospital deaths risen by 47 today.  When they add the other deaths this figure will increase, possibly substantially.

Last week, the average Covid deaths was 30 a day.  

The measures take 4 weeks to have an effect on death rates, and my view is the current measures will only slow the rate of increase (i.e. numbers will still go up).  My guess is we will soon be at 500 a week.

Boltons measures are having an impact - still very high infection and death rate, but its took 8 weeks to sabilise - still double the national average.

Keeping a base level as you describe, because we have shit politicians and flat earth society covid deniers everywhere, is nigh on impossible.

In reply to La benya:

Who told you hospital admission are not rising.

Hospital admissions are rising significantly. During August daily Covid admissions were fairly stable and low at around 50+-10. The average for the first three days of September was 69, the three day average for the latest available data (25th September) is 292. So in three weeks, daily hospital admissions have increased by 423%.

Early in September the rise in cases was predominantly in the under 40s, so the rise in hospital admissions hasn't been quite as sharp as feared, but we are now seeing much higher rates in the over 60s, more of whom are likely to be hospitalised. The next week will be interesting in terms of hospital admissions, whilst there is plenty capacity* still, it is concerning.

I find these stats more useful than the ones linked above: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospi...

* My local Covid ward is full.

In reply to neilh:

But the numbers aren't being kept down.  They might not be rising exponentially as they did before, but the increase is apparent and doesn't look good.

In reply to mick taylor:

It would be self evidently worse without the limited restrictions already in place.

You only need to ask yourself what it would be like if there were none.

In reply to La benya:

It can take a long time to die if you start out young and healthy and the hospitals have ICU capacity available.

And surviving is not the same as returning to full health.

Deaths are going to be a lagging indicator, I remember similar arguments from the first wave about UK death rate being much lower than other countries when actually it was just a time lag.

I really hope that we have learned enough to react when we get the warning signal from new infections and not wait until ICU admissions and deaths force the issue.

In reply to La benya:

35 deaths a day with a clear rise in death rate over time, and with deaths lagging the detected cases, which themselves are doubling every 9 days.  Your 13 deaths a day is wrong by a factor of 3x.

Deaths and cases are both rising.  Deaths are "locked in" with cases ~2 weeks in advance.  

Deaths are rising.  This is clear from a look at the data linked by the OP.

Hospital admissions are rising.  This is clear from a look at the data linked by the OP.

Cases started rising.  Then deaths started rising.  I am unclear how you are judging any of the points you raise.  If you have evidence for them they might lend some credence to your question.

Is there a "stalwart lockdowner"?  I was very happy in mid-august when we had no lockdown, there was a state base level of infections and normality was largely restored.  I am unhappy now because cases are rising, hospital admissions are rising, and deaths are rising and I don't want society forced back in to a necessary lockdown by the looming spectre of NHS overload.

I think you need to understand that every single "fact" you presented in your questioning post was categorically wrong.  If you can understand that by looking at the plain and simple graphs on the dashboard the OP linked to, you will find the answer to your question.

In reply to La benya:

On 12th March there were also 13 Covid deaths in UK.

On 8th of April there were 1075 Covid deaths in UK.

That's why you take 13 deaths per day seriously. 

In reply to elsewhere:

Anyone remember the joke back in February about more people dying in Michael Barrymores swimming pool than from COVID?

it wasn’t funny then and it still isn’t now. 

In reply to La benya:

If it was 13 and no expected rise then I'd agree.  But it's about to go up again unfortunately.   

In reply to marsbar:

It wasn’t 13/day.  It was about 35/day depending on your filtering method.

They opened their post with a number 3x below the trend line and followed it with nothing but incorrect assertions.  

It starts to look like propaganda as I’m not sure how someone can be so clearly wrong on so many points by accident.  It rapidly gained many likes as most unjustifiably optimistic posts did the first time around.  If it’s not propaganda I am sure - given their openly questioning stance - la benya will educate themselves with the many links and explanations given by many posters and will promptly post a correction to their deeply misleading post which presents as fact many fictional statements that grossly underestimate the severity of the rapidly developing situation.

In reply to La benya:

71 today. At what point do you think we should start making a fuss?

In reply to Removed User:

Might this site be useful? Uses the same data, but is a better collection of visualizations. In particular I find it points me to a slightly different answer to your question: not increase in daily admissions, but increase in ICU admissions (from ~60 up to three weeks ago, now climbing to 300+).

https://www.travellingtabby.com/uk-coronavirus-tracker/

In reply to Removed User:

Here are the figures from my plotting script that I keep an eye on, updated as per today's data release via http://coronavirus.data.gov.uk

To explain the method and motivation for these plots a bit:

• The "headline" data release (e.g. Worldometer) comprises cases/admissions/deaths that occurred with some spread over the last ~5 days, with variable reporting lag adding noise to the data.  So I use the data by specimen date / by admissions data / by death date instead from the government portal.   The most recent ~5 days in this data are provisional as many numbers for those days are still somewhere in the reporting pipeline and not released online.  So I don't use the most recent 5 days in these data sets.

• The raw time series data (grey crosses) is full of statistical noise (as infection is a random process) and in some cases jitter from weekend/weekday differences. 

• To smooth this whilst preserving the trends better than the Worldometer 7-day moving average does, I apply a 15-point 3rd order Savitzky-Golay filter to the data.  This is a very clever filter created by hardcore scientists in the 1960s that preserves the area under the curve.  I'm still amazed that it can be done with a convolution.

  • I picked 15-days as the filter needs an odd number of data points and it's close to an integer multiple of 7 which minimises the aliasing effects of the weekday/weekend disparity in specimen taking.

  • This is plotted the black curves

• For each point in the filtered time-series, I fit an exponential to the data points from within ± 7 days.  The exponential fit is used to measure the "doubling time" - how many days it would take for the count to double in value if the behaviour was a pure exponential best fit to that ±7 day time window.  A doubling time tending towards +ve infinity means R~1, and a small, positive doubling time means R>>1.  I find the doubling time a simpler concept to work with than R.  To interpret +ve doubling times (as per now)

  • If there is an exponential rise over time in cases, the doubling time is constant with time

  • If there is a sub-exponential rise (e.g. linear) over time, the doubling time increases with time

  • If the doubling time is decreasing, things are looking bad and the exponential rate is itself accelerating.

• The doubling time is quite noisy with small fluctations so I apply another 15-point 3rd order SG filter to it.  This is shown as the red curve on the second Y-axis.

• This analysis is done for the following

  • Figure 1 - Detected cases by specimin date

  • Figure 2 - Hospitalisatiosn by admissions data

  • Figure 3 - Deaths by date of death

• On Figure 4 I plot the filtered time series data for each measure, all normalised to an arbitrary Y-axis for comparison purposes (e.g. on lag)
• Observations

  • Figure 1 - Cases - Detected cases are rising.  The doubling time is is ~10 days and the process is faster than linear but not compellingly exponential

  • Figure 2 - Hospitalisations - these are rising and the doubling time is approximately constant, suggesting an exponential rise

  • Figure 3 - Deaths - these are rising and the doubling time is approximately constant, suggesting an exponential rise

  • Figure 4 - normalised comparison  - this shows that deaths are lagging admissions which in turn are lagging detected cases.  The initial rise in cases in the period I show presumably led to increased admissions and deaths, but these were masked but the tail of admissions and deaths from earlier, higher cases.  The uptick on hospitalisation and deaths shows none of the temporary softening of gradient of detected cases and appears to be rising faster than detected cases.  This I think hints at the leaks over a testing meltdown a few weeks ago, and a widening gap between detected cases and actual infections.

• Here are the doubling times for 5 days ago - the most recent date with mostly complete reporting

  • cases 9.5 days

  • admissions 12.9 days

  • deaths 6.9 days

Figure 5 is the data from Figure 1 but broken down by the reporting lag (how many days it took to report a positive specimen).  The pink shading shows the region of provisional data ,which is excluded from the exponential fit in this figure and from all analysis in the proceeding figures.

So, where are we?  It looks like by today, we are detecting 7,000 new infections per day with a widening gap between actual and detected infections.  I suspect that means we're closer to 15,000 infections / day now.   Doubling time from deaths is 7 days, cases ~ 10 days - but with a widening testing gap the real number is likely smaller.  Let's go with an 8-day doubling time and 15,000 cases per day now.  In 4 weeks we have 2^(4*7/8) * 15,000 cases/day = 170,000 cases per day which likely resembles the worst part of March/April.  More in my next post (only allowed five images per post)

In reply to Removed User:

Despite what others say, I don't think it's time to panic just yet, hospital admissions seem to be trending down over last four days, let's see if this trend continues over next week.  

Hard to tell a lot from daily case data due to mass student testing on going at minute, might not point to how things are trending elsewhere in community.

Our second wave seemed to be following Spain and France rather well, but things are starting to look more positive in Spain and maybe France, cases stabilising.   I don't think measures are any stricter over there so I hope we follow a similar pattern of growth then stabilisation.  It may be new normal for just now, summer low, followed by upward trend to stabilisation at autumn daily cases numbers, obviously we are yet to know what winter will bring, but certainly not panic stations yet.

Having just returned from a week in Germany I don't think we are necessarily doing anything wrong here.  Life was very relaxed in Germany, people seemed to be carrying less about covid over there, handshakes with everyone you meet is still very common, cafes, bars and restaurants are full, trains and subways are also busy.  Everyone wears a mask, but often to a poor standard wearing mask under nose etc.  My observation from Germany is that UK is probably unlucky more than anything else, a degree of natural immunity between countries must be a factor in different rates of transmission.

In reply to Removed User:

Having predicted 170,000 cases / day if we remain on our current course, the question arrises:  What is the likely daily death toll from this?

We get on to softer ground now.  I divide the reported death rate by the detected infection rate with various time lags (14-, 21- and 28-days), using the SG filtered time series from above.  This is vey noisy data as there's a lot of noise in the deaths data in particular.  An example is shown on the left of Figure 6 of the data for a 21-day lag (grey crosses).  I then apply a 7-point 2nd order SG filter to this (black curve).  The right panel shows the smoothed fatality rate for each of these lags.  Some thoughts: 

• The rates started quite high I presume because test and trace was still coming together and many infections weren't detected.
• The independent, random sampling survey from the ONS suggested at it's best, test and trace was getting about 50% of infections.  This would cast the ~0.8% apparent fatality rate from my plot as 0.4% actual.  Applied to my estimate of 170,000 cases per day that takes us to 680 deaths/day a couple of weeks later
• But - until a couple of weeks ago, we had mostly kept the virus out of care homes and most elderly people were successfully isolating.  The care homes are falling (most recent PHE Surveillance Report) and others will too if infection keeps rising, so treat these numbers with a massive pinch of salt - there's a lot of assumptions going on in my analysis and the interpretation. 

It seems to me that unless a significant reduction in community transmission is achieved in the next 3-4 weeks, a hard lockdown to protect the NHS is inevitable.

In reply to daftdazza:

I think that they always do trend down over the last 4-5 days, because of the effects of reporting lag on the most recent days.  Just like the detected cases presented by specimen date do.  Today I've started a daily download of the relevant admissions data set so that I can prove/disprove my speculation here. 

In reply to La benya:

Please see my 20:34 Tue for data that clearly shows how every point you present as a fact in your 15:10 post is wrong and misleading.

You are presenting the following falsehoods in your post

• A death rate 3x to low
• A claim that death rate is not rising - it absolutely is
• A claim that hospitalisations are not rising - they absolutely are

You suggest "that a base level of infections/ deaths is just the new norm" but we do not have a baseline level of infection and deaths, we have a rapidly escalating situation heading towards exponential growth and NHS overload "locked in" in perhaps the next 4-6 weeks if we continue on our present course.

The falsehoods you present are gaining traction - 17 "likes" by 21:00 today.  That's 17 people taking nothing but misinformation from your post that is dangerously misleading as to the severity of the situation.

If you wish to discuss alternative ways of adapting society to the threat of this virus, that's great and there are valid discussions to be had around this.  Misrepresenting the facts, be it through ignorance, confusion or intent, does nobody any favours.

Man up and retract your post.

In reply to wintertree:

Where did I say I was writing facts? Phrases such as 'it seems' followed by 'trying to understand' would make it pretty clear nothing I wrote is presenting facts. Way to be a dick about it though

In reply to wintertree:

Oh a double comment telling me I was stating facts. You seem to be reading more into what I wrote than what is actually there. Go get pissy at someone else. 

For what it's worth, I got the 17 daily deaths from the guardian website tracker.

In reply to La benya:

Let me walk you through it:

You question was "why all this fuss for 13 deaths a day".

That presents "13 deaths a day" as a fact and "why all this fuss" as the question.

You said "but cases are rising, deaths aren't. Even hospital admissions aren't. "

This presents both of those as facts that frame your question.  You stated them as fact, you didn't ask any questions about deaths or admissions.

Three apparent facts, presented as facts framing your question.  All totally wrong.

I have no problem with the world and their dog considering me "a dick".  Your post is deeply misleading and this is no time for deeply misleading content.  

You've shared your opinion on statistics and sample sizes with me before, so you clearly understand that a number like 17 people in this context is subject to massive statistical noise, so you understand the need for some kind of running average or other smoothing.

What about no rise in hospital admissions and no rise in deaths, where did you get that information from?  The OP gave direct link to graphs contradicting that.  I will be pissy if people manage to misrepresent the facts so badly, as consistent misrepresentation of the facts the first time around was a significant part of the problem IMO.  

In reply to wintertree:

So where did I say they were facts? 

In reply to La benya:

Because at 13 deaths a day with it doubling every week we have ~50 deaths a day in our near future assuming the current good segregation of the virus from the vulnerable holds, that's if we stop the growth today. If we wait a week or act too softly that gets into double figures not long after. If we wait for a hundred a dy before we take it seriously it maybe peaks at 400/day again assuming the bubbles haven't burst. This is getting bad fast. When it gets bad people and businesses die. 

At the moment it's not spreading where it kills and while we all hope that continues it does seem a tipping point will be hit, staffing and ppe issues will allow it back into homes and wards. At 300/day the 1000/day peak was already baked in. 

That's debatably acceptable while it's stable and low. It's certainly an approach and with vaccines looming probably now the best compromise. It isn't however stable and and the death rate soon won't be low. 

FWIW I'm not pro lockdown, I just don't believe the economic growth which we need occurs in the presence of widespread infectious disease, a ballance needs to be struck since we missed our moment for near eradication which would have been better. 

Jk

In reply to La benya:

You stated a death rate.  You did not question it despite your claim to the contrary at 21:09

Likewise you state deaths aren’t rising and you state that hospital admissions aren’t rising.  You don’t question either of these.  

So is your point I should not take the parts of your message you state factually?  If so, when you state something how should I take it?  

Asking a question about a response to incorrect data implicitly presents the data as correct.

In reply to jkarran:

Sadly it is back in homes. Ours is ok still but several local ones to us have cases. I hope they now have the tools to limit the spread or at least reduce the viral load.

We are on high alert and super high caution levels.

An older lady who is in my (now online) German class was recently in hospital for an operation. She came home and her son came up from Bolton to look after her. He was infected with Covid and now she has it. 

Slowly but surely it is creeping back into our more vulnerable population.

In reply to neilh:

Fair point. 

In reply to La benya:

What I find weird is that your opening post was so full of innacurate statements yet you got loads of likes. Deaths, hospital admissions and cases are all increasing, probably more than folk realise. Where did you get your information from, coz it’s a shite source or you mis-read it. 
Edit: I know there is a  decrease in hospital admissions over last couple of days, but that is against the general trend.

In reply to La benya:

1. Deaths lag infection by a few weeks typically. Today’s deaths are late August / early September infections. Which is sobering given there were a lot fewer cases back then.

2. If we do nothing, it will get a lot worse.

The main issue to my mind is that the government has been totally incompetent and track and trace collapsed at the first sign of stress (plus what’s the point if most people don’t self isolate anyway as they don’t get financial or other support to do so), plus there is a lack of any kind of coherent strategy (just tactical moves, which are mostly confusing half measures).

In reply to wintertree:

Hospital admissions and numbers in hospital are actuals I think, lagging by a day or two (at least for England - the lag is greater for the UK as a whole due to less regular reporting). As such, these are fairly reliable stats to look at - and they are important as they show how much capacity there is in the NHS. Covid hospital patients and ICU beds are currently around 10% of what they were at the peak but rising and there will be regional variation there, plus no one would want to be near the peak again even though on the whole capacity wasn’t exceeded. It still caused chaos though, with a lot of stress on the NHS and planned treatments / surgeries being cancelled. It will happen again if infections get out of hand (well they already are...) as NHS resources will have to get diverted and hospitals will have to be split into hot and cold zones / hospitals, plus getting Covid while in hospital for something else eg surgery leads to significantly worse outcomes.
 

So again in answer to La benya, it’s not just about deaths, it’s about making sure the NHS can cope and that’s wider than just making sure we have enough ICU beds after every available operating theatre has been converted into an ICU unit and the usual one to one nurse to ICU patient ratio has been changed to one to six again...

In reply to wintertree:

I hope you are wrong about 5-6 weeks from a lockdown but you may we’ll be right... though I suspect that in England at least it will be less strict than last time as the government is keen not to wreck the economy again (which is sort of right in the medium to long term). May be they will go for the circuit break approach but a couple of weeks might not be enough. 

In reply to daftdazza:

You might be right but bear in mind that reported cases not going up as much doesn’t mean cases aren’t growing exponentially. As cases grow, testing capacity comes up short and they capture a lower percentage of actual cases. There have been anecdotal stories of people not being able to get tests despite having symptoms and this seems to be not uncommon now. Some people might not even bother, while others are asymptomatic.

R is above 1 so it’s just maths - this thing will snowball. 

In reply to wintertree:

....or a change in the makeup of the infected population - if a higher percentage of vulnerable people are being infected then the hospitalisation & deathrate rise will outstrip the case rate rise.  We know it's getting to the vulnerable now as evidenced by the PHE stats you've shared recently and Girlymonkey's testimony, so I think that's a good candidate for a fair proportion of the change.  I guess problems with T&T would manifest themselves as a change in the detection rate.

In reply to Removed User:

Its cold and flu season, people get ill every years...its not covid , its a cold

In reply to Juicymite86:

Ffs, just no.

How are you being so wilfully ignorent when there's so much good info up tread.

In reply to La benya:

The fuss is not because we have 13 cases a day but because we saw a return to an  exponential rise in the number of cases

Again, you are forgetting about exponential growth. The reason it’s not rising as fast is indeed because we keep a lid on it.

(Even then, it is actually rising pretty fast at the moment)

The nature of pandemic management is that if you are successful everything you do will always look like an overreaction.

But one really just needs to understand that left to its own, the number of infection would double every few days.

In reply to MikeSP:

I’ve come to the conclusion that a significant minority are just plain thick when it comes to Covid. No amount of evidence will convince them. Worrying really, coz many of them are normally clued up people and if their stupidity manifests itself in bad covid behaviour, we will really struggle to get through this shit storm. 

In reply to La benya:

Genuine question: has this discussion changed your opinion in anyway?

In reply to Toerag:

In general I agree; in specific there was a period earlier this month where the doubling time of the detected cases rose (the growth slowed) - so it looked like spread was slowing - it’s this feature that didn’t translate into admissions or growths so I wondered if it was the test/trace alleged meltdown.  

But yes, I expect apparent fatality rates to rise as testing falls more behind and actual fatality rates to rise as a rising baseline and overwhelmed testing break the shielding around more vulnerable people. 

In reply to mick taylor:

The first few responses containing stats made me check what I had read.  For whatever reason the guardian stat metre page was showing out of date data- either it hadn't been updated or I was reading a cached version. I actually had the tab open and it still showed 13 deaths before i F5'ed it.  So in that regard, yes the problem is significantly worse than my wrong impression.

As I also said in my post, i'm not necessarily against the lockdown measures as long as they are appropriate and necessary.  My question now is,  are we heading for another lockdown? if we are, what's the point if we just bounce around from low to high deaths every six months? has there been research to show the benefits of a lockdown vs the costs vs not doing anything?  I'm not sure i've seen it at that would certainly sway me to support any measures.

As I said, I was trying to understand and some post are helpful.  Others, calling me a propaganda machine just made me argue about what I actually said, rather than the initial reasoning for the post. Some people really do need a lesson in how to win an argument rather than making people entrench their false opinions more (not you Mick, you're generally always courteous on here... other than calling people thick above).

In reply to La benya:

I’m not looking to win an argument with you or with anyone else.  I’m calling out what I see as a dangerously misleading post.  If the last 6 months haven’t changed your mind, how are a few forum posters going to?  It almost makes me wonder why you’re asking.   

You still haven’t answered a question from another poster and from my self about where you got your information from that neither hospital admissions nor deaths were rising.  Going to blame that on your refresh key too?

That subject has been done to deaths on UKC over the last six months.  This thread was started to be about facts and figures, not policy nor your lockdown skepticism.  So please excuse me if I call bull crap on a post mixing 3 different incorrect facts/figures and a skeptical approach to control measures on this particular thread.  Because it looks like propaganda and critically, intentional or not, it functions like propaganda.  It’s a little suspicious that all 3 mistakes you make align with your views. 

You didn’t press F5?  Maybe you should make the absolute bare minimum level of effort if you don’t want to get called out for posting 3 different misleading things to frame your questioning approach.  You’ve misled a lot of people going off the “likes” on your woefully incorrect post.  Given the news coverage it’s astounding you could believe one stale web page over the links in the OP and the near saturation news coverage.

Previous posts from yourself have made it clear you have a background that includes some form of stats so you can hold yourself to some minimum level of competence.

In reply to La benya:

The measures range from simply washing your hands to closing pubs at 10 pm and so on.

I am assuming you are washing your hands?

Can you be specific about the measure you are opposed to.

In reply to wintertree:

Are you able to create a simple graph to overlay the graph of ‘cases’ produced by the   government from testing and deaths. Back in April it was suggesting 5000cases a day max. Using the seroprevalence data suggesting it was more like 100,000 a day. 
 

It would be useful to have this as the seroprevalence data suggests for the whole of England 9% have been infected. That’s 5.4m people. In 270 odd days. Which is 20,000 a day on average. 
 

With 5.4m infected and a death rate of 0.3% that’s only 16,400 deaths accounted for. 
 

I’m willing to believe that not only were more people infected but also that there were a disproportionate number of deaths due to bad care home management. 
 

But it would be great to see the actual estimated infections vs the tested cases.

Also would be good to extrapolate back to Jan 1st. Using 21 days back from initial deaths and exponential growth for infections. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

A while ago I did that graph “MS Paint” style, attached (it was made before the current rise in cases).  I was thinking about doing a proper one with some sort of model fit against both the cases data and the seroprevalence data, fitting for for the testing catch rate and the fatality rate using some simple time based model for each, but I decided it would be so riddled with unknowns that I’d stick with MS Paint.  This graph ends just as the cases are starting an upwards swing.

Agreed; but the actual fatality rate was probably way higher then than 3 weeks ago due to clear demographic differences in the infections.  So it does seem like my 0.4% estimate producing 680 deaths/day is a lowball if we properly loose control again.

In reply to neilh:

I'd like to be able to see my co workers for the first time in 6 months. I'd like to be confident of having a job next year. I'd like there to be a retail, tourism and restaurant industry next year, I'd like to not have to cancel a another meet up with my family or friends or 4th holiday. I'd like the students I rent to, to not have wasted their money this year (alternative is I take a £10k+ hit...).

All of that is by the by, as I am not against any measures, only wanting to understand that they are appropriate. As I acknowledge above, I was looking at old data, and the situation has deteriorated beyond what I originally thought. As long as these measures are a net gain, i.e. the negatives are not outweighing the positives (todays news - estimates of 8000 women with breast cancer due to missed appointments since March) I'm all for them.  I wasn't convinced.  I'm more convinced now.

In reply to wintertree:

Ok. I’ll see if I can add the seroprevalence data to the government stats. Any idea where the numbers can be found in raw data before I go searching? 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

I’ve not seen them raw, only in graphs but I believe the ONS provide download links for most/all of the data they present.

In reply to wintertree:

I'm generally ignoring your posts as its clear we cant have a constructive conversation, however- where have I ever said I have a background in stats?!?  Are you confusing me with someone else, perhaps a statistician that shagged you're wife.  It would explain your attitude at least.

In reply to La benya:

Some of those things for the most part you can do including meeting your coworkers.Cannot do anything about you taking a hit, but that is always a risk in business anyway.They reckon 25% of pubs etc will close in worst case scenario.Jobs-all depends on what you do, but 90% of the economy will be ok.Some of the closures are l in retail just being brought ruthlessly forward anyway.

The issue as I see it is we just have to reduce our direct close contact with people to stop it spreading. That is the way the virus spreads.The stats speak for themselves.That is tough for everyone.

And maybe if people had self isolated more when they returned form their holidays and followed the guidelines etc ,. then we might not be in the position we are now.

In reply to La benya:

Some of those things for the most part you can do including meeting your coworkers.Cannot do anything about you taking a hit, but that is always a risk in business anyway.They reckon 25% of pubs etc will close in worst case scenario.Jobs-all depends on what you do, but 90% of the economy will be ok.Some of the closures are in retail are just being brought ruthlessly forward anyway.

The issue as I see it is we just have to reduce our direct close contact with people to stop it spreading. That is the way the virus spreads.The stats speak for themselves.That is tough for everyone.

And maybe if people had self isolated more when they returned form their holidays and followed the guidelines etc ,. then we might not be in the position we are now.

I am assuming you ar ewashing your hands.

In reply to girlymonkey:

That's really bad news. It was never much more than a vague hope that the segregation would hold as wider community infections rose.

jk

In reply to La benya:

If you're after a constructive conversation, it may be best not to open with a load of easy disproved falsehoods.

If you ask a blunt question you may get a blunt answer.

In reply to La benya:

Not until you ask the site owners to retract or amend your deeply misleading first post that is continuing to mislead the people reading it and liking it, no.

Not until you answer the question from myself and another about where you got the wrong information from that neither hospitalisations nor deaths were rising, no.

Back in May you asked a series of questions about data I presented from the ONS that came at it from a stats / certainty angle.  So, if you can question there you can certainly go to the bare minimum effort of not using week old data because you didn't press F5.

In reply to wintertree:

Ah so asking about stats makes me a stats expert? logic.

You do realise that web browsers will use a cached version of a page sometimes.  I don't always press f5 or refresh once its loaded a page, do you? 

I've acknowledged my mistake, and you're proving my point about how not to go about speaking to people.  You've successfully engaged me more in the workings of web browsers that on the issue at hand. I think that's all you'll get me to engage in, going forwards, until you reel your attitude in.

As for retracting a post- I'm not a politician, my words are my own and I don't represent anyone or anything.  People taking my word as gospel are idiots.  Surely what I wrote being thoroughly disproved, ad nauseam, in this thread will serve to show that better, than removing it and creating an odd vacuum which means nothing when people scroll through?

In reply to neilh:

Why is this so hard for people to understand?

If I don't put my hand in the fire I won't get burnt.

In reply to Misha:

I've not been following this idea very closely but 2 weeks seems pointless, anyone bringing it home on day one of the 'circuit break' will be living in households with active infections and ongoing internal spread on day 14. 4 weeks seems like the bare minimum necessary to actually knock numbers down to a manageable baseline as we reopen into the winter flu and Christmas family gathering season. I suspect since much essential contact/mixing will continue the reality is 6-8weeks are really needed. That's a grim prospect because I'm assuming there the schools are once again closed, uni accommodation/campuses ghettoised (they can't be sent 'home') and teaching overwhelmingly online. Without school closures I doubt there's anything we can do at the moment to get R<1. I hope I'm wrong, the medium term consequences of that conclusion are awful. One glimmer here is that school transmission may burn out pretty quickly over the coming weeks as classrooms quietly approach immunity, it may be a fairly severe short term problem which would ultimately leave us a little more flexibility in the medium term to trim R. I'm speculating and glad I don't work in a school.

jk

In reply to Cobra_Head:

or - if I don't put my hand in the fire now, will I get 3rd degree burns 5 years down the line? As well as getting a slightly irritating rash now

In reply to La benya:

You still don't seem convinced of the precarity of our position. Am I reading that right?

jk

In reply to La benya:

Some people on UKC take posts extremely literally and don’t always have a grasp that not all of us spend an hour constructing posts so that they can’t be unpicked by a forensic legal expert. 
 

We then all disappear down a rabbit hole of he said, she said. Especially when the original argument has been lost. 
 

Ultimately, it’s not really important, people don’t get their (mis)information on Covid from UKC. Or they shouldn’t anyway. 

In reply to Cobra_Head:

Because it’s not their hands they’re putting in the fire. It’s someone else’s, in 2 weeks time. 

In reply to La benya:

And you the spreading fire to other people.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

To be fair, their post could be unpicked by someone who can read a newspaper, listen to the radio, watch news on a television or press F5 on their computer.  

They shouldn't.  The incorrect post is right at the top of the thread and is continuing to garner likes - 26 and counting.  A lot of people skim the start of a thread, and they're taking the misinformation with them.  They shouldn't - I agree with you there, but I don't think it's contentious to say that social media is acting as a widespread source of low quality information across society - not just with Covid but with everything.

In reply to wintertree:

Maybe. But it doesn’t require a 5 page dissection. Just move on. 
 

Maybe the likes are because they liked the question? It’s a good question to ask. It’s one I’m asked regularly and a good opportunity to give a good answer. Even if the answer is - because your data is incorrect. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

It's a question that's been done to death on these forums, it's odd that it's dropped in to a hard stats/numbers thread wrapped in misleading stats/numbers, but there you go.  

In reply to La benya:

No really, if you want to use that analogy, it's ... or will someone else put my hand if the fire sometime in the future, without my knowledge.

Are you telling me you really don't understand how distancing, or even vaccinations work?

That by doing, or not doing, one thing can prevent another?

In reply to jkarran:

The current plan seems designed NOT to reach classroom immunity, it's aiming to do the opposite, to minimise spread with the class bubble.

I have two girls at home as both have had 1 instance of Covid in their respective class bubbles. Entire class bubble is then sent home for 14 days to self isolate*. Cue they go back in a fortnight, a week later there is one more case and we are back to home schooling for a fortnight. This seems to be the picture for the next 6 months?

*Though, from seeing people from school out and about, they seem to adhering to the self isolation rules as much as South Manchester have embraced the tighter restrictions.

In reply to jkarran:

No.

In reply to La benya:

It isn't lockdown which is caused the missed cancer appointments.  In fact it is because the lockdown reduced the level of infection in the population that the NHS has been able to start reopening things like cancer treatment.

There is no option to 'just keep things open as normal'  all that will happen is the infections will keep doubling and the hospitals will be full of Covid with no capacity for other treatments even if it was safe for patients to enter them.

The question is whether we have learned enough to take action pre-emptively based on modelling and predictions or whether we need to wait until there is a level of death high enough to scare the population before taking action.   It will not stop growing the day we lock down, it will keep going for quite some time.   The longer we wait the worse it will be and the longer we will need to lockdown to get back to safe levels.

In reply to wintertree:

Because not everyone reads every thread...?  am I to know exactly what has been posted elsewhere?

As Dancing said, just answer the question and move on, and try not to be a bellend in the process. especially when you don't understand how cached webpages work.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

The amount of people that don't get this basic point is staggering, or those that don't get it shout a lot about it......they seem to think that if we didn't lock down the NHS would have carried on as normal....it's mind blowing.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

thats just wrong.  lockdown was exactly the reason so for the missed screening and the current backlog.  what else could it be?

that isnt to say it could have been any different.  but your statement was just wrong

In reply to La benya:

You are confusing lockdown with the allocation of NHS resources and impact of the virus on the ability of the NHS to function normally.....

You need to consider the counterfactual, what would have happened to the NHS from no lockdown before blaming lockdown for missed cancer screening....have you done this?

Do you think cancer screening would have carried on as normal with no lockdown?

In reply to galpinos:

I guess nobody from that bubble is tested though. It's a very slow disruptive way to hit localised herd immunity (which I'm sure isn't the current goal) but taking an uncharacteristically sunny view of this (which I'm not convinced I believe!), each time the class is sent home if 3 or 4 students have it rather than the 1 with symptoms and a positive test you maybe only have to go through the cycle half a dozen times before it's pretty effectively broken.

Probably and fairly predictable. Any reasonably large body of people like a school year/pod/class will be continually disrupted if all are sent home for one detection. That much was obvious from the outset, how anyone expected to run schools on that basis escapes me. The alternative, letting it rip in schools takes a massive hit on R (which will ripple out of schools into homes and workplaces) in the short term at relatively low risk to pupils (no so staff and extended families) for a potential medium term gain but it's risky! So's too though is failing to teach them effectively because half the school year is spent periodically in quarantine with a parent on leave at home. I'd want more information in order to choose the better option, it's certainly not clear cut but what we're doing now isn't likely to work as numbers grow.

jk

In reply to La benya:

If you are such an expert on cached webpages then I’m very surprised you didn’t take a moment to fact check something from a regularly updated webpage that was so at odds with all the current news on the subject, the link in the OP and the topic of the thread.

You still haven’t said where your false information on hospital admissions and deaths came from.

I have no patience left when 6 months later someone is still posting a mix of misinformation, skepticism over lockdown (lockdown which I don’t think anyone actually wants), and is still repeating the basic misunderstanding that lockdown - and not NHS overload from covid - is responsible for eg missed cancer screenings.   The ensemble effect paints a picture.

Despite posing your first post as a question, all of this has been done to death on UKC a dozens of times over by people far more charming than I (a requirement to engage you to shift your views apparently, rather than evidence) so I really don’t know what you’re looking for other than pushing incorrect misunderstandings by continuing to repeat them, eg that lockdown was the root cause of missed cancer screenings.

In reply to jkarran:

Natural immunity( as distinct from vaccine one) is a red herring as it’s not proven long term. 

Youmight have it for a couple of months with t-cells and you might also get another bout of Covid. The medical / research view on all this is still out. 

As per Mayo clinic at John Hopkins which provides excellent easy to understand stuff on this. 

here is the link to the excellent explanation

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/herd-im...

In reply to wintertree:

Oh, i'm not an expert on cached webpages clearly, but you continually referring back to this mistake would suggest you think you are.  Do you routinely make sure you aren't using an old version of the page?

(pst... were still talking about web pages rather than COVID).

You seem to have your back up about me revelling in false information....try and count how many times above I've acknowledged my mistake?  I also say I've read others posts and it has changed my mind.  Their posts have engaged me and help correct my view.

You being a knobhead has made me realise I should press f5 a bit more.

In reply to Blunderbuss:

No, it's beyond mind blowing and over to simply unbelievable.  I literally can't believe that someone capable of functioning highly enough to have a job, go climbing, interact with the world and post online can still continue to think we could have not locked down and instead that regular NHS operations would have continued as normal in the absence of the lockdown that we did.

I can only see it as deliberate misrepresentation by this point.

In reply to La benya:

To be honest, I was going to cal BS on this because nothing I use ever presents me with stale pages, but then I thought perhaps it's a Windows things so I'd extend you the benefit of the doubt on that one, as incredulous as I personally am.

You still haven’t said where your false information on hospital admissions and deaths came from.

And I explained why - the combination of that, the mis-representation that we could have continued routine NHS operations if we didn't lock down, use of the phrase "ardent lockdownist" (an imagined person if ever there was one).  It all adds up.  

I'm incredulous that you would care enough to post but not enough to spend more than half a second getting together 3 different pieces of information to base your questioning post on, when the answers are plastered all over the newspapers, the radio, the TV, and the link in the OP.  

I hope that my approach combined with you noticing the growing number of likes on your misleading post has made you realise that you should take a moment to consider and to check what you post so that you don't inadvertently contribute to the significant misinformation problems in our current crisis.

In reply to neilh:

I agree in the wider community it's a pretty unrealistic objective, certainly not something we should yet be aiming for. However in a smaller, contained and low risk community and on a time limited basis assuming we're several months, not years from a viable vaccine I can see some merit. If schools are heavily disrupted by distancing classes/pods with isolated cases and still an ongoing longer term source of community re-infection then I think a case could be made for carefully developing herd immunity in that low risk group. As I say it's risky and from the caveats you'll deduce I'm not wholeheartedly behind that idea!

In reality I don't think the infection could be contained well enough to do this in one big hit nor the idea sold to parents even if it was broadly beneficial. It may happen naturally anyway over the next few months though as the prevalence rises assuming keeping schools open remains near top priority.

I agree completely, it's an unknown.

jk

In reply to La benya:

The way that peoples views become so entrenched and stubborn during forum debates is interesting, and rarely do I see someone going: 'you've helped me change my mind', so I am genuinely interested to understand the hows and ifs of having better debates.  Covid clearly produces very strong opinions.  And I do try and be measured and polite, but I have recently witnessed a growing number of odd attitudes which i cant frankly get my head around (i.e. the wife of an ex Wigan MP refusing to wear a mask and saying 'its all a hoax').  Apols if you took offence at my general comment.

For folks info:  52 hospital covid deaths, big increase in Scotland, Grter manchester hospitals increases in Covid patients reported today.  Some area reporting big numbers, nearly 2,000 new cases in NW England alone, and thats with folk struggling to get tested.

Lockdown?  Not a clue.  Whats interesting is if you look at when lockdown started in March it had a pretty much instant impact (it was taking about 3 weeks for people to die after catching it and death rates peaked pretty much 3 or 4 weeks after lockdown IIRC).  I think if we all did the right thing then many 'things' could still happen, like pubs staying open, university life cracking on.  But too many folk ignore the rules (for multiple reasons) and the virus gets spreaded.  Thing is, its still small numbers, most young people just get a bit ill and chances are they dont know anyone whose died.

And whilst I'm here: another thing that I find depressing is, large numbers of people in care homes live in isolation from their extended family so, sadly, their deaths touch less people than if they were living in their communities.  So care home deaths don't hit home to many folk.  A colleagues daughter works in one: 20 of the 60 residents died last spring.  Wigan had a shocking death rate back then, on of the worst in the UK i think.

In reply to jkarran:

In the absence of a vaccine, a massive flu party is the traditional way to go, and avoids most of the problems you mention. How to avoid issues with community transmission.... isolation at home or in halls??? Seems to me we are halfway to doing this already, might as well do it as well as we can.

I'm increasingly convinced that central government is the problem. Stop wasting billions on useless national systems, butt out, except for some broad-brush behaviour modification ala Sturgeon, and let the NHS, local authorities, and the academic institutions do the work. Focus on something you can help with, like the economics.

In reply to La benya:

The hospitals couldn't provide normal services because they were overloaded with Covid patients.  Wards, staff and equipment were reassigned and if sick people who did not have Covid came into hospital for treatment they might catch it.   This is not something caused by lockdown, it is caused by the Covid epidemic.

If we didn't lockdown there would be even more Covid patients.

In reply to La benya:

It was:

NHS staff of with covid, or isolating with possible covid.

NHS staff deployed from regular jobs to covid wards, in some cases fearing a worse situation than we had (becuase lockdown worked)

Without lockdown both of these would be much worse.

This theory that the economy and the health service would be fine and dandy if we 'let it rip' is absolute rubbish.... the opposite is true. Like others have said, I'm completely shocked that someone who can get to a crag, tie on, and competently belay others needs this explaining to them.

In reply to freeflyer:

Repeat ad nauseum ther e is no evidence that natural immunity occurs for more than a couple of months. The jury is out. You cannot have a flu party until they know you will be immune and there is no guarantee.So you may never been immune.

Agree on local initiatives and control. Its something the Uk has always struggled with. See Tony Blairs comments about what he learnt during the foot and mouth crises. Westminster struggles to let go.

In reply to jkarran:

It is difficult as you say, I would suggest its impossible.

I have heard that the Italians have now changed their behaviours to deal with it  after their horrendous experiences.Perhaps that just needs to happen here, it gets so bad that people wake up.

I would prefer not to do that.

In reply to Mike Stretford:

Here is a timely example.

We have perhaps 10% of the cases that we had when we locked down.  Hospitals now have a good supply of PPE and have the benefits of 6 months of lessons learned in infection control for this virus.  Still, outbreaks are happening in hospitals.  This virus is hard to control. To quote the article:

Eight patients have died with coronavirus at a hospital where 82 cases have been linked to an outbreak on the site.

Planned surgeries have been temporarily stopped at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital in Llantrisant as part of a plan to manage the outbreak.

Lockdown is not postponing routine business at the hospital, covid is.  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-54351724

As the virus grows in the community, hospital outbreaks will grow reducing capacity, and more patients will go in to hospital using more capacity, and more and more routine work will be postponed.  It will be because of the virus.

In reply to wintertree:

Hospital covid outbreak few weeks back in Tameside:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/15/tameside-hospital-fights-uks-...

I guess that these aren't making the headlines the same as they would in 'normal' times.

Despite hospital admissions going up today after four day drop there is some positive news with ZOE/kings college covid monitoring showing a slow down in cases

Tim Spector stating on twitter today,

'Yes - not a glitch- our CSS swab survey is a few days ahead of other daya and many areas are slightly down - and nationally rates have stopped rising- so may be good news!'

In reply to daftdazza:

Looks like I was wrong about reporting lag being a potential reason for the dropping tail; comparing dashboard data from the last 2 days, hospital admissions aren't subject to any reporting lag.  Either that, or the data is only presented by reporting date and the lag is never resolved; it seems odd that it takes up to 6-7 days to collate and report both infections and deaths, but hospital admissions are reported immediately... 

It's nice to have a glimmer of hope in that result; if the new measures up here in the North are working then that pushes locking NHS overload into the more distant future than the 4-5 weeks we currently appear to be on, giving more time to figure all this out.

In reply to wintertree:

I thought you might find this interesting mate:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-dr...

In reply to wintertree:

The lower number for the last few days from Saturday and Sunday, Mondays figures are back over 300 for new admissions in England with Covid. I honestly don't know if the weekend has any impact on admissions like it does with tests. I guess like with any of this data sort, we need a few days to look at the trend.

Worryingly for me, the North West rate of hospital admission for 28th September was 1.56/100,000 population compared the the national average of 0.55/100,000 population.

In reply to Alyson30:

Apart from one significantly incorrect throwaway comment on Sweden, that was very interesting; thanks. Super-spreaders have been coming up since the beginning in individual studies and anecdotes; some recent suggestions much of what happened in Bolton was down to one truly feckless individual for example.  

I thought their point on contact tracing was very interesting - if it's largely driven by a minority of highly infectious people, it's much better to trace upstream to find them, that to trace downstream to find exposed but uninfected people.  Someone I know in NZ is very proud I think of their involvement in the sequencing of every detected case which helps them to evidence and find these links, although that level of detail is a pipe dream for where the UK is now.

In reply to The New NickB:

Being impatient I made a plot.  The top plot shows a trend line as per my 20:34 Monday post but with today's data.  The middle plot shows the difference between individual data points and the trend line.  The x-axis gridl Iines are every 7 days.  The bottom plot is the middle plot's residuals normalised to an estimate of the statistical noise taken as the square root of the corresponding trend line (this is skating on thin ice in terms of legitimacy I think...  Then again so is looking at residuals from a polynomial filtered trendline...).  Observations:

• There is no obvious 7-day structure in these residuals unlike for the detected cases (also attached).  So, there is likely no weekend sampling issue here
• The recent "low" points another poster mentioned are not outlier residuals or normalised residuals in terms of magnitude - and the few days before these were all "high" points. 
• The normalised residuals have a reasonably symmetric and centre-weighted distribution (histogram plot) suggesting they're random in value, but they look by eye to have some time-series correlation, with a Dubrin-Watson statistic of 1.3 suggesting weak time series correlation.  Which could imply bouts of implicit reporting lag, or one of many other things.

Looking at the data in the download some more, there is some reporting lag in the headline "admissions" numbers, as whilst the numbers in the download don't change for past dates (unlike deaths and cases), different nations within the file are reported up to different dates - Scotland hasn't updated since Sep 16 (!), England and NI update to 2 days before the data release and Wales updates to 1 day before the data release.   

In reply to La benya:

Try this analogy then, imagine it's drunk drivers, you don't drink and drive, but everyone else does, but you still have to drive you car.

In reply to La benya:

Well think about it this way. We are destroying our economy. We are ruining children's education and life experiences. We are destroying peoples businesses and preventing people from earning money. Covid-19 kills the elderly and a small percentage of unfortunate souls. For the sake of the young people, who I care about, I'd happily sacrifice all my elders.   

In reply to munkins:

You really should have read the rest of the thread before replying...

In reply to MikeSP:

But if he cannot prove he has had it, how can he claim to have it? Tests say no, so he hasnt got it. Am i missing the point of a test? Its like me claiming in greek , when theres no proof of greek in my blood

In reply to munkins:

.You are not " destoying the economy". The economy bounced back. Yes some , and I repeat some businesses are devestated, buy 90% are not. The Bof E talked about this yesterday, It is not 100% doom and gloom and there is a real risk of us talking us down the position.

I see lots of investment still going on.(  I posted about Nestle investing £5m near Staden Quarry). its something like £ 15m in Buxton in total). This is just 1 example.

There is really no need to " sacrifice" people, you sound like aome form of Nazi supporter , where only the fittest are deemed worthy to be part of a master race.Adapt and change is equally as good.

In reply to neilh:

Quite.  There are a couple of regular, serious posters who keep pushing this approach and ignoring the counterpoints raised by a lot of other posters.  As a new and rather extreme account, I think munkins could be one of those who have got banned recently.  

What really pisses me off beyond their willingness to throw half a million other people to the wolves and and their rank stupidity in believing this will protect the economy and their "freedom"... why do that want to throw vulnerable people to the wolves to protect vulnerable companies?  Both companies and people are vulnerable to this virus.  Which is more important?  Which leaves usable assets and a hole in the market for another to adapt in to when it dies?  Which takes its value with it and rots into compost?

If a person dies, they are dead.  Why does their approach (basically naturally assisted eugenics) not apply to companies but only to people?  

Change happens, the economy tracks it.  The economy is here to serve the people, not the other way around.  

The last half year has been an awful shock to the economy, but it's one we can recover from.  We can't reanimate the dead.  "Sacrificing" a bunch of weak people won't fix that.

In reply to munkins:

No we are not.  It ain't good, but no way are we ruining it.

How many?  Everyone over, say, 75?

I have children, young adults, and the worse thing for them would be see there grandparents suffer a shit death.  They've already seen it with two of them (not Covid).

In reply to munkins:

That's nice but have you really thought through what happens when we let 'er rip?

How we might react to a tsunami of totally preventable and ultimately pointless death, the economic, social and political consequences? Whether staff will turn up at the schools where the pupils are infectious? What it would actually be like to dispose of maybe half a million dead in a matter of months? How we would memorialise their sacrifice, the myth and monuments we'd need to construct to assuage our guilt? Have you thought what happens to people requiring lifesaving non-covid medical care when the hospitals choke, the medicine runs short and a third of the staff are off ill or quarantined? What happens to a pub's business when there's someone obviously sweating and coughing at the bar or a restaurant where the waitress is pale, clammy and coughing? When several of your friends aren't recovering well from their covid, aren't able to return to work or look after the kids? About what happens at the border when France says non? What happens a day later when the shutters come down on the empty supermarkets? What happens a week later to those who missed out on the smash and grab? Could Berlin airlift us the aid we'll need? Who'll carry the can when the public mood inevitably swings against the carnage and privations?

jk

In reply to wintertree:

This was posted on Facebook yesterday and copied by someone I know, the person I know has just got a fairly robust response, but I see that from this single source (undoubtably not the origin) it has been shared 34 times.

In reply to Blunderbuss:

Lol, I never read the thread.

In reply to neilh:

Nonsense, your grasp of the economic situation is very poor.

So you're telling me that when we reopened after the lockdown we genuinely believed that it wouldn't cause any deaths? 

In reply to jkarran:

I don't think that would happen.

In reply to munkins:

It's clear that you and others who advocate the 'let it rip' policy, just don't think things through at all.

In reply to munkins:

What do you think would happen?  And how many would you sacrifice?

In reply to mick taylor:

I don't really care what would happen, although I don't think it would be as bad as you guys think. I don't care how many people it would kill.

In reply to munkins:

I own a business, I am well aware of the economic impact.Your grasp is poor. Read what the Bof E said yesterday.

You are implying that there were zero restrictions/regulations after we reopened and that it was back to " normal".

That was clearly far from the case.

In reply to jkarran:

munkins is clearly trolling, but he does have a point: Worldwide, the brunt of the economic cost of the pandemic response is borne by the young, while the benefit is largely going to the old. The younger workers are always the first to be sacked, university and school education is curtailed to an extent that goes beyond, say, restaurants, etc.....

In the UK, chicanery like luring students to halls of residence (presumably only so that they can be charged residence fees) and then imprisoning them in these halls rather than letting them quarantine back home, even using private security goons and bouncers, is just the cherry on the cake.

I am certain that I would be tempted to force my way out in such a situation, even using violence if needed.

There must be a price to pay by my generation (51 yo) and that of my parents. I hope my children will not forget or forgive how we shat on them come the next election.

CB

In reply to neilh:

Our dept has rocketed and our tax revenue is plummeting. If you want your business to survive I think you need to learn how the economics works.

No we partially opened after lockdown, knowing that the virus would spread and some people would die. We sacrificed them for our economy. My position is that no sacrifice is too great for liberty.

In reply to Removed User:

For folks info, Covid data reported for North West today, 2279 new cases, 660 in hospitals, 90 on ventilation.  That's about 400 new cases on yesterday.

In reply to cb294:

Why do you guys always think people are trolling? Could it not be possible that I am expressing my beliefs without any fear of the repercussions? Does that fact that I disagree with most posters here on almost every topic mean that expressing my views is trolling?

In reply to cb294:

 

The old were young once. It’s called resilience. Every generation goes through some kind of issue at some point. Talk to anyone under 27 about the financial crisis of 2008 and they look at you blankly. 

In reply to mick taylor:

But this is what gets me, everyday of my life around a thousand people have died in this country, and I didn't care about them. So why would I care if ten thousand died?

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Yeah but there's got to be a breaking point, don't you think?

In reply to munkins:

No. 
 

1996. My friends with babies in their first properties were losing jobs and leaving properties with tens of thousands of pounds of negative equity that they would never pay back, and moving back in with their parents. Causing divorces and all sorts of ‘mental health’ issues. Of course we didn’t put so much store in mental health back then - we just called it the normal stress and strain of life. 

In reply to munkins:

It’s a very simple concept. 
 

You may not care. 
 

Someone does, in fact the whole of society does. That’s why we have a health service. Now I’m not naive enough to believe we spend billions of pounds on health care each year ‘because we care’, there’s a massive financial and economic benefit to having fit and healthy people in your workforce. 
 

But there are a few people who worry about their own health and what will happen to their families. 
 

Out of interest, how old are you? Do you have children? Are you living at home with your parents? Your views don’t seem very mature. 

In reply to munkins:

No tell us what you think would happen and shows us on what data you are basing this claim,,,

FWIW - I used an epidemiological calculator and used the following inputs:

R0 = 2.5

Number of infected people - 100000

Infection > hospitalisation rate - 3%

Average hospital stay - 7 days

Very basic but the output should be pause for thought......It would take less than 3 months for very single NHS bed in the UK to be taken up by COVID19 patients.

Let me know your thoughts on what would happen to the economy and society if that happened.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Do you think 'mental health' issues exist? An example

A person was sectioned three times over a 6 year period and diagnosed with bi polar disorder, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder by 4 different consultant psychiatrists. Then was put on disability benefits by a social worker who filled all the forms out and posted them to the DWP, and stayed on disability benefits for 12 years. Would that person have 'mental health' issues or would they be suffering from normal stress and strain of life?

Anyway back to the point I find your comparison of 1996 to todays events laughable and I don't think I can take you seriously. 

In reply to munkins:

Because nobody can be that stupid and irksome whilst also being high functioning enough to have a job, use a computer and go climbing etc?   Because you’re posting crap at the extreme end of the spectrum from a new account?   Especially when a couple of others posting such crap have been banned recently or gone on some stroppy departure after finding out what a dozen other people think of their views?

Many posters have patiently explained the exponential growth mechanic of a novel infectious disease driving a pandemic.  It’s been explained ad nauseam that this breaks healthcare and a society like ours (where most people value the lives of their friends, family and colleagues) if unchecked, and that the results of this would curtail your freedom far more.

The sacrifices being made in early August - wearing masks, limited large group sizes, table service only and so on - they were enough to restore most of our liberty.  R was less than 1 and more liberty could have been restored by now had everyone stuck with it.   So it seems that many sacrifices are too great for you - anything that touches your life is apparently too irksome (Masks, table service) yet you’d happily sacrifice the lives and liberty of countless others to do as you please.

If you’re not a troll, you’re toxic in that you hold your life and liberty above that of everyone and anyone else.  

In reply to wintertree:

Today's news from Imperial college REACT study is also a glimmer of hope and backs up what Zoe have found with there community survey over last few days, I think ONS study is maybe a week behind ZOE interms of weekly data it reports so might have to wait until a week on Friday to see if improvements has been picked up by ONS.

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/205473/latest-react-findings-show-high-numb...

Ideal situation for country is to get past Christmas period before any need for a full national lockdown, main problem with any winter lockdown is how we get out of lockdown once we are in it(highlighted by some south American countries) but at least with a January lockdown spring weather and chance to reopen is not that far away.

In reply to munkins:

I find you comparing someone being sectioned with schizophrenia with someone having to stay at home for a few weeks laughable too. 
 

As I say, you’re not being very mature over this. 
 

The situation is the same only it’s a bit more dangerous as people are dying. As has been said lots of times. The economy can be rebuilt - extremely quickly.

What we need to be doing is giving these youngsters some guidance and pointing out that up to the late 90s we had a cycle of recessions where people lost their entire livelihoods and life savings. Then someone tinkered with it, the growth got out of control and then there was an almighty crash. 
 

It’s not new. Many of us have been through it before. And will again. As long as you don’t kill us all off. You need us to give you guidance and reassurance it seems. Although if you’re anything like my kids you won’t take advice and you’ll believe some bloke on YouTube rather than someone with real world experience. 

In reply to daftdazza:

Yes, the second study coming that way is tempting me to think optimistically.  I agree that the reporting lag in the ONS data means waiting another week to see if this apparent relaxation appears in their survey too.

I think it’s important that we hold out for another 10-14 days on policy however and let that be steered by hospital admissions and pillar 2 testing as well as the next-but-one ONS report as much as by the other random sampling surveys because we’re too close to locking in a disruptive level of deaths, so we can’t afford to get it wrong if we want to avoid being forced into full lockdown to protect healthcare.

I’m instinctively cautious of the random sampling surveys when we have tightly clustered hotspots however.

In reply to Removed User:

Sorry to derail the very interesting discussion - but am I the only person who immediately assumed this was some new Garmin or Suunto functionality?!

In reply to munkins:

Don't know about you, but I reckon the vast majority do care, caring is a commonly held human value.  To steal a phrase, I want to add years to life and life to years.  I don't want to live in a society where we sacrifice, or treat less favourable, people because of their age (or any other reason).

If we let it rip, I think we would see huuuuge numbers suffer and/or die, millions.  My guess is mental health would be worse if we let it rip (e.g. bereavement issues) than mental health problems due to lockdown etc.  With lockdown, I think the economy would bounce back - its what capitalism does.  Some businesses would suffer, but a balance is needed.  I loathe our government, but i think they are trying to strike a balance.

And I don't think you're trolling and I do think I understand where you are coming from.  I also think the mental health example you describe might be based on yourself (from one of your other posts and the fact that the posts got a bit 'tit for tat y').

In reply to munkins:

Wintertree has pretty much answered for me: Your views suggest a callousness that I do not believe you hold for real, and looks more like the manufactured web personality of an immature (or simply young) person.

This is coming from an adult who actually agrees with you to an extent. The young are treated unfairly every single time our societies are in trouble, be that the dotcom bubble, the 2008 banking crash, or now covid. The generational contract has been broken, deliberately, by the boomer generation. Just look at pensions, housing, jobs, you name it.

However, you do not do your cause any good by fetishizing your personal freedom and claiming not to care about thousands of deaths. It is possible to have a rational discussion of the present and future costs associated with extending our life span even further, and again, whether the distribution of the limited resorces of the health sector between generations is fair, but that needs much more consideration and reflection than you show in your posts.

One obvious point is that your personal freedom is worthless (as in, you cannot do anything with your cherished freedom) if society collapses around you. Balancing lives vs. freedom and economy is a false dichotomy anyway.

CB

In reply to wintertree:

Yes

In reply to cb294:

I take your point but I’m not sure this is a new phenomena.  Back in WW2 conscription into the armed forces, the coal mines and civil defence was targeted towards younger people, with the younger part of the age bracket being more likely to be sent somewhere to fight.

Now we’re getting to the point where the older people in the latest crisis were the younger ones in an earlier post-2000s crisis so at an individual level, it’s not one-sided; people take their lumps more when younger then gradually insualte themselves from it with age.

This is a toxic situation for society, but perhaps it’s what happens when a society based around acquisition starts to decline...

In reply to DancingOnRock:

It sounds like I'm like your kids.

In reply to mick taylor:

If that's the case then why do we have BLM protesters gathering in huge crowds, smaller numbers of anti-restriction protesters, packed beaches, illegal raves, uni dorm parties, and around 1 in 10 people wearing no face covering?

I don't think that would happen.

I'll let you decide for yourself.

In reply to cb294:

No it's real. I'm an immature young person.

Yeah I've had enough. Old people, go **** yourself.

It's also possible to admit that I don't feel anything when people I haven't met die.

Why not?

In reply to munkins:

Go to your room. I’m turning off the router. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Ok, I'll go play play with the smart phone I didn't tell you about

In reply to cb294:

The thing is I'm not clear what could really be done significantly differently for workers other than at the margins where various job and skill protection schemes have left some adrift without welfare or created perverse incentives to zombify already doomed businesses stymieing economic reform.

jk

In reply to munkins:

Why not? Point by point, go through my questions, explore them, convince me why they're of no concern. I'd love to be wrong here.

jk

In reply to munkins:

If you really believe you should be at liberty to just make everyone pretend this isn't happening I suggest you go discuss your liberty with a rising tide, see if it cares.

jk

In reply to Removed User:

Could munchkin piss off and leave this thread it's original purpose which is a scientific analysis of the data as it comes in?

The socio-economic aspects are equally intriguing/diabolic but this isn't wasn't really meant to be the place.

In reply to munkins:

Because most people know that those activities pose very low risks.  And don't forget that the silent/hidden majority are doing the right thing, but we don't see them coz they are low profile.  And I still think many of those people actually care.

Aye, it is crystal ball work on all our parts.  But there are 5.5 million people aged over 75, 0.5 million people with cancer, huge numbers with diabetes/obesity.

In reply to daftdazza:

Interesting. The question I have would be how this relates to daily infection rates and the percentage that are being picked up through testing.

How long is Covid detectable by the PCR test?

In reply to Removed User:

Updated plots with data from today's release.  Cases and deaths are plotted up to 5 days ago, and admissions are plotted up to 2 days ago, as they are significantly provisional after these cut-offs. Thoughts/observations:

• Cases and deaths continue to look exponential (Figures 1 & 3) as shown by roughly constant doubling times.
• Admissions (Figure 2) are backing off over the last few days - but my suspicion is that hidden/embedded, jittery  reporting lag affects the "actual" numbers delivered here rather than having the lag resolve over time as with cases and deaths, so I'm reserving judgement and consider the polynomial fit line (black) over the last 3 days to be suspect.  Let's hope it's a real drop off that continues.  Realistically though, the residuals (difference between the polynomial fit and the individual data points) often have some correlation day to day and are currently in a negative phase that's not exceptional considering the others, so I don't have much cause to believe that its a real dip.
• The exponential rate for deaths appears faster than for either cases or admissions (Figure 4).  I think the factors behind this are many and complex (bit of a cop out interpretation, that) and can't really be understood without information on the setting of the deaths (e.g. care home vs hospital).   Perhaps it is also related to outbreaks in hospitals which presumably don't have matching admissions (admitted for X, catch covid, die of covid).  Regardless, it's not a good sign; the current doubling time for deaths is estimated as 8.4 days.
• Staring at Figure 5 I could almost convince myself that the detected cases in the provisional region (shaded pink) are going to end up below the current exponential fit (even accounting for the typical weekend lull in specimen taking) in line with the 2 independent, random sampling surveys daftdazza has referenced on this thread.  Maybe.  

In reply to munkins:

Yes you do, your just too stupid to know it yet!

In reply to wintertree:

Figure 4, why only a 1 week lag on deaths vs admissions until recently?

In reply to Removed User:

Good observation.  I've been thinking on it.  It's taken a while.

I think it's because some people start dying 7 days after they are admitted, but most take longer.  That means the up-tick in deaths starts to happen 7 days after admissions - but initially, deaths are happening at a lower rate than admissions until things start to reach steady state.  This is why the deaths line on the normalised plot gets steeper after the initial uptick - but remember steepness isn't so comparable as each curve is separately normalised.    

So I made a noddy model - also attached below with normalised and absolute plots.  There's the same kind of lag between the admissions and deaths lines, followed by the lines coming together after a while (although in the real world, admissions are slowing down in the numbers, but not in my model).

The model I did has a mean time to death from admissions of 14 days, with a standard deviation of 7 days - so deaths start up-ticking about 7 days after admissions, and some time later they're on the same exponential trajectory.  So the lag to uptick is about 1 standard deviation before the mean time to death.  The 1 week lag does not mean that the mean time to death is one week, just that deaths start coming through after one week. 

Interestingly, this gap between the normalised curves only occurs when transitioning form a non-zero baseline of admissions and deaths to an exponential phase as in this situation, shortly after the transition there are only extra (from the exponential phase) people dying early from the mean time since their admissions, but nobody extra dying late from the mean time since their admission.  After about the sum of the mean and standard deviation times, this asymmetry disappears (assuming the doubling time of the exponential growth is more than the mean time to death, anyhow - if cases were doubling faster then the mean time to die, deaths would always be lagging ).   If you have pure exponential growth from zero cases, this gap never appears.

I think.  It really needs a proper stats person to explain it better or correct me!  I think the way to do this properly is to write an equation the admissions curve (a constant to a fixed point in time, then an exponential), then to convolve this with an gaussian function the area of which is the admissions:deaths ratio and which represents the distribution of admissions to deaths times, and the behaviour of the "knee" in the deaths curve will pop out comparing the curves, potentially with an analytical approach. However, it's now passed maths-o-clock.

In reply to all:

I wonder whether there is any more information on climbing wall covid safety following the The BMC article by Prof Ian Hall?

One of my problems with the data is there seems to be very little analysis other than basic numbers of cases, hospitalisations, deaths by area... surely there must be some patterns, and does this impact how we think about the safety of indoor climbing walls as case counts rise?

The effects on the economy are very significant, and we have suffered more than most developed economies, and it will never be completely the same again, though there will be positives, more remote working/ digital economy but this will not balance out the pain felt by sectors that cant easily digitise their businesses such as indoor climbing walls...

It seems likely now that we will be living with this virus for at least another year so for me I think it is important that we start to manage the risk, rather than to try to eliminate it, if only for good mental health and the economy - if we avoid climbing walls for a year they could easily go out of business...

I went to The Foundry yesterday mid afternoon, and climbed auto belay on my own, there was lots of space, used mask when not climbing, hand sanitized before and after climbing... it felt relatively safe though I am not aware of any stats on climbing wall "hot spot stats"?

I found the comment from munkins about sacrificing his/ her elders misplaced - munkins this is not your sacrifice to offer or make. There are plenty of older folks still having a great time, I like the quote, "we dont stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing". We do need to find ways of keeping playing.

S

In reply to simon cox:

I’m not aware of any analysis that breaks down a sector such as leisure sport into its component parts like climbing, swimming, etc.  There are academic publications that look at transmission in specific cases but they’re scattered and don’t give hard data.

Its likely each climbing wall knows how many outbreaks it’s had and how many people have been contact traced to it etc, so it’s not impossible for, eg, the BMC to coordinate the walls into pulling some figures together - which could be an important part of keeping them open when sensible.  It seems the evidence is strongly towards big transmission events being due to groups of people in confined quarters for a long time - so with high ceilings, good ventilation, proper distancing and mindful hygiene climbing walls don’t seem like a great risk.  The evidence should be there distributed across the walls.

The only consistent source of data I am aware of on the risk of different types of location is the weekly PHE surveillance report - see figures 19 and 20 on this week’s [1] - where education and care homes are currently dominating.  Presumably universities.

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

In reply to Removed User:

This is the result of convolving a gaussian distribution of probability of death vs time with admissions to model-fit to the deaths curve.  The left plot shows the curves, the right plot shows the fitted probability distribution.

This model fit doesn't work at all without allowing a constant offset in the y-axis of about -15 deaths/day.  This could represent the effects of an asymmetric distribution with a long, low tail as applied to the long proceeding region of constant cases.  I'll try and fit some other distributions tonight. 

In reply to munkins:

Liberty to what? Kill people you don;'t know, or maybe more to the point have other people kill the people you love?

I'm sorry to say this, but you're an idiot! You're an idiot, who doesn't see what devastation will befall ALL of us if this virus gets out of hand, not just the people who are willing "to take the risk". You are risking everyone, for freedom, like it's really hard to not do the stuff we've been prevented from so far.

WTAF?

edit. Awe! they got banned

In reply to Removed User:

The latest PHE surveillance report has landed [1].  The quality of some of the plots is worse than ever, but there are more of them and more granular breakdown.  

For now, just a quick comment on Table 3 which breaks down educational covid outbreaks in the last four weeks (I think) by sector.

Normalising to the number of institutions from a quick google, this suggests covid outbreaks at 1% of primary schools, 6% of secondary schools and 40% of universities.  Keep in mind that most schools returned before universities.

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

In reply to The New NickB:

Today ONS infection survey is also showing hints of a slow down broadly in line with other studies, also showing infection begining to plateau in North West similar to ZOE but north east now looks main area of concern.

Each community study is showing different amounts of daily Infections, with ONS estimating around 8000 daily Infections  for England which would suggest we are picking up vast majority of Infections which is highly unlikely due nature of asymptomatics, delayed test results and flaws in test and trace, where Zoe suggest around 20000 UK symptomatic daily Infections, a big difference, also REACT study suggest 400000 people are currently infected while ONS 100000 in England, so big difference between individual community studys but however all three suggest daily Infections are slowing down.

I don't know enough about the PCR test but majority of people seem to be Infectious for around a week, with the test picking up fragments of virus that can't be cultivated in lab for up to a month after individual was infected but some other paper suggest  upto 40 days.  I think it depends on amount of cycles used. With 35 cycles perhaps being limit of what is useful.  More information can be found at recent paper here;

https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa1491/59126...

In reply to daftdazza:

Interesting the react study was making me  wonder how long after getting it people can receive a positive pcr result.

In reply to daftdazza:

The latest plot of cases by specimen date with reporting lag makes it look pretty likely the data for Monday and Tuesday this week are going to fall well under the current exponential trend line - which itself has decreased by 0.4% day-on-day since yesterday's trendline.  I'd guess looking at this that cases up until October 31st are going to remain at or below 7000/day.

So it looks like ZOE and REACT called it well - but will the north east take over driving the rise as it grows some more, or will it also level off?  Other regions are perhaps only 1-2 super spreading events away from joining in.  If cases do level off, they remain uncomfortably high and really need to be driven down 5x or more so that test and trace is responsive enough for the months ahead.  

In reply to wintertree:

The universities will be major drivers of a huge increase in cases over the next few weeks. 700 odd at Northumbria. If I had to bet, I’d say the only thing separating them from many other unis is that they have their own testing station, or easily accessible testing. 

In reply to wintertree:

There we go - BBC news just said they have good testing facilities. 

In reply to Yanis Nayu:

If they can all keep up on testing - lacking for cars and unable to use public transport if going for a test, many students can't get one I think unless their institution and/or local council has on-site or local walk-in testing; our council has just set one up I think for that reasons.

The good think about fresher university cases is they can pretty effectively lock them down in halls.  The bad thing about that is being a fresher locked down in halls.  I'm not sure how many halls can come fully out of lock down this term assuming infection continues to spread more slowly after the initial fresher's week explosions that seem to be happening...

In reply to Cobra_Head:

Funny how many new accounts are popping up, promoting "let it rip" and getting banned.  A lot like back in March/April. 

In reply to wintertree:

Except for all the ones who’ve gone home incubating it as they dreaded being imprisoned in their flats. My daughter and loads of her friends have gone home. Some, like my daughter, have subsequently become ill putting parents at risk. It’s going to be a couple of months of rounds of self isolation and spill-out into the wider community. Still, the new owner of iQ, one of the accommodation providers, is a Tory donor so all good. 

In reply to Removed User:

It looks like the government found 6,000 covid cases down the back of the sofa today;, the dashboard says "Due to a technical issue, which has now been resolved, there has been a delay in publishing a number of COVID-19 cases to the dashboard in England. This means the total reported over the coming days will include some additional cases from the period between 24 September and 1 October, increasing the number of cases reported."

I've put some plots below to show where the extra cases fall; many of them are the blue bars (reported > 7 days ago) on the left plot.  The right plot shows them in red.  They stretch back 14 days in time, compared to the usual ~6 days.  The biggest unusual update is for Aug 21-22.  The 26th, 27th and 28th have all received unusually large updates given how long ago they are.

What does this mean?  I'm going to wait until the backlog is flushed out.  Hospital admissions, which apparently have less reporting lag than either deaths or detected cases, appear to be levelling off.  

In reply to Removed User:

Headline figure for today is 22,961 new cases.

Provisionally, I think it's a case of "Don't Panic".

Some reporting backlog they're clearing...

This puts detected cases right back on an exponential trajectory.  On the other hand, hospitalisations and deaths are both apparently backing off as can be seen from their curves sloping down and their doubling times rising.

How to square all this off?  My best guess (and it really is a guess) is that the reporting backlog is from the new testing centres set up by local councils and universities for the return of the undergraduates, and that given their limited age range this explains the divergence between detected cases and the downstream measurements.  Either that or test and trace is miraculously improving it's reach - and there are some signs of this, for example the total testing capacity increasing above the demand (although there are plenty of reasons to argue the total capacity is a bullshit metric.)

I'd be very interested to know how the various random sampling surveys handle and control for undergraduate students.

I think a public explanation of what's gone wrong with reporting might be in order...

(Remember, my doubling time cases and deaths plots omit the most recent 5 days - where much of the massive cases growth is - as this data is considered provisional; likewise the most recent 2 days are omitted from hospitalisations)

In reply to wintertree:

We're now tracking above the IHME forecasts in terms of cases, giving 116k deaths by the end of the year

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-kingdom?view=total-deaths&tab=tre...

In reply to mik82:

We're well above their forecasts for infections if you consider that testing and test and trace gets perhaps 50% to 70% of actual infections, but our deaths are at the lower end of their forecast's confidence interval - so perhaps this is another sign that the infections is largely in the young right now - as is clear in the ONS random sampling data.

So again, I'm not minded to panic just yet.  Probably taking the household to WINTERCON 3 this week however.

What happens when the freshers go home for Christmas though...

In reply to wintertree:

After following the equivalent thread back in February/March and modifying my behaviour accordingly, I'm curious as to what WINTERCON 3 involves.

In reply to wintertree:

Another scenario is that detected cases follows hospitalizations. It goes as follows: some people show up at a hospital with Corona. The test and trace teams jump on it and find 10-20 other people (not or mildly symptomatic) in their contacts/neighbourhood. Because the Corona test can give positive results up to some time after the virus infection, there can be a reverse time lag between cases and hospitalizations.

In reply to Jack:

All measures as per WINTERCON 2, plus:

Full biosecure airlocks on all external doors

UV-C sterilisation of all received goods

Intensive bleach and Dettol sanitisation program of all living organisms

In reply to wintertree:

Out of interest, what *would* cause you to panic?

I'm pretty worried at the moment. I live in a badly affected area (Sefton). It seems to me that if the country as a whole is still on an exponential curve with cases doubling every 8-9 days (from eyeballing your graph) and given how concentrated the cases are in certain areas, those areas appear to be f*cked. I am starting to convince myself that, locally, we are already in as bad a place as March. I do think that people's behaviour has changed drastically over the last 2 weeks (locally) so things may turn around but it worries me greatly that cases aren't dropping off the exponential yet.

In reply to HansStuttgart:

That is a very good point.  Another reason to side with the OP’s view against data on cases - it’s very hard to interpret without a lot more detail than is publicly released.

In reply to mik82:

Got it. Right, off to b and q in the morning for some of those bio secure airlock things. Then boots for the other stuff. Will be extra careful with other living organisms and try to avoid them where possible.

In reply to Jack:

I’m much less worried about things progressing to civil disorder or serious supply/services disruption this time around as (a) the government are way more proactive than last time around and we’re currently > 6 weeks away from NHS overload with signs that the north west lockdown is working.  I’m watching the north east one though and am ready to panic there... (b) industry has 6 months of adaption under its belt.  

It seems I may have been over-cautious last time around in quarantining inbound supplies, but as it takes very little time to do so and can’t do any harm, I’m going to sort out the mouse proof cold storage again - bent metal hangers of rungs on a ladder laid horizontal on the garage roof with car ramps to step up a bit.  The inevitable sprawl of crap has taken up the space.  This only works in winter when it’s cold in the garage.

The main change is for our support bubble - the last remaining grandparent to Jr - do we just meet outdoors, or do we meet indoors with masks and/or the HEPA filter unit running? 

Back to minimising my physical trips in to work and getting the most out of them.  Back to packed lunches perhaps instead of the burger wagon round the corner.  Other good reasons for that change include shedding some weight.

Zero alcohol intake for now and trying to exercise more to give the immune system it’s best shot.

Its very different this time round as Jr is in school and none of us wants to pull them out, so we can’t just cut ourselves off like last time.

In reply to mik82:

You’ve got your levels backwards.  

As I understand it soapy water or 70% ethanol solution is way better than bleach and less toxic to the human using it; I prefer to just quarantine stuff and then carefully dispose of packaging.

In reply to Si dH:

I’m by no means happy.  I was flat out panicking by mid March as the government appeared to be on a national suicide mission.  Now they don’t and the last few weeks Boris is starting to sound like he - or whoever briefs him - finally gets it.

We’re in County Durham and some areas here are likewise bad.  The thing that really worries me is healthcare overload - that I think is where it all goes pear shaped; the infections are mainly in younger people right now - plenty of evidence for that - but I do worry they can’t grow much more without breaking through to older people and setting up overload.

The latest ONS data suggests spread is getting under control in the NW, but driving cases back down again will be tough.

This is the big difference to March - we know what to do to stop this dead in its tracks now.  Don’t hang out in other peoples houses, follow risk control measures on the workplace.  Don’t go to restaurants when it’s bad.  Shut the pubs.  Flip 6th formers and university students to remote learning.  It’s massively frustrating that people can’t take the more personal steps until it all goes wrong locally.

I don’t understand the cases staying exponential vs the various random sampling surveys and apparently levelling hospitalisations and deaths.  Some piece of the jigsaw is missing; I’m tempted to think it’s university shaped - 40 outbreaks in the sector by latest PHE report, a typical size of 400 students from a few news reports = 16,000 extra cases.    So if that was the backlog it should be about drained by now, but realistically there’s another 250,000 freshers almost bound to get it this term.

If tomorrow’s number is much more than 8,000 cases I think panic will be inching closer.  But the expectation has always been that it’s going to be a grim winter with some form of lockdown returning - that almost feels inevitable and has done for some time so that in itself isn’t panic worthy, just depressing.

In reply to wintertree:

Thanks for the graphs. Latest estimate of R is 1.3-1.6 so it makes sense that cases are rising exponentially. I thought it was off they had got stuck around 7k and figured it was due to capacity limits in the system and some people not even trying to get a test. Turns out it was an IT issue but I suspect these other factors remain relevant and the real number of cases is significantly higher. I wonder whether the proportion of total cases which are identified and reported will drop as cases rise, even if capacity increases to 500k as promised.

As for admissions, it’s good that they are growing more slowly for now though I fear that may change. We are still relatively early on in the second wave. I suspect the virus hasn’t yet spread to the vulnerable population to the same extent. You’d hope that care homes would be better protected this time but of course the vulnerable population isn’t limited to care homes.

In reply to wintertree:

We started doing some of that back in feb / march and have now relaxed somewhat. Perhaps time to readjust and adapt to the current situation.

In reply to HansStuttgart:

That assumes the t&t system is able to identify and contact relevant contacts (it might be 10-20 people for some, a lot fewer for others) and then those contacts go and get tests. People are being told to only go for a test if symptomatic and even then some people can’t get a test. What you describe might explain some of the numbers but I can’t imagine it’s going to be a significant proportion.  

In reply to Jack:

Depends if it’ll freak others in the household out too much by raising their worry levels or if it’ll reassure them.  It’s something to do during lockdown after all...  Some stuff we’ve just kept up from April includes doing a single, careful weekly shop for fresh goods at a quiet time and getting a monthly delivery of long shelf life stuff.  We have been venturing to a takeaway once a week lately, having settled on one with online ordering and payment that always has the food ready on time so no waiting; if cases in the specific area rise much that may have to go.

In reply to Misha:

That’s my thinking.  Weekly testing is used to screen care home staff I gather, but one test every 3 days has a 30% false negative rate (worst case), probably more like 50% for every 7 days - so if it’s widespread in the community it’s going in to care homes.  Signs of that in the latest PHE surveillance reports breakdown by institution.  But cases are still predominately in younger people.  For now.

I think you’re all getting a bit too bogged down in this.

A massive proportion of people are either having mild or asymptomatic symptoms.

Keep it below 50k infections a day and keep it away, as much as possible from the vulnerable and we will cope.

Unfortunately life does not come without risks, we need to manage those risks. And those risks are not directly limited to public health. We can’t lock everyone away for months at a time and we cannot let the disease run wild.

Wash your hands and wear a mask. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Which isn’t as great as it sounds because it looks like a lot of spread is done by a minority of asymptomatic people who don’t even know they’re infected.

How’s that working out at 1/3rd of that daily number?  See figure 20 in [1] - below 

My biggest worries are Jr if our health gets clobbered and my work, it’s future and it’s employees if we get clobbered by a staff quarantine and/or lockdown.  Two very good reasons to make damned sure I don’t get it or transmit it.

Clearly, but neither of those are going to stop the grief from a necessary lockdown if many other people don’t stop hanging out in each other’s houses and doing whatever else it is they’re doing wrong.

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

In reply to wintertree:

It looks like daily cases by specimen date are now over 12-13000 from your graph so I can't see why tomorrow's reported number would be below that even if the backlog from the IT error has now all come through.

Re: lockdown, my biggest worry is that there is no actual lockdown like before but everywhere has to shut anyway because it's no longer viable for places to stay open, and that they no longer have any significant financial support so ultimately never re-open in future. Four or five restaurants, cafes and pubs within a mile of my house have announced temporary closure within the last 48 hours and that is only going to grow.

In reply to Si dH:

Maybe; I’m thinking a lot of this rise was freshers week and university cases seem to be backing off after that.  Unusual optimism for me and I’ll probably be proven wrong in a few days. 8,000 was probably too low though - I was looking at the trend lien which excludes recent days.  Call it 10,000 per day.  

Yup.  Some really fine places around here have called it a day permanently my and it’s clear the government are focusing their support on things that can remain viable if this goes on for another 1-2 years.  It’s not good, either for the worker or for rural communities with few options.
 

In reply to wintertree:

 

Don't get confused between businesses that would fail within two years, and the virus going on for two years. 
 

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t have huge levels of infection for a long time. The greater the infection rate, the quicker it’s over. 
 

I think they’re gambling on the young creating some kind of partial herd immunity. 

In reply to wintertree:

Purely anecdotal and statistically without value, but I've just finished a block of 5 shifts with more confirmed or suspected CV19 than I've seen since April. This included a cardiac arrest at residence where both occupants were covid positive and another seriously ill patient with oxygen sats of 31%, in a home where all four family members had tested positive that week.

I really, really wish I could drag a couple of anti-maskers along on these jobs. Every time I enter such homes, I contemplate the inadequate PPE I'm supposed to wear, possible viral load, exposure in an uncontrolled environment, etc and more often than not, chills run up my spine. Oh, and then I get to finish the shift, drag my potentially infected arse home to my family and shove my potentially plague ridden uniform in the family washing machine. 

It's fine, it's the job and it's a privilege to do it, but I swear to God, I could punch in the nads every single social media virology expert who keeps spouting "it's just flu" 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

I disagree for two reasons:

1. It’s not know yet if naturally acquired herd immunity is sufficiently enduring to end rapid transmission after a short sharp burn of cases 
2. We can have it both ways - low baseline infection rates and periods where control is lost and then localised lockdown gets it back under control.  This hammers consumer confidence and vulnerable businesses and could go on for years in a worst case.

> I think they’re gambling on the young creating some kind of partial herd immunity. 

It would explain a few things about the university situation....  More generally, a lot of spreading events seem to be associated with certain minority behaviours and so a subset of people.  If immunity turns out to be persistent, it could be that those people attain enough immunity to slow transmission significantly.  New rule - if you break quarantine to go on a 48 hour bender pub crawl, and it subsequently turns out this was a super spreader event, your choice is to work the rest of the pandemic as a hospital cleaner or to volunteer for periodic exposure every 3 months to see how persistent your immunity is...

In reply to Stichtplate:

Amen.  In the early days some people with multiple degrees were telling me this.  What’s crazy is “it’s just flu” isn’t even comforting -, flu can be terrifying, with the 1918 pandemic hammering healthy young adults into the ground.

If you do, please film it and share...  I don’t know how so many previously normal seeming people have gone off this precipice.

In reply to Si dH:

Here are some fag packet stats to back this up. Many of these inputs are from my memory of things I've read so no sources.

At the peak of the pandemic in March/April it is estimated that the UK reached around 100,000 cases per day. That equates to very roughly 150 cases per 100,000 people, per day - or alternatively 1050 per week.

London appeared to have around double the seroprevalance of the rest of the country over summer (on average) so it's reasonable to assume that the peak infection rate outside London was somewhat lower than 1050. Pick a number, 8-900 in northern cities? That's probably reasonable to+/- 100.

Using today's latest data analysis in the Guardian the rate in the worst hot spots (upper tier local authorities ie large areas) over the last 7 days (Liverpool, Knowsley, Manchester, Newcastle) has been over 400 cases per 100,000 people. (Obviously with that being a weekly average and the rates increasing, the rate per day will now be somewhat more than a 1/7 of it.) If we assume half of cases are currently missed (which I've had no reason to change as an assumption?) then these areas are already at similar rates to the peak seen in March. If we assume that all cases are currently being found, then on current trend they will be there inside a week.

If this is driven by Freshers week then the trend will be false but I'm a bit sceptical about that. Other hotspot areas with only small/negligible student population (eg sefton) are at 200-300, so less than a week behind the city centres and knowsley on the current trend. I think the impact of universities is probably visible in the PHE data at MSOA level if you bothered to analyse it. The worst MSOAs (7200 people approx) are now at over 100 cases per week, or in other words 1 in 70 people there has caught the virus in the last week. This equates to a daily infection rate of 200 per 100,000 people. In many more badly hit MSOAs outside of university accomodation areas and city centres, where there will be negligible student impact, the peak is around a 1/3-1/2 of that - so again just over a week behind. Obviously the data is volatile at this level.

Pretty grim.

In reply to wintertree:

having seen hasty work by inexperienced or careless people make large numbers of records "disappear" I sometimes wonder if some people are having trouble with inner joins

It's usually the people who rush to a quick solution who seem to be associated with these disappearances in my experience.  They do a rush job, get managerial praise, go on leave and other people pick up the pieces and take the acrimony

In reply to wintertree:

I’ll explain it again. 
 

You can have a high rate of infections over a short period. 
You can have a low rate of infections over a long period. 
You can’t have a high rate of infections over a long period. 

In reply to Si dH:

Hospitality is a notoriously difficult business, most restaurants barely survive beyond  3 years for example.There is a high turnover of businesses- opening,closing,forced closure - anyway. We should not forget this.The guy who founded Pizza express reckons that 25% will go bust.What he does not say is how many of those 25% will reopen again when the vaccine or other measures are finalised.

You can relatively easily hibernate such a business if you are smart.Or you adjust and make sure it’s still profitable.

putting a hard business head on for this sector is perhaps easily the best thing to do rather than worry about their survival. In a year or sos time people will still want to give it a go.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

You said this in response to me saying that the government are focusing their support on things that can remain viable if this goes on for another 1-2 years.  I hoped with my next response to you that was clear clear "this" means the situation of the virus being present in the community without significant immunity.  I did not say I was worried about a high rate of infections for a long period.

As I stands, I also disagree with your view that can’t have a high rate of infections over a long period.

1. Assuming everyone who gets infected - however mild - goes on to develop lasting immunity, we could sustain infection at the level that took us to the brink of healthcare collapse for about 14 months before immunity was widespread.  Thats in my 1-2 years ballpark.  So I think you are wrong in a best-case scenario for high infection levels
2. There isn't good evidence yet that mild infection (of which most are, as you yourself have said upthread) gives lasting immunity over timescales of 12-18 months.  If it doesn't, then the rate of infection from 1 above could be sustained for many years in the absence of a vaccine.  So I think you are wrong for a worst case scenario for high infection levels.

My original point as I clarified was that we could have the following situation for the next 1-2 years until there is widespread, effective vaccination and it's clear the government are more interested in supporting businesses that will be viable in this situation:  low baseline infection rates and periods where control is lost and then localised lockdown gets it back under control.  This hammers consumer confidence and vulnerable businesses and could go on for years in a worst case.  It doesn't take high infection rates for a long time to send a lot of businesses to the wall - it takes chaos, confusion and uncertainty with generally low but occasionally high infection rates.

In reply to wintertree:

I don't know why we bother.  The system is so f*cked up it is just a complete joke.  The reason they forgot 16,000 tests is that the file was too large.   Like an organisation who's whole purpose is collecting Covid tests shouldn't have people noticing that they had a f*ckton of tests but the calculated figures look about the same or an IT guy shouldn't notice an error message about file size and split it up.

https://twitter.com/tnewtondunn/status/1313011573171027968

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

that can't be the whole explanation though - even such a failure would show up by doing sanity checks on the number of records processed at various stages .......

In reply to Si dH:

I agree in terms of ball park figures - I agree that infection rates in the hotspots are probably approaching those in London at peak - assuming all infections detected by PCR go on to develop detectable seroprevalance (bit of an unknown?  But now we're catching lots of mild/asymptomatic cases in this rising phase with PCR that data could be filled in over the next 9 months) .

The big differences this time round I think are:

1. Infection appears largely in the younger adult ages- figure 5 in the ONS data [1].  This puts healthcare overload far further down the exponential growth than back in March/April.
2. High infection rates are much more localised in different areas, which means that local public health teams and local contact tracing should be able to put a lid on them, and the healthcare overload doesn't come in to force as there's a capacity in the surrounding areas.

I'm still holding of panic for now - we don't yet know what kind of scale of local flare up we're going to see before they get contained again.  I'm not happy - this is way too much spread and the systems (e.g. test and trace) that are supposed to help fix it are sometimes shambolic (with the news the the 20,000 delayed covid cases did not go in to test and trace...).  Is this what whack-a-mole looks like?  

Perhaps I am being too optimistic - the ratio of pillar 1 / pillar 2 cases estimate from Figure 1 in the latest PHE report isn't falling, and widespread infection in the young could be setting up a time bomb for everyone else if cases continue to grow.

The next key observations will be the Friday updates to the ONS and PHE reports which both have regional breakdown but independent data sets.  Both showed the North West and the East Midlands levelling off last Friday - if that continues this week or starts to drop and the North East shows a levelling off, we know that the local lockdowns are starting to work.  If those areas have growth, that's bad. 

In terms of the PHE MOSA data, there's a slippy map here - we're slowly being encircled by dark blue...

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=47574f7a6e454dc6a42c...

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/con...

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

There's only one explanation.

youtube.com/watch?v=JNwhB2D1YEc&

In reply to wercat:

If they did sanity checks they wouldn't have put Dido Harding in charge.

In reply to Misha:

If only we had a data science guru advising the government on how to collate and process data sets... 

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

The important issue is that it was picked up and then publically corrected.At least no attempt was made to hide the error. 

I do not expect Dido Harding to last long  assuming this comes under her remit.  Too many errors / bad publicity at the moment.  

In reply to Misha:

There are two parts to test and trace. One is as you describe. The other is a mobile testing unit showing up at a factory/apartment block and simply testing all employees/inhabitants. The latter is the one where typically a lot of "new" cases are found.

In reply to captain paranoia:

we've got something so much better though...a talentless baroness collating tax payers money straight into her bank account to accompany her business track record of being absolutely f%^&ing useless at everything she touches. 

In reply to wintertree:

That depends on your definition of ‘high’ and ’long’.

And I don’t think the 2 years is ‘how long the government expect the virus’ to be around. eg Cineworld have been in trouble for a few years but they continued to pay the bosses big bonuses and shareholders dividends. That’s the kind of viability the government are talking about. There’s a lot of high street names that are badly mismanaged. The taxpayer shouldn’t be bailing out those companies. 

In reply to neilh:

They were running at about 6k positive tests per day, and it was increasing so you'd think there'd be a bunch of people keeping a close eye on it.  You don't just not notice you've missed 16k positive tests when you are running at 6k a day unless you are absolutely incompetent.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/cases

In reply to neilh:

I suspect that the founder of Pizza Express has not been commenting on restaurant failures because of Covid-19. Peter Boizot died in 2018.

In reply to wintertree:

you'll like this: 'an Excel spreadsheet maxed out and wouldn't update'

makes you wonder if they are  doing all this without a database?!

In reply to groovejunkie:

Bit unfair. Talk talk was very good at providing access to data. They went above and beyond with open data.

In reply to groovejunkie:

Whilst I do not think she will last long as far as I can see from her business cv she only had one issue , the TalkTalk fiasco. 
 

Perhaps you can expand on the other failures before making such a sweeping generalisation. 
 

personnally I would prefer somebody in charge with a public health background. 

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

It was picked up. All those figures are provisional. They’re not making decisions on one or two days worth of data. The media want values, it sells papers and advertising, and that’s why we had that mess in April. The figures take 2 weeks to collate but the media wanted them day+1. So they were given something that gave in indication whether deaths were rising or falling.  

In reply to wintertree:

I'm in Manchester, now month three of extended restrictions but struggle to see what difference it has really made (hopefully you are right that it is finally plateauing) in that you can still (now) meet five mates in a packed pub, five different mates tomorrow etc etc. but you can't sit in their garden or go in their house. I suspect after a few bevvies people have largely been ignoring the latter.

What I'm really suspicious of though is the place of infection data, claiming only 4% of infections came from hospitality. 

With recent science suggesting the virus is airborne in poorly ventilated places for up to 4 hours, the lag time from infection to symptoms, peoples behaviour after a drink and a car crash track n trace system - can it really only be 4% or are they are entirely cooking the books because pubs and restaurants have tills in them. 

I dont want pubs and restaurants to shut down, I really don't but I find this figure almost impossible to believe. Where have the hundreds of thousands of students all been drinking and partying recently for example? A students union bar is a hospitality venue, they will have also been out in community venues. 

In reply to groovejunkie:

 

’only’ that’s 1 in 25. If you take those 6 people in the pub and send them home to a family of 4 you get 6 cases of 24 occurred in the pub. The 24 technically stemmed from the pub but you should be able to see how ‘only’ is quite a significant factor. 

In reply to malk:

No, no I do not like it.  I would go on a rant about how can an entire system be so f*****g incompetent but I’ve done that a lot already.

Look at the plots in any PHE surveillance report - compare week to week things like precise sizes, resolution, and so on.  Does it look like  it’s coming out of an automated pipeline or from someone pratting about in Excel, and copy/pasting plots in to a Word document (as bitmaps not PDFs so not even a minimally competent job).

I have built a lot of automated reporting pipelines.  The people I work with tend to see it as an efficiency thing, but really it’s about assured data quality driven by consistency and absence of erratic human error along with a documented, readable and reviewable workflow is the real reason.

By assured quality I mean the outputs of the analysis and reporting pipeline reflect the inputs accurately.  Inputs also get sanity checked...

I genuinely think I could to a better job given a pick of 2 people from my network than this.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

What's the point in Covid test figures that take two weeks to collate? 

They are also admitting contact tracing may have been delayed for up to a week because of losing the data.

If they can't get accurate figures fast enough to take action based on them they aren't fit for purpose.  It isn't rocket science for a computerised system to update quickly.

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

 

Sorry. I was talking about the death figures from April. That wasn’t clear in my post.

In reply to wintertree:

The data you see will be on an Excel sheet as we previously explained in another thread. It’s the global standard software everyone uses. It means you or I can go to the ONS and get the xls data rather than having to have a server and sql. 

In reply to wintertree:

 

Do either you or your two picks donate regularly to the tories?

If so you lack a vital qualification.

In reply to neilh:

Yes, she 100% should have a public health background, all the more troubling that she is now the inaugural chair of the "national institute for health protection" awarded to her by the ever so talented Mr. Hancock last month.

Perhaps it was a sweeping generalisation and she was amazing at Mckinsey, Sainsburys etc. Perhaps she also brought nothing to party, she certainly moved fairly often. To be honest I don't care, what I do care about is:

She was given the track and trace job because she is a peer, wife to a tory MP and she has links to the bank of England. It was a corrupt "keep it in the family" appointment and the end result seems to be every bit as impressive as the talk talk shambles (which cost the company 60 million pounds and 95 000 customers).

She was involved in the decision making behind the original app (which never materialised) and she is also a member of the jockey club and sat on the board of Cheltenham race course - the gold cup being an event back in march that no-one in their right mind would have let go ahead. Perhaps she helped influence that brilliant decision too? I don't know, needless to say I'm not a fan. 

   

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Who is this "we"?

If it was xls then chances are this would have been noticed a lot earlier. Maybe you meant xlsx which doesnt give faith in your knowledge in this area.

Excel formats are okayish but obvious lockout quite a few users and also have some really bloody annoying "helpful" formatting issues which can badly corrupt data. As such I am not a fan of them as a means of transferring data.

The other key bit is "transferring" data. It isnt how you should be holding data which, from the sounds of it they probably were doing. Since no daily feed would break the limits is sounds like they were combining them into an excel worksheet and its that point that a proper db wins.

In reply to mondite:

 

Seriously? 
 

I meant xls. Do some research. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

I'm not suggesting for a second that 4% is an insignificant amount, my point is that if six people meet in the pub, get Covid and infect their families (in your example making 24 cases) this is logged as 6 infections in the pub and the rest as household transmission which keeps the hospitality number looking lower than the impact it really has. As you say, technically all 24 cases stemmed from the pub.

lies, damn lies and statistics and all that!

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Well done for demonstrating you are completely unqualified to take part in any serious discussion around how to manage data.

xls was replaced by xlsx back in 2007. Amongst the significant changes in this was the increase from 65536 to 1048576 records. As above though I am not a fan of either for data transfer. It excludes a lot of users and can corrupt data. I have had several painful conversations with people trying to explain to them just what *dd/mm/yyyy actually means and why you therefore need to be careful around data conversion routines.

I think the government (and many other governments) are still experimenting with controls.  The problem is that it's a moveable feast - what works in summer when nature is helping isn't what works in winter. What works at a low prevalence level doesn't work at high level. What works for the young doesn't work for the vulnerable. What works in London doesn't work in Dartmoor. Etc.etc.

  There's also the problem of not having a goal, or changing the goal. The original goal was 'don't crash the NHS' and keep the infection rate just below the crash level, but it would appear that it's impossible to do that for all the reasons above, and thus the infection level needs to be kept down, and this means the restrictions hit the economy harder than originally anticipated.  I also think people thought it would be 'over' much quicker than it is and consequently accepted the 'we'll have to live with it' hypothesis.  I bet if you asked people if they wanted to go for elimination and subsequent strong border control instead they'd take that option.
 

In reply to groovejunkie:

Statistics are statistics. They don’t lie. 
 

It’s down to people to interpret them and look at why they’re as they are. 
 

There could be a sub-categories of household transmission between households and within households. But I’m not entirely sure how much data we are getting for the releases. There’s a fine line between easily digestible data, and data overload. I suspect the test and trace people are getting a good feel of whether that 4% is  actually leading to a significant of household transmissions or not. My guess it is, but not the majority. My experience of looking at Facebook is of people expanding their ‘bubbles’ to several families and clearly with families that have more than one adult. People having parties in their houses with no social distancing. 
 

Shutting the pubs early local to me has had an effect. Anecdotal, but I’ve been to the pub once since they changed the rules, and had to sit outside on my own. I will not going again for a while.

In reply to mondite:

You’d better tell the government that then. 
 

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriage...

In reply to DancingOnRock:

I dont think I need to since the majority of their data is in xlsx. Looks like you found an anomalous one from this year in xls with most being older. Odd you didnt question it and its obvious limitations for larger datasets.

In reply to mondite:

seems like they were adding cases as excel columns as they are limited to ~16000 - same as missing cases..

In reply to mondite:

It’s not odd at all. 
 

What’s odd is your pedantic posts claiming I don’t know what I’m talking about just because I said .xls

The mind boggles. 
 

Next time I’ll be sure to list all the formats that the ONS use to ensure that you don’t get so confused. 
 

But in the mean time please assure yourself I am familiar with xls, xlsx, xlsm, csv, sql, pdf files etc. 

In reply to mondite:

You might be on to something here.

I just asked my collection of daily "by specimen date" files "how many cases were there in the 7-days leading up to this mess before the backlog was drained".  

Answer: 50,306

If they use one pre-2008 Excel file per week, we just hit the point where it would shit the bed when the intern tried to paste one file in to another to merge rows.  That's probably why it took until 8 pm to get the data out - try and update Excel, find you have to install a bunch of Windows updates, several reboots later...

Well done I would say for demonstrating how they talk totally apparently authoritatively about something without having a clue.  

In reply to mondite:

Trick question.

There are no Tories left in cabinet.  

In reply to Removed User:

Greater Manc figures in this morning:  over 1,000 new cases in Manchester, similar Liverpool, most other Boroughs are in the 100's.  This data is NOT artificially high due to the mistake - that has been rectified (or so we are led to believe),  so this new data suggests cases are going ballistically upwards.

In reply to wintertree:

Hmm. That wouldnt strike me as likely just because of the sheer hassle of keeping an old copy of excel running. I gave up a while back even keeping 2007 alive. Maybe someone really hated the ribbon?

I guess it could just be using xls behind the scenes and so being even more an arse to update but why use that and not a decent cross platform format?

In reply to DancingOnRock:

Who is "we"?  I have never seen the data that lies at the root of this total clusterfudge - and nor I suspect has anyone else posting here.  It's not publicly released data. 

The data that I get from the government dashboard is in a plain text file with values separated by commas and rows separated by newline characters.  This is often called a .CSV file.  

Excel is not a "standard".  It's in common use, but it's not a standard.  It's anything but...  I send data to customers in CSV files.  I've sent CSV files to collaborators globally.  When I download data from the government coronavirus dashboard, the choices are CSV, JSON or XML.  None of these are Excel.  There is no choice for Excel.  There is no Excel there.  

The data comes from a server whenever I go to a website.  It's quite likely the file comes to me via SQL as part of the web server architecture.  The data itself is embedded in a file stored somewhere it seems.  ONS use Excel data in .xlsx format not .xls as you repeatedly insisted.

Your understanding of this subject seems so poor I'm not sure you can correctly interpret my post.  I'll simplify it:

• When processing regular updates to data,
  • Using a manual workflow based around manually munging data between spreadsheets is bad, mkay.  It's error prone, unreliable and difficult to quality control or audit.
  • Using an automated pipeline that ingests, collates and outputs data is consistent, and can be quality controlled and audited.
  • Excel is a crap tool and .xlsx is a crap file format for building automated pipelines
  • Excel can be used reasonably safely as the output from automated pipelines for summary level data
  • The problem here isn’t - as you intimate - in the file formats used to communicate with us the public but in the back end architecture in the pipeline.  Using excel format files for data transfer and interchange in an analysis and reporting pipeline is begging for this sort of thing to happen.

Hitting row or file size limits in Excel is utterly inexcusable but about what I'd expect from the cockwombles who also failed to predict test and trace reaching capacity despite two lines heading right for each other on the plot of capacity vs tests for 4 months.

Before anyone claims I'm deplyoing hindsight, here's a rant from me last Thursday about the dangers of mission creep with Excel...

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/the_pub/exponentially_speaking-725780?v=1...

In reply to mondite:

I'm probably wrong by this point - but it's not just about the limitations in the version of the software but the limitations of the file format; it's possible they're using an out dated file format like .xls because some other part of their analysis and reporting pipeline was written 10+ years ago using it.

In reply to mick taylor:

Do you get your morning updates from some internal system or is it online?  If it's internal, can you get any insight into how much of the city cases are university related (or not)?

It's really bad news if the local lockdown restrictions aren't keeping a lid on numbers beyond the university madness.   That only really leaves enhanced enforcement or much stricter lockdown on the table.

In reply to wintertree:

Likewise, I'd be very keen to know how much (or little) of this is University related. A friend of mine's son started at Liverpool this term. He's been tested this weekend as his other five flatmates have all tested positive and a girl he "met" last week has also tested positive. 

In reply to wintertree:

I would be impressed if they had kept it going that long. Would be nice to see a proper post mortem on it but I doubt it will see the light of day.

In reply to Toerag:

Agreed.  Easily overlooked but critical - having a shared goal and a path to it is - I naively assume - one of the pillars for a competent messaging strategy that engages as many people as possible in adhering to the regime needed to get to that goal.  

I don't know, six months of frustration has cranked reception of misinformation up to the max for many people - and I have every sympathy for why they're so fed up and so receptive to this.  

In reply to wintertree:

That may well be all true. But you’re both missing the point. csv and sql won’t be being emailed around government departments. For the simple reason as they’re pure data formats and then relies on everyone trying to analyse the data themselves. 
 

If you want to show your data in a format that everyone can understand, you need a graph. And Excel is the way it’s done. 
 

If I emailed my client a csv file he’d laugh at me and ask for a graph. 
 

Stop getting bogged down in the difference between xls and xlsx. It may well be the issue of the missing data, but it doesn’t change the reason why the data is presented using Excel. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

No.  You are missing multiple points.  Here we go again...

This was not data for "everyone to understand".  This was low level data that was being gathered by A and sent from A to B, not for B to navel gaze at, but for B to ingest into a data pipeline as an input, the outputs of which are designed for institutional and public dissemination and comprehension. 

The issue appears to be that an Excel file format was being used for the interchange of low level data at the input stages of a pipeline that gathers, collates and reduces low level data in to high level analysis. The reasons you give for using Excel do not apply to this level of data collation and dissemination.   I'll bet £50 that the offending files were little more than a grid of headers and numbers, with no graphs in.

I send both - graphs to look at, and .csv files for them to do with as they please.  Exactly like the Government covid dashboard which shows graphs and offers downloads of .CSV files despite your repeat insistence that everyone uses excel.

I'm not bogged down in that, I'm bogged down in the way you undermined any credibility by dismissing mondite bay saying "Seriously? I meant xls. Do some research. " when mondite was correctly correcting you that nobody uses .xls and it's been out of date for 13 years.

The final presentation being done with Excel with week-to-week variation in plot formatting does however indicate that the pipeline is very manual, and I have already explained the problems I have with manual pipelines in situations such as this.

I'll note that the plots on the government covid dashboard also aren't made with Excel...  In terms of bulk analysis and reporting, a lot of Excel plots are a becoming warning signs that no sort of professional approach is being used.  I mean, finding 16,000 cases down the back of the sofa and critically not sending 9 days old cases for contact tracing is an even bigger warning sign - especially as this appears to have hit the North West hard, were cases were holding steady.

In reply:

Excel top trending on twitter

In reply to malk:

Until it hits 16,000 posts...

In reply to wintertree:

Hospitalisation rates still seem remarkably linear?

In reply to wintertree:

Yes. You’re still missing the point. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

No I’m not.

Excel is not an appropriate format for interchanging large volumes of low level data.

This has absolutely nothing to do with your points about how to present data to humans for them to interpret.  This is about the routine daily transfer of large quantities of low level, batched data between systems.  Excel is a poor choice of file format and a poor choice of tool for that - as this very cockup makes clear.

Nothing you have written gives any reason why excel is an appropriate tool for the regular, batched transfer of low level (per-speciment) data from one system to another.

You are still missing the point.

In reply to wintertree:

There is £10 Billion of funding for test and trace.   You'd think that would be enough to hire a few software engineers and maybe even do some testing.

https://www.nhsconfed.org/resources/2020/07/summer-statement

In reply to Removed User:

Certainly sub exponential.    Optimistically it could be the university effect (growth at an age that doesn’t hospitalise much), realistically it could be partly down to lag, pessimistically perhaps they’ve lost a bunch of hospitalisation data too.  Deaths are also growing sub exponential at the moment which aligns with hospitalisation.

What happens next really depends critically on the demographic of the spiking infection rates.

In reply to wintertree:

Get my info from local papers:

https://www.wigantoday.net/health/coronavirus/every-confirmed-case-coronavi...

Local papers from nearby towns all have the exact same info (probably owned by same company).  The fact the Liverpool and Manchester Boroughs have had such big increases (compared to neighbouring Boroughs) indicates student transmission is a massive factor.  So long as they don't spread it to vulnerable groups.......

 ''That only really leaves enhanced enforcement or much stricter lockdown on the table.''

That's what I think.  Local measures look to have slowed the rate of increase down (Bolton and Oldhams rate did start slowing down and even started to go into reverse gear) but the actual number of cases is now high.

In reply to wintertree:

Is there an easy access web source for cases/hospitalisations/deaths split by demographic? I am sure I saw somewhere similar trends across all demographics (except 2-6 years old) although the magnitude rates were different for each demographic.

This does not go far in explaining why hospitalisation appears to remain linear (does not even look quadratic to me). Your interpretation suggests that hospitalisation numbers should primarily be determined by the trend in elderly cases, with a lag (some variance in this aspect adding noise). It's not clear to me this is what is playing out.

In reply to wintertree: lol

twatter has informed me that xls workbooks have 256 columns -one for each day of pandemic- almost will be interesting to see the date-corrected cases graph..

In reply to Removed User:

The ONS Infection Survey Pilot has cases broken down by age - Figure 5 is in the latest edition [1] is quite compelling that cases are heavily weighted towards younger people, more so when you consider the rapid reduction in population for > 70 years of age.

The PHE Surveillance Report is giving more detail on cases - Figure 2 and Figure 14 in the latest edition [1].  Figure 14 is pixelated almost as much as the face of an SAS bloke on Top Gear, but if you squint you can probably read the legends.

The NHS Covid-19 Daily Deaths page gives a demographic breakdown for deaths in England inside the daily download [3] - which is a .xlsx file so badly formatted as to be maddening and which shows most deaths to be aged 60+.

The NHS COVID-19 Hospital Activity page [4] has a "Daily Admissions" download which doesn't have age ranges, but does separate admissions from the community and from care homes.  The file "September 2020 COVID Publication" has demographics for admissions and discharges scattered over many tabs in a maddening format.  This is updated to 2nd September only and I assume another update is due soon, but I haven't been watching it to understand the reporting lag from the end of a reporting period.

The data currently in [4] is almost useless to our present situation as it ends a few weeks too soon.  The update will be relevant to your question, but to madden and annoy you, each data source uses a different set of age bins.  

Also maddening is that although it takes a while to appear, there's better numerical-source separated by age data for admissions and deaths (given by age bin per day) than for detected cases (best I've found is tatty plots in PHE reports).  Between this and the mismatch in age-bins in the different data sources I gave up about a month ago on the idea of visualising the flow through these three metrics with demographic breakdown.  Which is a shame, because the data exists somewhere and a visualisation of a flow through the detection>hospitalisation>death pipeline broken down by demographics would be really helpful to understand more about what is going on,  and which is why I'm not so sold on my current position and all for having it questioned to shreds.

[1] - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/con...

[2] - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...

[3] - https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily...

[4] - https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-hospi...

In reply to Removed User:

Was trying to reply to Nick B but can't see his post.

This graph for Manchester LA area is startling.  You can see a slight dip in August when local measures started to impact, then things went belly up.  But as you say, hospitalisations are not increasing at anywhere near the same rate, which is kinda good (although the next week or so will be telling)

In reply to wintertree:

You might want to re-check your stats sources are fully up to date - last night worldometers had added a load of cases going back as far as the 23rd Sept., I've just looked again and they've added even more.

In reply to Toerag:

These were the 'missing cases', which may explain worldometers amending their numbers..

– 957 cases on September 25, when the original figure given was 6,874
– 744 on September 26, when the original figure given was 6,042
– 757 on September 27, when the original figure given was 5,693
– none on September 28, when the original figure given was 4,044
– 1,415 on September 29, when the original figure given was 7,143
– 3,049 on September 30, when the original figure given was 7,108
– 4,133 on October 1, when the original figure given was 6,914
– 4,786 on October 2, when the original figure given was 6,968

In reply to Toerag:

Yesterday's data dump is in my most recent plots upthread.  The latest updates just in on the government dashboard landed at 4 pm today - this data has added a few cases going back up to 12 days ago (right plot) but is less drastic than yesterday's.  Cases are rising faster than a recent exponential trend (left plot) and data for the recent rise is still provisional.

In reply to Toerag:

The disparity between measures continues.  Cases are rising exponentially (soon to be above exponentially when the provisional data firms up and feeds in to this plot), admissions look pretty linear, and deaths are levelling off.  Updated plots below with consistent y-axis for doubling times.

Comparative doubling times are shown in the final plot.  If it is a demographic shift separating them we're on thin ice if "demographic containment" fails.  If it's down to lag, we're doomed when it feeds through.  Clearly a lot more going on than this data shows.

In reply to wintertree:

Without wanting to kick off the arguments up thread again, what I've just heard on radio 5 is that the use in PHE of the xls file format in some of their systems rather than xlsx was *exactly* the reason for what has happened.

I would dispute what someone said up thread about xls being too hard to maintain for that to be realistic, since everywhere I have worked xls has been more common than xlsx. I have never had a machine more modern than windows 2007 (although that is about to change): government related systems witg additional bespoke security requirements always upgrade extremely late. It's not at all surprising that PHE was still using xls, doc etc. 

In reply to Si dH:

There's no argument up thread in my view, there's multiple posters pointing out the pratfalls of using Excel as a file format for routine, large scale data interchange - and it seems in hindsight getting it spot on, and someone who is confusing the middle part of a data pipeline with end user reporting...

Facepalm.  Did they clarify if the problem was the limited number of columns or rows?  Several enquiring minds on this thread want to know...

Indeed - and modern excel still saves .xls if told to; it only takes one weak link in the chain for everyone to standardise.  What is more maddening is that Excel is being used as part of a workflow for aggregating and onwards reporting of specimen level data.  I just can't believe this is turtles, sorry Excel, all the way down - there must be some database in there somewhere, so it's possible that .xls is used as an export format from an internal database so there's no need for anyone to ever run a pre-2008 version of Excel. 

In reply to Si dH:

I think the real issue is wondering why the hell is this data being pissed about with on spreadsheets instead of within a database. It seems like insanity or incompetence. Or both.

In reply to Si dH:

More details here.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/excel-glitch-may-have-caused-uk...

Apparently the data was supplied as a .CSV file to PHE, despite another poster’s insistence that .XLS is the global standard.

PHE then open this in Excel, presumably to summate it etc.  Excel truncates the file - presumably silently.

Best guess is that these are files of specimen data both positive and negative if the article is true, and the one million limit was hit with the recent rushed expansion of pillar 2 capacity to meet the long predictable demand.

This horrifies me as it strongly implies using a Excel as part of a manual data analysis pipeline.  Not only is Excel an utterly unsuitable tool for this sort of work, but routine manual ingestion of data with any tool is also very error prone.

In reply to Removed User:

It’s okay, they’ve found a solution.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54423988

“To handle the problem, PHE is now breaking down the test result data into smaller batches to create a larger number of Excel templates. That should ensure none hit their cap.”

Problem:  our shitty pipeline using shitty file formats is truncating long files.

Solution: add an additional shitty step of breaking up long files.

In reply to wintertree:

Surely any informatics graduate could knock up a script to parse csv data, do some basic data validation aand upload onto a fecking database in about, say a week, including some actual testing?

In reply to Removed User:

These discussions aren’t the same without other posters popping up to accuse me of being an armchair expert.

But, yes, it’s a f*****g 6 hour job extended to a week by a test suite and documentation.

Well, unless they database is a creaking pile of excel macros and a prayer... 

In reply to wintertree:

 

You’re still missing the point.

Oh no. You’ve finally got it. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

No, you are still missing the point.

You’re trying to win this argument with your view that excel is the appropriate tool, by agreeing with my point that by using Excel to ingest the file they’ve been silently throwing away data and not realising it and breaking contact tracing?

I don’t think you have thought this through.

I build automated data analysis pipelines for a living.  I’ve done it for 15 years one way or another.  Excel is in no way the appropriate tool to bridge between incoming plain text data and a database.  Half a dozen other posters have said this.  About 50 IT people say as much on the arstechnica article I linked.  There’re professors of this stuff saying as much on the BBC article,

I thought you chose a ludicrous hill to die on with cummings testing his eyesight by driving to Barnard castle, but this one is more ludicrous.  They didn’t put 16,000 cases mostly from hotspot regions with above exponential case growth into contact tracing specifically precisely because they used excel to manually bridge different automated systems.  Limitations in excel or it’s file format silently broke the process.  Excel is not the appropriate tool for any stage in the middle of an automated reporting pipeline.

Perhaps with the work you do you can’t conceive of another way of bridging plain text files in to a database.  I suggest that’s a limitation on your part; there’s no shortage of informed posters on this thread and the other one in the pub with a counter-view.

Nobody disagrees with you that excel is an appropriate way to circulate simple data and plots for viewing and interpretation.  This issue however is about the moving tens of thousands of records from one database to another every single day.  Use The Right Tool For The Right Job.

This is incompetence pure and simple.

In reply to Removed User:

I'm using this for hospital admissions. You can break down by age 0-18, 19-69, 70+. It only does admissions & triage per CCG - no deaths figures and no confirmed diagnoses.

https://digital.nhs.uk/dashboards/nhs-pathways

In reply to Removed User:

I have a PhD in Computer Science and for the cut price of £5 billion I will volunteer to take on the task, arduous as it might be.  For an extra billion I will hire my friend to test the code.

In reply to DancingOnRock:

How many petabytes of data do you process per week.. ?

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/the_pub/exponentially_speaking-725780?v=1...

In reply to tom_in_edinburgh:

Amateur.

Here are the qualifications that count.

I have watched a few ted talks about big data and am willing to read cummings spaffing about technology and say "oh wise one" (actually make it ten billion for that)

Plus I am willing to pretend I believed in brexit (okay 15 billion) and even pay to play a game of tennis with Johnson (f*ck it not enough cash in the universe).

In reply to wintertree:

One of the concerns is that people who are asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic would have a weak immune response and thus could get it again after a period of time. This is the issue with herd immunity with this particular virus. My understanding is that its closest relative is the common cold and there’s no herd immunity to they for this very reason... I’m not an immunologist so this is probably a gross oversimplification but from what I’ve read this seems to be one of the (potential) issues. 

In reply to wintertree:

I use excel on a daily basis and it’s a great tool for my simple purposes but it’s very easy to get errors by not adding up a row or linking the wrong cell. Anyone who uses excel knows that. To use it as a link in something so important and with so much data is a bit crazy. 

In reply to captain paranoia:

You need data science gurus but you also need people who look at the output, apply common sense and say “this doesn’t look right”. I suspect some of the people using the data were seeing what they wanted to see. Still, someone must have asked questions, otherwise presumably the error won’t have been picked up for even longer. 

In reply to Misha:

I was taking the piss: I think Scummings is an idiot, not a 'data science guru'.

In reply to wintertree:

 

No I’m not. I’m trying to point out that the government are using excel to circulate data in a format that they can all read on a basic PC. 
 

Why are you continually writing pages of tosh, rather than trying to understand the point? 
 

I’m not trying to win any arguments. 
 

I was even laughed at when I pointed out the ONS were using XLS files. 
 

You lot are so wrapped up in your own worlds you’re not considering what’s going on outside with the data you provide.

Petabytes of data? Who presents petabytes of information to management? They’re only interested in easily understood graphs. 

Bespoke software packages? Who is going to install all this software and teach everyone how to use it. A school leaver can use Excel. 
 

Step into the real world. 

In reply to DancingOnRock:

You don’t know what you’re talking about.  The data wasn’t circulated in excel format it was circulated in CSV format.  The government weren’t using excel to circulate anything.  

Nobody is “reading” this data - it is being shoved straight from one database in to another.  The .xls format is being used to transport data.  Nobody is actually opening it in excel to “read it on a basic PC”.

Because you keep telling me I’m wrong briefly and dismissively when you apparently don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.  It’s not pages of tosh it’s explanations.  

Go take that up with the other poster.  It does however show how you think a user-facing download and an intermediate step in a data processing pipeline are in any way comparable when they’re totally different things.

Now you’re just trying to be offensive.  The data I provide is for people to interpret so it goes in people friendly formats.  The data provided to PHE was in a machine friendly format (CSV) and Excel was being used as a tool to shove it into another machine friendly format (some unspecified database).  It was the wrong tool for the job.

Where have I said I present petabytes of data to management?  I haven’t.  Are you confused?  I take petabytes of data a week, I process it down through various formats and produce graphs that are presented to customer.  

Do you understand that excel isn’t being used here to make graphs? It’s not.  It isn’t.  “Management” don’t look at the data concerned, it’s flowing from one database into another.  Management look at outputs of that second database.  The files concerned are not being used to present anything to any human.  They are being used to transform data records from CSV files and to present it to a database where it’s stored in a non excel format.  

Do you understand any of this?  

 > Bespoke software packages? Who is going to install all this software and teach everyone how to use it. A school leaver can use Excel.  

Because by using the right tool for the right job, 16,000 database records aren’t lost whilst nobody noticed for a week leading to 16,000 people not being contact tracked in the middle of a pandemic.

I am in the real world.  I’m also “qualified“ by dint of working in big data pipelines and having spent 15 years making, using and occasionally teaching pipelines as well has having a working knowledge of databases.  

Until this week I had imagined someone more competent and better equipped than your school leavers with a basic PC was behind the cases reporting system relied on it seems by both ministerial briefings and contact tracing.