UKH

My perspective on the situation in England...

We have an increasingly acknowledged policy of removing most remaining controls to hopefully achieve a hopefully achievable “minimal restrictions” herd immunity threshold  for society with minimal restrictions, effective against the new, highly transmissive variant. That’s a lot of people needing antibodies, and vaccination is running out of steam - at an impressively high level of engagement, and one that would I think have knocked old variants out of widespread circulation already.  

• Approve or disapprove of this policy and well how it has or has not been openly communicated and debated by parliament in advance, we have been committed to it by the government, and my repeatedly stated opinion has been that if this is deemed necessary (there’s a broad range of views on this from scientists and others, I tend to think it's the least worst option now we have the Indian or delta variant and its very high R0) that there was no compelling reason to rush the release of further restrictions, rather than taking a progressive approach to give time to respond to a reasonable worst case rise in infection, in order to preserve healthcare.
• Freedom day is 5 days behind us, and the consequences of it have not yet landed in any of the data. The first infections from the nightclubs that opened a minute after midnight are probably presenting for tests today, and it’s a few more days for that to be analysed, processed and reported…
• I fear it’s going to be right down to the wire, again, on healthcare.  If we come out on the better side of the range of possibilities, that will in no way retrospectively justified the lack of caution now in my opinion.

One wart in the machine for this update - Saturday's data update has not landed on the dashboard yet, with this message given "Because of technical difficulties in processing England deaths data, today's update is delayed."   I have been using the Saturday release of late because that has data through to Monday in the download I use for the demographic and UTLA level data, and the Monday data is needed to undo the biassing effects of low weekend sampling.  Most other downloads have data to Tuesday in by Saturday which further improves the sorting out of these issues on the leading edge.  So, no demographic or UTLA level plots today, and perhaps the leading edge of all the other plots is a bit more provisional than normal. 

We are where we are, so without further ado, I’ll get in to the plots and interpretation on that.

Link to previous thread: https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_35-...

Well - one bit of further ado: I’m sure we’ve all had enough of plots, so here’s a photo of my first Orchid, a result of diligently not mowing the lawn from May until August.  If anyone can identify it I’d be most grateful.
 

What The Heck Is Going On In England?

A rather long and verbose post that goes in to a lot of detail about what I think is happening in England right now.  I don’t think it helps us predict the near future much, so you might want to skip over it to the usual plots in further posts…

I have overhauled the PCR rate constants plot.  Changes:

• Expanded Y-axis range - there was one data point hiding above the top of the plot, sorry!
• Included all the bank holidays from Easter onwards
• Added a system for annotating events
• Changed the x-axis positioning of datapoint from the middle of the 7-day period they represent to the end date.

To recap how this plot works:

• For date X on this x-axis, measure:
  • A = PCR cases on date X
  • B =  PCR cases 7 days before date X
• The plot shows the fractional growth or decay between those dates (A/B) expressed as an exponential rate constant (left hand y-axis) and characteristic time (right hand y-axis).  The second y-axis is a reciprocal axis - that is, it’s value is a constant (natural log of 2) divided by the first y-axis value.  Whacky stuff but I like it.
• This is pretty insensitive to the day-of-week or weekend effect in the sampling data as the same weekday is used for both A and B.  No filtering or reassignment of cases based on day-of-week effects (my “deweekending”) is performed, it’s a very pure transformation of the cases data.
• I use PCR data only as this doesn’t have the term/not term swings and day-of-week effects seen in LFD testing associated with school terms etc.

My general interpretation of this plot:

• Cases were in decay up until April because we had strong control measures and progressive vaccination at a high rate - so a negative rate constant and a halving time.
• Between April and June, the decay turned to growth as control measures were dropped.
• In this period, the bank holidays start to land; testing is down on a bank holiday day;
  • This causes a “false” decay in the A measure in the ratio, leading to a lower exponential rate constant as the numerator in the fraction A/B is depressed.  I say “false” because whilst cases are an actuals number, it depresses their relation to infections.
  • Then, 7 days later that data forms the B measure in the ratio, leading to a falsely depressed denominator and a resultant high measure of rate constant.
  • The handy blue annotations link these points, and we can see that many of the locally extremal values on the plot.  So, I think when interpreting these plots it’s pretty safe to just move the low and high points in your mind by equal amounts, and then they generally fall close to the short term trends.
  • Keep in mind how a low value of cases on day X causes a lower rate constant on that day in this plot, then a higher one 7-days later…. (Note 1)
• The wobbles in rate constant over ~7 to 10 day timescales reflect real changes in the infection rate - not artefacts of measuring cases (testing), and they correlate strongly with changes in the Central England Temperature from the seasonal mean / recent temperatures.  When it’s hotter, transmission is less, and vice-versa.

Now, the interesting part….

• The vertical line marks the date of the Euros 2021 finale at Wembley.  We already know from news coverage that a big spike in Scottish cases coincided with their previous match….
• Despite the weather continuing to be on the hot side in the days after the match, we see two days with very short doubling times (rapid growth).  These are 4 and 5 days after the match.  They are annotated by purple circles on the plot.  Looking at the gender of cases [1] those days are standout days for way more male than female cases; another shared characteristic with the Scottish event.  I’m taking it as read that this is a massive spike in cases due to the football…
• Now, this is really interesting, because it was such a brief event in time that the downstream cases (the people those cases and undetected but infected/infectious people from the same event) went on to infect haven’t landed yet in the data…..
  • So, more growth is likely coming form this ~4-5 days downstream of the case detections as second generation infections come in.  This will be more blurred out (landing over more days with less height and more width), desynchronised and merging in to the baseline.
  • In the same away an anomalous low cases number causes a low-then-high pattern over 7 days in this (recall note 1 above), an anomalous high day (from the unusual concentration of the football spike vs the more blurred out downstream cases, both added to the baseline) will probably cause a high-then-low pattern over 7 days... 
• The dashed purple lines show when this lowballing of the measured rate constant and doubling time might happen
• Now, the red line shows “Freedom Day” in England, and the red circles sit on the x-axis 3 and 4 days downstream of that; these are dates when I’d expected cases caused on Freedom day to start showing up in this plot.  I took the 4 and 5 day lags from the football spike as an indicator of how an event might translate at present, and subtracted a day, because the match was in the evening but the local nightclubs opened their doors at 12.01 am on freedom day (to mile long queues according to some rather sensational reporting)
• So, we’ve got lots of conflation going on in the data when the effects of Freedom day lands in the data.
  • The worst bit is that the second generation of infections from the football spike would have just been hitting an infectious state as Freedom day landed, let’s just hope they were all still to hungover to go clubbing…

Now, the really interesting part…

In the last 4 days of mostly non-provisional, the exponential rate constant for England has fallen off a cliff and is now in decay.  This compares data 7 days apart, and this is currently comparing days after the football spike with corresponding weekdays before it, so it not currently biassed by the presence of the spike, unlike a simple cases vs time plot where a spike can absolutely mask underlying growth and lead to a deceptive peak and subsequent decrease.  The dashed purple annotations show the days on this plot that might have a measure biassed low by the football spike.

So, what’s causing this decay of cases?

• Lots of theories covered in the past thread ranging from pessimism to optimism.  I don’t have enough information or skill to test any of them in a quantifiable way.
  • One “pessimism” point that occurred to me yesterday watching the return of a near constant stream of jetliners to the sky…   We’ve talked about then umber of people self isolating (order 0.6m) and the likely small effect this has on R right now.  But how many people are leaving the UK on all these aircraft and removing themselves from both testing and local transmission?  A quick google didn’t produce any sensible estimates….
• My hunch is that we’re seeing us reach the herd immunity threshold for the pre-freedom day level of restrictions combined with the amazing weather.  I’ve generally come to trust the cases data as a barometer of infections; confounding factors like engagement with the system seem to change more slowly than real changes to the rate constant of infections as embodied in cases.  It’s also got a good correspondence to the temperature data IMO - looking at the raw data points beyond the trendline on the weather plot.
• If this is the case, it’s big news IMO - a real sign that the end is (was) in sight, and also a welcome period of grace before freedom day in terms of locked in hospitalisations.
• It’s hard to imagine we’re not heading back for growth following freedom day however
  • The Netherlands had something like a 600% week-on-week growth in cases following their analogous day and with similar levels of vaccination; this corresponds to an exponential rate constant of ~0.26 / day and a doubling time of 2.7 days.   Given our already high level of cases and the observations in past waves of high cases apparently auto-moderating growth at a local level, and given how saturated testing would be if we had a 600% growth from our already high baseline, I’ll be very surprised if we measure that much of a rise in England
• The heatwave has broken…
• But, if we had reached the fair-weather herd immunity threshold before freedom day, perhaps the next threshold for average-weather post-freedom isn’t so far off. 
  • However if there is a giant rise to the baseline level of cases in the next few days of data, allowing the situation to continue and waiting to see if the new thresholds emerges soon would be a very, very bad idea given where hospital admissions are likely to be with hospitalisations “locked in” by the rising baseline, and where those measures are already.
  • It feels to me like a game of Policy Chicken could be emerging - who will swerve first, cabinet or cases?  For all concerned I hope the more optimistic scenarios come to be and we don't have to face that.  

Several different threads have had front line reports from healthcare workers this last week, and it’s clear that crisis point is once again looming amidst all this uncertainty.  Of the three times a reluctant approach to control measures has set healthcare on a path to catastrophic overload, this is the first time IMO that there’ve been measurable odds that it won’t get really, really bad in healthcare.  I wish we’d gone for a more progressive release of the measures dropped on Monday to improve our ability to control the situation.  It’s to late for that, so my wishes are with all the people carrying the brunt of whatever may be coming.

So, that’s my best stab at understanding where we are and what sort of ting to expect.  There are so many different things going on at once that it feels like almost anything is possible.  Now, we wait.

[1] https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_35-...

31,795 cases today. 

Scottish  cases turned to decay several weeks ago, and the decay is accelerating it seems to me

• It doesn't look fixed-rate exponential to me, as we'd expect from restrictions setting R<1 against a mostly susceptible population.
• Perhaps this is the Gaussian-like logistic distribution, the result of getting close to the immunity thresholds where the susceptible pool is shrinking appreciably.

I can’t put a quantitative test on that mind you, it’s just my interpretation; really another week of data is needed to claret differentiate the two possibilities; but "level 0 day" will be landing.

The hospital admissions look to be accelerating in their decay as well now, a really strong confirmation that what is seen in cases is a real reflection of what's happening with infections.

A key point to keep in mind for the England post - reading off the axis crossing from plot 9s admissions and deaths turned to decay ~10 days after cases.  

All downstream measures - hospital admissions and occupancy and deaths are in to decay.

What's going to happen after "level 0 day" lands in the data?  My best guess (which isn't very good) is that the decay of cases is going to slacken but not fail. and that the other measures will therefore remain in decay.  There's ~3 weeks of vaccination and infection between cases turning to decay and the dropping of more restrictions, and that dropping is more cautious than in England.

English cases have unambiguously turned to decay, as I went in to in the earlier post, this seems unlikely to last with freedom day and the 2nd generation of infections from the “football spike” due to land. 

• Lots of different views on the previous thread about if this reflects a real decay in infections; personally in the absence of proper evidence I’ve got the faith. 
• If it takes ~10 days for this turning point to translate to hospital admissions (as noted from the recent data on Scotland), we’ve got another 7 days or so to wait before that comes through in the data, assuming the likely coming growth doesn’t wipe it out in hospitalisations; I think it’ll show through.  The gods know any slack will be appreciated and soften the blow of what many fear is coming.

Doubling time for admissions is slackening off a bit on the far right of plot 9e, tentatively preparing to follow what we’ve seen in cases. 

• As always, the right most part of this plot is highly provisional as cases and deaths are subject to updates (admissions not so much), and as these are filtered trendiness that will adapt to future days of data.

Deaths are moving to a faster exponential rate (shorter doubling time); perhaps this is related to the demographic shift going in to a very mild reverse as the big spike in ages 20-25 collapses down to peg the more general rates; more infections are now in older people.  Perhaps it's something else; I wouldn't expect the exponential rate to keep increasing much after today for deaths, if it does, something is going wrong somewhere.  No demographic plots today as previously noted.

The four nations plots.

Scotland, then Wales, then England have all turned to decay in cases with followthrough to healthcare metrics clear for Scotland, and perhaps expected for Wales and England soon - other than for the minor details around football and freedom day in England…  If you had an optimistic hat on, the cases curve for Northern Ireland is starting to level off.

Thanks again.

Good effort on the orchid. I've been leaving quarter of my lawn for a couple of years. No orchids. Lots of frogs!

The Lissajous Plots

Scotland - nicely shows how deaths and admissions are now in decay, lagged from cases.  Both types of occupancy have ceased rising and are preparing for decay, depending on how their “level 0 day” pans out

• Occupancy is dropping already on plot 7.2s, but the data is much more heavily filtered for these 2d plots which delays when the drop shows through.  The reason for this is that noise on a plot of one measure vs time is filtered out well by your eye, but on a plot of two measures vs each other it becomes catastrophic to the human eye, and what emerges without heavy filtering looks like a graph drawn by hand during an earthquake

England - North West - Cases are in decline and more importantly the plots look to be “turning the corner” with both admissions and occupancy slowing their (vertical axis) rise; this starts forming the loops that turn these plots in to decay on both axes.  This is strong support for the decay in cases being derived from a decay in infections and not conflating factors.  What happens next when freedom day lands in the data is anyones guess.

England - London - cases are decaying but the other measures haven’t yet turned the corner - they probably don’t have time to do so much before freedom day lands in the data.

England - not unsurprisingly somewhere between its different regions 

The rising phase of this wave and the last wave remain separated as a result of improvements in the situation made by vaccination.  Some of the current wave's curves decay phases (blue) are going to cross the last wave's rising phases (purple).  This means that at that instant in time, the values of both cases/day and the other measure are going to be the same as for the last wave.  Presented in isolation that would suggest the vaccines are not making a difference, but it's an effect of the lag between measures; the key thing is that the decay phase of the new wave is not crossing the decay phase of the last wave - these remain well separated.  

A Somewhat Off Topic Rant

I've assembled a review of my posts in the words of another poster. It's hard to say who they are because they've been cropping up behind an array of ever changing user accounts, some apparently created over half a decade in advance of their activation... Their words are in italics.

This is the place where you can get your “rubbish predictions” from a “pseudo-expert” who is convinced of everything with “absolute certainties” and “never questions themselves”.

I hope it’s clear to the more mainstream readers that I’m re-projecting the official data sources, and giving my take on them, which people are free to ruminate on, discard, disassemble in an evidence based way or do whatever else they please. In particular I try and make plots that convey what’s going on in the data as intuitively as possible.  I try and explain how I reach an interpretation of the data, with reasons and evidence. I make no claims to expertise in the subject matter. I find every day is a school day on UKC. I always welcome genuine posters disagreeing on anything I post; IMO it always results in good discussion and more insight from more people.  I see this  as trying to carry others along my journey when I look at the data and ask myself “what the heck is going on?”.  It’s my way of coping with the last 15 months by anchoring myself against the choppy seas (as I find them) of highly confusing reporting, government comment and policy that don’t make a lot of sense when taken together or often in isolation.  Helpfully it also gives me a solid resource of plots and analyses (that have been scrutinised by quite a few readers with broad professionally relevant expertise) at my back when confronting some of the lies, half-truths and misrepresentations that Covid attracts like flies to cow dung.

I try and go out of my way to qualify where I think there’s more uncertainty - and other posters chime in on that theme with very informed detail - although it’s always tough to find a balance between verbosity and flow.

I do not believe the poster(s) operating behind over 25 different accounts that get changed as often as my socks are here in good faith, especially the one that has a habit of operating several accounts at once.  The sheer level of effort that must be invested in to running that and evading any automated countermeasures (which I imagine any forum will run given the scale of spamming about out there) doesn't seem like a hobby-level activity to me.

Currently, on such postee will try and pin people down with an absurdly reduced question, demanding an answer, another will start with an over-simple and wrong proposition, and when someone bits they’ll argue their position about-face over 30 posts or so, then claim that was their position all along.  Sometimes they post from a second unconnected account I think, perhaps to keep things moving.  The net effect seems to be a lot of noise and confusion. 

I expect one or more will be along soon enough.

I have a big pile of weeds I pulled out from the hedge; I went to move them but some frogs had moved in.  Who knew a frog could looks so grumpy...

It is worrying, and odd.  Is UKC really so significant that an outside organisation would put so much effort into fake accounts?

Anyway, there is no need for you to explain or apologise for anything you have posted - ignore their attacks on you.

is it a possibility that many cases are simply not being registered any more, either through app deletions or folk ignoring symptoms due to being vaccinated?

It’s possible - the random sampling live infection surveys give some insight here but they always lag cases by a few weeks in terms of seeing rates of change.

I’m leaning to “trust the data” on cases for now; it’s reflecting through to hospital metrics in Scotland - a touchstone of truth. Vaccination status is not changing anything like as rapidly as the exponential rate in cases; I tend to think cases are very accurate over timescales of a week or so, attitudes to engagement would tend to drift more slowly.  

We might find out from hospital data in a week.

Indie SAGE said the SAGE modelling indicated cases should remain high throughout August. They said the drop could be real but there was a possibility it was due to various other factors: test delays, test access and people avoiding testing. I'm keeping my fingers crossed this is partly a genuine decrease for now. Cases don't usually show fast S bends after over half a week of decline and I think the huge rise was starting to get most people more worried and acting cautiously, keeping them away from the infected. Plus warm weather, lots of kids off school and many adults off work. Still it's a unique set of circumstances we face that could still force a big new rise. Here's hoping any unlock upward pressure just slows the drop a bit. I'm not back to full optimism but my rate constant is heading that way.

PS that's way too tame a rant given some of the idiotic things said. Still, best to ignore them beyond explaining why they are wrong. 

PPS for every covidiot here you have many major grateful fans for all this incredibly useful work.

That was my take on the latest modelling, but to paraphrase Idris Elba’s character from Hobbs and Shaw (the best Bond movie since True Lies), “modelling schmodelling” - the uncertainties on so many things are just so large right now that it’s not a very happy time to be a modeller I think.  The submissions to SAGE from the modellers have recognised this up front in their text.

With the coarse feedback loop given by our approach to policy and control measures, cases are never held constant at a high level, they’re either rising or falling.  For them to be high throughout august, they’d have to be rising throughout august.  Healthcare can’t take that.  Hence my comment I think policy is going to play chicken with cases if we return to a rise.

It's perfectly clear, don't worry.

The bad actor(s) are fairly obvious, but it is a worrying phenomenon. It's hard to put it down to simple trolling, so it does seem to be a concerted effort, by someone, whoever that might be, for whatever purpose.

To flip your question, is UKC that much smaller than other forums?  It has a lot more readers than posters I think, and a *lot* of registered users.  

Most forums can, in isolation, note their insignificance.

How many of those are Roms, though...?

This is interesting in light of recent conversations on this and other threads:

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-trending-57928647

Always the post I turn to every week.

I'm going for common spotted orchid. Though I am sure a sock puppet will be along soon to tell us it is a dandelion

Timely, thanks.  I put a tenuous case together between one of last autumn’s pop-up posters and a foreign social media influencer.

Call me a pessimist but I am concerned this is the case. ‘Pandemic is over’.. ‘it’s a pingdemic now’.. 

If people who previously would have got tested with mild symptoms or were doing lateral flows mandated by work or school now aren’t.. well, we will see a sharp drop in detected cases.

Common spotted, isn't it? Dark blobs on the leaves?

Seen those, pyramid, and bee round here in the last few weeks. All finished now though. They don't last long.

It's a tempting thought.  To put it to the question however, the number of PCR tests has not gone of an equivalent cliff to PCR cases in England.  PCR cases are down ~35% from their peak, and PCR tests are down ~8%.  It would take quite a specific and odd situation to bring that about.  Perhaps symptomatic people disengaging and symptom free people engaging to get tested for foreign travel, with the numbers balancing by coincidence?  Thin ice...

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing

The dashboard updated overnight, so I've updated the PCR week-on-week rate constants plot.  The decay in week-on-week measures is now on a 10-day halving time.  For some wort of context, I've run the same analysis on Scottish data, although that's only available with PCR and LFD cases.  Our rate constant has fallen at about twice the rate theirs has; if this was purely a herd immunity threshold in Scotland, I don't see why the effect would be twice as fast here.  

Lots of mystery, perhaps one more day of data before the conflating factors from football and freedom day land.

Does it have dark spots on its leaves? If so then I think your orchid is a Common Spotted Orchid aka Dactylorhiza fuchsii.

I'm gonna say heatwave. All in. 

Edit: although..... Has anyone ruled out PCR sensitivity depending on the weather? Samples degrading faster in the heat? People making too much/not enough snot because humidity/hayfever? Any good papers on this?? Next week's hospitalisations will answer it if not.

Alas it didn't last for long so I can't check but it looks similar from memory and the photo I took...

In reply to Duncan Bourne & Longsufferingropeholder 

3 vote for the common spotted, thanks all.  This one was bluer than any I've found on a google image search but I suppose the colour depends on soil parameters.

I'd hoped it was something exotic, the seeds of which would make me a fortune.  Oh well, back to my plan B of cultivating Cloudberries.  Just as soon as I find one in the wild and harvest its seeds...

This and people not wanting to cancel social events and holidays they planned because they thought everything would be OK by now. Plus the self-employed not wanting to lose work.  Government here are introducing test before travel for incoming 2+2 travellers from next week. Loads of returning locals kicking off because they could potentially have to self-isolate in the UK if they test +ve and saying they won't do tests.  It will be exactly the same in the UK, people will avoid testing or ignore +ve results when it affects their holidays.

Keep repeating the process every year and you'll get more if the local experience here is anything to go by.  I think they also like relatively infertile soil so you may wish to avoid leaving the cuttings on the grass or fertilising it, but best do some research.

If this excursion is real, it's going to show in hospital admissions by next week without any careful analysis needed...

Devious thinking.  The thermocycling runs well above normal or even hot lab temperatures, so even if the labs aren't well isolated from external temperatures the cycler mechanic should be.  But the human part of the system and snot production...

If it's in the testing not the disease progression, then there should be no lagged correlation between historic PCR rate constants and hospital admissions.  Something to test the data for...

Yup.  I'm very much hoping it's real so it takes some of the tension out of the system.

I was thinking more of the van that drives the samples to the megalab. Or the tray that sits in the hot tent in the IKEA carpark until the van collects it...

School transmission must have dropped, private schools have been out for a couple of weeks already, plus all the burst bubbles and parents keeping kids off the last few days so as not to screw up holidays…

All this that are happening but the number of PCR tests is dropping much more slowly than the number of positive results, so unless only people who somehow know they’re gout to test positive are avoiding them it doesn’t square the circle…

On the subject of bad actors I'm just reading the analysis by Sarah Knapton "Science Editor" in Saturday's Telegraph. The theme is modellers dire predictions were wrong again. They show worst case scenario plots (eg LSHTM peaking at 250,000 entering August) and of course completely ingnoring any error ranges and make no mention of the Telegraph's even bigger errors (with no mention of an error range) in the past. For icing on the cake we have an inane quote from Prof Heneghan who has been even more wrong with his herd immunity ideas than the Telegraph; followed up by his implication covid hospitalisations are now people going in for something else but testing positive as an aside. After trashing anything sensible wrt mainstream covid scientific views, the article finishes with the standard warning that cases might go up again due to the full unlock, with no irony whatsoever. Such is some of our major publication modern journalism on the vital subject of public health in a pandemic.

I go for common spotted. I took this photo of one a month back. Had one in the front garden as well which was cool. 

I can see some darker spots on the leaf in the background, so I would say it's a common spotted orchid.

Just to say also, how I very much appreciate your continued hard work with Covid plotting.

Many thanks.

A McD 

Who has some form for spouting absolute bollocks over medical issues, for example misrepresenting findings over ME/CFS to further the politics of division over denialism of that umbrella condition.

I just find the situation around CH. unbelievable.  In my opinion the consequences cut to national security, and the potential for links to foreign organisations is well evidenced.  

Thanks as ever.

My biggest problem with the herd immunity theory is that I can't see why the whole of England would turn over at the same time when infection rates have varied so much and to some extent vaccination rates too. London is way behind on vaccination. The South West and Scotland are a long way behind the northern half of England on cumulative infections, unless you only look at the last few months with Delta, in which Scotland has had a relatively high number, but then London should be even further behind. Yet Scotland turned early and all the English regions have seemingly started to turn over within a few days of each other. It just doesn't seem to make sense.

I don't really buy any of the alternatives being put forward though. Reducing positivity (which I interpret from your post about testing numbers) is good evidence that it isn't down to people not getting tested. Closing schools should have perhaps reduced the rate of increase a bit but not turned things over like this, especially when the recent demographics of cases are considered. And I can't imagine a spike due to the football coming back down so fast. So who knows...I suppose it's possible that we are seeing the superposition of all of these things and increasing immunity cause decay everywhere at the same time but that cases would then rebound next week in the places with less immunity...but, then the unlocking effect will just confuse things further.

Like you I anticipate rates will increase again overall, showing through from some time in the next week...but maybe they won't, stranger things have happened.

Edit to add, local observation this week - almost everyone indoors has stopped wearing masks, I would say compliance below 10%, and even fewer staff wearing them than customers - 0% in small local places without good aircon. I think it must be at least partly down to the heat - wearing a mask all day in a hot stuffy shop would be really unbearable...so I was wondering if this might provide some counter to weather effects in future. I'd hope only a small one though.

Very much my thought after my plots updated this evening.  I’m going to cogitate on it for a bit before posting an update.

The only way I can begin to buy into the popular interpretation is if cases really are very concentrated in those 20-29s and they've suddenly hit the wall of vaccinations being opened to that age group combined with football ending and a heatwave. But even then that only works if they accounted for nearly all cases. And even then we will still see things pick up when the weather goes crap again. And even then I don't really buy it. We've not had a drawn out linear not-really- growing-or-decaying period like you would with a classic logistic function, and I get it will be bumpy and we might be able to ffwd a bit, but for the number of susceptible to suddenly drop off a cliff even in that age group is hard to believe. And yes, regions all synchronised? Not having it.

Some other effects can be ruled out by where things pick up when they pick up; the disengagement from testing, or the thing I suggested above, would manifest as growth restarting from a higher number of cases if/when the driver goes away, and would be obvious.

It's all about next week's hospital numbers. 

A very long (and very unlikely) shot this, but could the downturn in cases be related to a decline in hayfever, i.e., less transmission of Covid by sneezing. This last Covid spike has been more or less coincident with the grass pollen season. Probably just coincidence.

Waaaaahhhchoooo

Nope.

Hmfffffchoooo. Def not that. Not round here anyway.

Maybe the best way to get people to stay at home really is to have a 30°C week when all we can do is lie down and moan about the heat.

Interesting you say that.  We have seen pretty much that over the last few weeks in much of Merseyside - see attached graphs for Sefton, Liverpool and Wirral. Cases rose quickly in June and then roughly flattened off through July at fairly similar rates to those we were at October. We haven't seen the same style of spike that has been present in the broader regional or national data. Haven't a clue why.

PHE are reporting somewhere around 90% of the adult population have antibodies.  Isn't this sufficient for herd immunity to kick in?

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

Just in case you don't already know this and it helps your cogitating... you mentioned the deaths signal yesterday and I think the data got worse overnight. I read an article yesterday (can't remember where) that said hospital stays were now shorter than they used to be for people who survived, but longer than they used to be for people who died. So, I think we can expect to see more lag between hospitalisations and deaths than we did in previous waves, and we might see deaths continue to rise even after occupancy comes back down. What I don't know is how much the lag has changed.

Not without a similar percentage of kids having them too.

The other unknown (apart from kids) is how many of that 90% have enough antibodies to prevent infection and/or transmission. We know most people get antibodies from a single dose, but not necessarily enough to prevent infection.

I was quite optimistic about this based on the ONS data and other bits, and was expecting bits of England to follow Scotland. Only a few days ago I thought it was probably a herd immunity effect we were starting to see in the North East, which you could see tipping first, and I thought the North West would follow pretty quickly. But in the 2-3 days since it has become clear that rates are dropping everywhere, so I think there has to be something else at play.

That's pretty intriguing. More questions than answers, as ever...

It would be nothing short of a miracle for cases to stay that stable for any other reason, but do the numbers stack up? This is getting really interesting now.

I don't see that reported either way. However, the adult data is a couple of weeks old so it will only be higher now.  I can see there are imponderables still but at that level of antibodies, getting to decay must be quite likely.

This is also going to be conflated by the vaccinations moving down the ages, cases pushing up the ages, and the resulting CFR/CHR inevitably increasing as discussed in an earlier thread as a marker of a successful vaccination programme. The same changes will presumably fold into this lag and, as discussed in the same thread, make like for like comparisons of the then and now really hard to interpret meaningfully.

Isn't there uncertainty the other way too - no antibodies but still resistant?  Crudely, doesn't a R of 6 (is that what Delta is estimated as), required5/6=83% of the population to be resistant for decay?  That is seems about aligned with the numbers, allowing for children.

True. The longer answer is that there are a lot of kids out there. 92% of adults is a long way from 92% of people. (Cue protracted discussion on population estimates). Jury's out on what's needed and on how many kids have immunity. Consensus though seems to be that we don't think we're there yet.

Edit to reply to your follow on post without posting yet another post: You wouldn't expect to hit herd immunity like a brick wall. This week just doesn't make sense.

That depends on how much children mix between households indoors vs adults; I reckon the summer school holidays are when children are most decoupled from spreading the virus.

Edit in response to your edit response to an edit:

Although you might just hit it at the moment the wall grows legs and starts running in the opposite direction.  Only thing is, the wall is on a bungee rope and is eventually going right back where it was wenting from, but the car is going to get better at not hitting walls, with open questions over how long it’ll be before it gets worse again.

I second what Si dH says about antibodies on that context m (of unknown strength, some from natural infection only) not all equating to stopping spread of the disease, *but* they should moderate the disease following infection which will affect all sorts of things.

Or there is something else really weird going on.

In reply to Si dH:

If we were hitting herd immunity thresholds for the seasonal average weather, then just as that landed the temperature soared (I bet people are opening bus ventilator windows now…!), schools broke up, lots of parents spent more time at home not work for childcare, lots of people leave the country on their holidays, and infection and vaccine granted immunity continue on.  Perhaps everything came together at the right moment to lower the number of contacts and infection happening, crashing the immunity thresholds down just as we hit the old, high one.

A good time for Jim Pooley to place his six horse accumulator, if so.

All of those factors except immunity are going to go in to reverse, but immunity marches on, noting questions about how long naturally acquired immunity may last…

I’m starting to wonder if there’s a problem with the data pipeline however.  I’d have expected that to manifest as a false ceiling rather than a crash down though.

It’s all a bit exceptional.  

> Just in case you don't already know this and it helps your cogitating... you mentioned the deaths signal yesterday and I think the data got worse overnight. I read an article yesterday (can't remember where) that said hospital stays were now shorter than they used to be for people who survived, but longer than they used to be for people who died. So, I think we can expect to see more lag between hospitalisations and deaths than we did in previous waves, and we might see deaths continue to rise even after occupancy comes back down. What I don't know is how much the lag has changed.

Thanks.  It’s getting much harder to infer useful stuff from the top level, non longitudinal data we get access to.  Probably worth looking at the 60 days measure for deaths with that in mind over length of time.

We went from barreling toward the wall to suddenly teleported miles the other side of it. I get that the heatwave and stuff and things, but if you do that thing I hate and think about R, that sort of reduction is, to use the trigger word of the 'Sunak press conference drinking game of 2020®', unprecedented.

Last seen popping into the Professors - perhaps the occult forces besieging Brentford have now been pushed back and the healing balm of the Great mans powers are fuelling the fall in case numbers?

Golden watches all around if so.

Yes roughly speaking - like I said I thought we must be close. But it just doesn't seem feasible that immunity thresholds are reached everywhere at the same time. Some places might have reached it or be about to but not everywhere.

(Edit - the latest ONS survey results do show less regional variation in antibody levels than one would expect from dashboard case and vaccine data. Although, they also suggest Scotland has the least antibodies.)

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

Mine will be a pint of Large please Neville. 

I am 95% convinced that the mystery is solved.  Cases are indeed falling off a cliff.  

It seems likely that we reached the herd immunity threshold for pre-freedom day restrictions some time ago, except for the wart of the football tournament; this has led to repeated burst of transmission mainly in a young, male demographic that has masked what would otherwise be falling signal.  Then, as the football ends, so does school term disrupting school based transmission and leaving more parents at home on daycare, a near-record heatwave lands opening more windows and taking more people outside, and a bunch of people jump on planes and remove themselves from our local equation.

I've put a pair of plots in below, one shows the demographic cases and the other the difference between cases in males and females.  Squint and you'll see a blue band on the far right of the gender difference plot; secondary household transmission after the final?  This is clearer in the all-ages gender ratio plot, which has fallen off a cliff much like transmission rates.

The halving time continues to plummet in my annotated PCR plot  - unprecedented as LSRH says.  But, I am now 95% convinced, utterly real and not related to disengagement from testing or a problem in the flow of data through the reporting systems.

Si dH has raised the highly suspicious looking timing of all regions going in to decay at once.  Coincidence, synchronicity, the chromium plated megaphone of destiny?  End of the football...

So, the chances are we the hit herd immunity threshold for average weather and pre-freedom day restrictions at a similar time to Scotland, but the addition factor of the football kept us in growth for a few more weeks.  Good call on Scotland letting us beat them a few weeks ago.

So, now, I'm not quite as worried about freedom day; it's coming on top of what would have been decaying cases had it not been for the football, so whilst I think we might still return to growth, it's not on the worst end of the spectrum.

As many people have said, the litmus test for this will be the hospitalisation signal over the next week or so.

So it's all over?  Just orchids next week?

The same plots but over a longer period of time, covering the last wave as well.  The previous wave was biased towards female cases, as was the calm between the waves.  

Someone can probably get a doctoral thesis out of unpicking all this; not me - I'm looking forwards to finding a new hobby soon enough.

Thanks for that. Timely, relevant, and convincing.

Well, the consequences of freedom day remain to be seen, but I'm hoping for a better mix towards orchids next week.  I'm still holding on to hope that my strain is unusually blue and therefore is going to be worth a fortune to collectors.  Although as part of my reading, I found that some orchard growers use a patented injection process to use die to falsely colour them prior to sale in supermarkets, and I can't compete with that.  Back to the drawing board on becoming a millionaire then...

I’m sure Tom will be along soon to correct you  

Vital correction. My Scottish colleagues reminded me very clearly that England did not beat Scotland.

Ah, many apologies.  The football is all a bit opaque to me.  

If we really have turned the corner then it will be interesting to see how other nations with lower vaccination/immunity levels act as they get closer to our levels.

Plummet really is the right word. Incredible!

well, in 36 weeks I don’t think you’ve called it wrong yet…. 

That's an interesting point.  At this time of year I'm taking hay fever medicine and it makes a huge difference to snot production.  

I wonder how the 'pingdemic' affects PCR testing.  If someone is pinged and told to isolate but they are feeling OK I wonder if that makes them more likely to get a test.

Hope people don't mind me hijacking this thread for a moment, to reach some people who might know...

We've got some enthusiastic technicians and academics wanting to use CO2 monitors to assess ventilation and air circulation in teaching spaces. Does anyone know of any reliable guides or publications to help convert numbers into air changes per hour (easy?), implications for aerosol accumulation (harder?) or ideally some measure of covid transmission risk (even harder?). Thanks in advance...

I'm inclind to agree but it must be compounding something else to produce such an apparently dramatic shift in direction.

Thanks wintertree.

Jk

Yep. Really not convinced there's anything yet mentioned that can explain the instantaneous change from such rapid growth to such rapid decay that has any chance of being sustained.

Bruxist linked a recent paper a couple of weeks back - https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_34-...

The mean free path of CO2 and virus laden exhalate are going to be quite different, so I can see why one might be cautious when faced with confident sounding people armed with the kind of plan you outline...  Especially with regards dead zones for airflow.  Depends if you're removing contaminated air or looking to create particle sinks to draw the load down diffusively.

Edit:  I reckon teaching in the style of Daft Punk might be the way forwards - https://www.best4safety.co.uk/products/3m-versaflo-m-306-tr-315-bundle

Looking at the cases and gender data, I think perhaps the football effect slowly building up over a month or so of periodic events, and then switched off more or less overnight.  We'd presumably otherwise have seen a more Scotland-like trajectory and probably have been in decay for a week or two.

Then, the question is - with more immunity under the bridge, are nightclubs and vertical drinking more or less of a problem than the ways people were congregating for the football?

I'm not optimistic we'll keep it in decay, but we'll know for sure soon enough - and if a rise does land, things have gone in to such a rapid reverse in the last week that it's not going to be as catastrophic as it was starting to shape up.  Assuming the rapid fall translates through to hospitalisations -we won't really be sure that happens until it happens.

This tool might be useful: https://tinyurl.com/covid-estimator

Developed by Uni. Colorado-Boulder last year; this version was updated a week ago. It was used for the simulations in National Geographic and El País, if you've seen either of those. 

When you open it, go to the Read Me tab at the bottom first.

This, definitely this. But also, where does that leave us in the "exit wave over before winter" game? Was it ever really a thing? Will we have had enough infections to keep us out of a crisis when it gets cold? Are we somehow already closer than anyone thought? Have we delayed the widely-predicted peak into clocks-go-back season? Tune in next week to find out.

Edit to add: New good bit of analysis from James Ward that backs up many of the conclusions above.

The odd thing in all this is that the voices that were claiming herd immunity from about April 2020 are now largely quiet about it, despite it now being a serious possibility.

Not true, just read the Telegraph article I talked about about above or various similar posts in the press and online. Like Boris, the denialists who were pushing herd immunity  just ignore being wrong before and are still attacking good mainstream science.

Are they this?
https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03213146

You need to put some fake news in your next report, I'm sure you are being plagiarised (or writing for) The Times (26/7/21)!

Actually, now I know why you mentioned Scotland's defeat by England in the Euros....

Felt curious enough to do this again:
http://ukwalls.epizy.com/wtr/cases_26-7.png (http://ukwalls.epizy.com/wtr/cases_26-7_lin.png for a sanity check)

Have I messed up somewhere? Looks insane, right? To the point where past me would slap present me if I could go back and say "this will happen next week". Someone check my working because... well all the things we've said over and over again.

There's a reason I've largely stuck with interpretation and not prediction...  

As with the Kent variant, if I'd been plotting the right measures in advance I think the group would probably have figured it out.  Of course, the right measures are much easier to pick in retrospect, and the plotting doesn't exactly get the time it deserves.

My updated rate constant plot is below; today was the first day I'd have expected the signs of Freedom Day to land in the data (the red circles); the fall in halving time has arrested but it remains a somewhat balmy 6 days.  If the data doesn't start going up tomorrow, I'm going to dance a jig.

Also below are updated plots 6e, 7.1e and 8e.  To my eye, it looks like admissions are slacking of significantly as are deaths.  So, tentative hints that the end of growth in cases is entirely real - with the fall to be confined over the coming days hopefully.   So, even if freedom day does see a return to rising cases, the baseline will have halved and hospitals will have had some slack.

In reply to elsewhere:

Can you send me the link?  If someone writing for the papers out there has been improving their understanding of the interpretation through everyone's posts to UKC, I'm ecstatic as the interpretation out there (I mean the honest stuff, not the Telegraph) tends to be lacking; I found myself peer reviewing a BBC article this morning before I gave up and went to play in the garden instead...  In the unlikely event they were reading here, I remain open to mail through the site as ever...

Yes, this. Excepting the potential Tuesday/Wednesday bounce when we count the weekend.

First reaction was "what? no they aren't". Second reaction was "oh wait, I'm looking at UK and he's looking at England". Third reaction was "But why is UK different?". Fourth reaction was to add up the NI, E, S & W hospitalisations and compare to the UK number. Fifth reaction, predictably, was "WTF?".
Edit: they're all given for different dates. Ok. Brilliant. That's why.

I'm old school, I bought the paper, but here's a photo of the article at URL below.

https://ibb.co/svSVbvf 

Excellent, thanks.  I can confirm I'm not Tom Whipple by the way.  How refreshing to read an interpretation and not find myself disagreeing with the way core concepts of the virus mechanic are misunderstood.

My brain made a jump to the Whipple shield which is an area I'd much rather have a hobby in, if I was allowed the necessary toys.

Hi Tom

Nobody believes sock puppet denials here

The name rang a bell so I did a quick bit of research...turns out his time at Cambridge overlapped with mine by a couple of years and he was into night climbing. We have at least one mutual acquaintance through Cambridge climbing (according to LinkedIn) and I suspect more (I took up climbing properly the year after he left I think.) So, I conclude there is a reasonable likelihood he is still into climbing and reads (or contributes to) these threads.

Vaccine uptake, first and second jab percentages

East Dunbartonshire 97.3% 78.2% (highest)

Scotland 89.5% 69.4%

Aberdeen City 81.6% 61.3% (lowest)

I can't imagine difference in cumulative infections so far could make up for up to 16% difference in vaccine uptake to get same level of immunity.

Hence, surprising we can get plummeting cases across UK due to herd immunity if there are such geographical disparities. You'd think it would be pretty slow as different areas achieved herd immunity at different times.

Still plenty of potential to increase uptake too. I doubt there are sufficient demographic differences for differences in uptake.

Curiouser and curiouser.

Fingers crossed the various indicators continue to improve.

I'm not sure where this should go, but here is a promising article on immune response post covid. I did look to post some useful input on the rock talk to prove I'm not a CCP troll, however it is as dull as shit.....  

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.04.19.21255739v1

Not really. The number drop in positives is real but it's obviously not just herd immunity doing this but a combination of factors, some which will be reducing infection levels and some which will be hiding infection levels.  The BBC and Guardian had good articles on this today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57971990

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/26/what-is-behind-the-latest-fal...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/27/uk-not-out-of-the-woods-despi...

The BBC link has an interesting graph of showing mean number of contacts per day remaining low.

Curious how complex viral, vaccination, political and social factors etc operating on multiple timescales are combining.

I was surprised by that chart. Do lockdowns really make that little difference? It's got me googling, but if it turns out to be right, then I'm completely re-ordering my internally assumed list of things that influence the pandemic.

I think people learnt the lesson from "eat out to help out" to stay cautious.

The graph does not show mean number of contacts per day in pre-covid era, I think lockdown works even after it is officially over. 

Those who can WFH are still largely WFH, few are flying/travelling and public transport busier but not back to rush hour crush(?),  pubs/cinemas/theatres/gyms not as busy as pre-covid.

Yeah, I just expected there to be more of a difference between lockdown and inter-lockdown than they show there. From what I've (just) read it was up at more like ~10 in the beforetimes.
If the lockdowns really made the little difference to number of contacts they show on that chart, but the significant difference to transmission that we saw in the case numbers, then it gives me a new view on how sensitive the magical R number is.

Presumably much of the reduction in average face to face contacts per day shown by that graph (vs a baseline of ten if correct) is because many people have been working from home throughout.

I think the bigger impact of lockdowns is almost certainly reduction in the number of outbreaks in enclosed spaces, particularly hospitality. None of that will get picked up by measuring changes in face to face contacts reported by individuals.

Edit, to put it another way, whether I talk to 4 or 6 people in a day when I have the virus doesn't really make a huge amount of difference in the grand scheme of things, especially if it's out in the street as it would be in lockdown. What really matters is if I go and have a few beers in a busy bar and spread it to twenty people (which is perfectly possible without having reportable face to face contact with any of them.)

Yes - it's almost as if herd immunity achieved through massive state investment and delivered by a nationalised health service is somehow less attractive to them than herd immunity achieved by the state doing absolutely SFA, and delivered by the little people carelessly dying.

Although I totally agree with your sentiment, as I said above, what MG states is sadly not true. The same bad actors are still up to the same unscientific dirty tricks. They also still talk about lockdown trade- offs for the economy and for secondary health damage when in fact they correlate with later-than-ideal lockdown control, due to our government mistakes.

A report of stats on covid hospitalisation and death for children.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/09/first-year-of-pandemic-claime...

How do you mean? 

The recent welcome switch from growth to decline in cases was quicker than we have seen before.

That's a few weeks old now. Some of the stats were used/referred to by the JCVI advice piece on vaccinating under 18s that we discussed a week or two back. They gave a much more positive view on long covid than that article though.

Interesting stuff!

Anecdotal only but I have been on the Paediatric unit today of a fairly large hospital. They are doing a lot of prep for an expected high volume of covid admissions in the coming weeks.....likewise at the children's hospital where my daughter works, she says they have a lot of covid positive kids in intensive care and high dependency....

My best guess is that we had a regional level distribution of rate constants before the final match, all but one positive (R>1), and the football lowered then all simultaneously in to a different but all negative (R<1) distribution.  So regional inhomogeneity before and after the final, but when the gradually building contribution to the rate constant was cancelled simultaneously, the big effect - cases in to reverse - was synchronised.

Except in the north east, where as Si dH noted reversal happened earlier.  There’s no way it could have been related to the staggering university outbreak thought as senior management put out a press piece saying how there was no evidence of their previous giant outbreak driving community cases.  I’m sure that as learned professors and the like they would never conflate absence of evidence and evidence of absence.

Great looking pre-print, I’ll read that properly when I’m not recovering from a day at the beach.   I’m glad you’re looking at the outputs from scientists if you’re taking a wider interest in what’s going on.  As I said on the other thread I don’t doubt that you’re genuine.  Point of disagreement though, immunology and this paper aren’t dull as shit, they’re fascinating (okay, opinions may differ… ).  After the last year I’m seriously wondering how to get in to immunology over the next few years.  Put on a lab coat and just walk in to a lab and start talking with people, amazing how many places that works around September time…

So, you see, when some noisy and “new” posters are making a lot of noise about how there’s no evidence immunity will persist, actual scientists are working bloody hard to quantify it and are putting numbers behind it. One of those “new” posters is making noise about how we don’t know that’s the case for the new variant yet, but as I understand it the T cell response is far more robust against variants because it’s against shorter subunits of the virtual proteins, most of which aren’t affected by the small number of mutations separating the variants.

Then there’s the studies showing antibodies fade over time - as I understand it, the body starts removing unneeded antibodies after a while, but stored information on how to make them if needed in the “memory” cells, so good to see both B and T memory cells showing persistence in this paper.  I’ve seen one of the “new” posters citing studies on antibodies fading without mentioning the role of the memory cells.

So, when faced with new accounts taking a very one sided view without any data or references to back them up, keep in mind they might be looking to either unsettle people in a genuinely worrying time or just derail focused conversations; a lot of immunologists are working on this now in a lot of labs, something I’ve come to realise recently is that they’re like the brain surgeons or rocket scientists of the life sciences world, just without the public perception to go with it…

Edit: fixed a … ) that was being mangled by the site code

23,500-odd today. Jig-worthy? Plz post photo if so. But it is only a small drop from yesterday and hospitalisations and deaths are up again. I'm not quite jigging yet.

Getting closer to a Jig.  Half the relief is just form feeling like I understand what the heck is going on again, the rest from the plummeting cases.    Updated plots:

• The halving time is rising - it was never going to survive Bothe one-time end of football associated transmission and "freedom day" landing.  Still, it's very low, around 8 days.  Phenomenal for the low level of restrictions.  It'll need a few more days to really show that's where it's going to stay
  • If I was going to be a negative ninny, I'd wonder about the Venn diagram "people with vaccination", "people going to nightclubs" and "people not going to engage with testing if not seriously unwell".  Which might tentatively lead me to think the first round of infections landing for Monday onwards are going to have a lower fraction detected as cases than their secondary infections.  Perhaps the missing part of that which adds some optimising is the circle labelled "Young adults who have had Covid but didn't engage with testing the first time around and still have some antibodies"///
• Hospital admissions look to have just about turned the corner; if true there'll be some real plummeting in the next 5 days or so.
• Occupancy hasn't turned to decay yet -soon I think - but deaths are in the process of turning round.  It's notable that deaths I think used to lag cases more; I think this fits with the "biphasic" interpretation of hospital trajectories others have mentioned; hard to say without longitudinal data.
• Given the balance of antibodies in England's favour and the football in Scotland's, one could assign a death toll more or less directly to the Euros.   It is perhaps a surprisingly high number.

I think this is an incredible collision of different factors, a massive coincidence, and I don't look forwards to how the sudden turn to decay in the absence of lockdown is going to be horrendously abused by those who have insisted (retrospectively) that cases were about to turn to decay anyway every time a lockdown controlled numbers.  The key difference is the way cases are falling...

• In a susceptible population far from herd immunity thresholds with R<1 through control measures, cases fall exponentially - a linear plot of fixed gradient on log-y axes.  
• At the herd immunity threshold, cases fall faster than exponentially for a while - as I think in Scotland.
• If you suddenly re-define the herd immunity threshold to be much lower than the population's antibody levels, either by explicit control measures (lockdown) or by implicit ones (football ends), cases plummet off a cliff. 

Average household is 2.4 people.

Perhaps 2.4 contacts per day is near zero mixing between households for R<1 and a modest increase to 3 contacts per day may several or many times more mixing between households for R>1.

No sign of major bad effects of "level 0 day" in the Scottish rate constant data yet.  Much less drastic drop than in England.

Linear y-axis versions of the cases curves to show the "off a cliff" bit....

This is a good point.
Makes me wonder even more what question they asked in their survey, but that would explain why adults stayed ~3 lockdown or no lockdown, and adults+kids did not.
Still maintain it's a strangely niche plot with suspicious parameters and cropping and I don't trust it on its own.

It's Tuesday. Never compare Monday or Tuesday to yesterday.
Possibly justifies some light toe-tapping.

Either way it illustrates a potential path to zero covid, should we ever decide to try to eradicate it; use an footballs to artificially inflate transmission for a bit then turn it off suddenly...

You meant this battle has just ended. My bad.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean sorry. Worth bearing in mind that if one person in a household of three gets it and passes it to all their household but everyone isolates in time and passes it no further, then the average number of people they each pass it to is only 0.67 (2 for the first person, 0 each for the other two people). If one of them infects one other person outside the house, then the average is 1. So, if when a household gets the disease they all isolate and none of them pass it on then the epidemic will shrink slightly, regardless of the number of people living in the house and who get infected there.

The last 3 days of dashboard data releases before today were very delayed due to problems with English deaths data.  That’s all the banners said, presumably some buffer built up during the problems and just landed.

Only very briefly at the peak, and with weather and football slamming both nations through the peak (or slamming the threshold in the other direction), perhaps not.

Schools are probably a big rewind, with children having been balkanised from before the worst of this.  The weather pogos, the Euros aren’t coming back soon.  More immunity under the bridge since then.  If we’re lucky the only rewind button is the gradual fade of immunity or a really evasive variant….  

 

Mean contacts per day during lockdown  roughly corresponds to household size of 2.4. Household size is the "zero baseline" for mean daily contacts for looking at transmission between households. 

In theory mean contacts of 2.4 per day means during lockdown people see their household only and no transmission between households so no chain of infection. R>1 to infect household then a week later R=0 as no transmission beyond households and disease is eliminated.

Obviously the above perfect isolation between households is NOT reality.

After lockdown, contacts might increase modestly to 3.0 per day which now includes other households meaning that a sustained chain of infection and a sustained R>1 is now possible.

The change is not 2.4 to 3.0, the change is 0 to 0.6 mean contacts with other households.

Obviously 0 mean contacts with other households is NOT reality.

Another way to put it is if you subtract 2.4 from every point on the plot we're talking about, it starts to make sense. i.e. it would then show lockdowns making a difference to mixing. The way they've plotted it it looks like they don't.

irt elsewhere: you're right - they did just ask for total number of people participants had exchanged a few words with that day, including people they live with.

I suspect what you are seeing in the deaths figures must be noise at this stage - cases turned less than two weeks ago from today's date (around a week in data terms) and as I understand it hospitalisations are taking longer than they used to to turn in to deaths now. So I think the deaths graph should be lagging cases by much more than a fortnight, I'd be surprised if it turned over in less than another two weeks. Even hospital admissions turning now, if they are, would be a few days earlier than expected I think.

Yes, thanks makes sense now.

I'm finding I rarely make sense first time round...

Maybe, maybe.  I can’t fault the logic in your position downstream of cases, but how homogeneous are cases over the last month?  Most of the recent rising cases were in young people, most deaths are in older ones still, so it could be a case of a rising cases signal in one sub population masking a fall elsewhere.  I don’t think age is the only relevant factor here but some of the others aren’t in the public data.

Edit: I see the plot 8e update didn't upload...  It's below.  It looks too big an effect to be noise to me.

Putting my proper thinking cap on, rather than noise (genuine statistical variation in the data) it could be that there's some more exceptional reporting lag to drain out as well; there have been problems with processing of English deaths noted on the dashboard, and today's data release was a lot more by-reporting-date than recent by-specemin-date numbers even considering that they're expected to be rising, typical of releasing some reporting lag.

I don't normally update mid-week and haven't got such a good idea for what the variations in reporting (and actuals) from the weekend do, it could be that's behind the apparent downturn on the plot 7.1.  I should really learn the lesson to only look at them at a fixed point in the week and not get carried away with a bit of optimism.

Unless we draw up another venn diagram of people who ended up in A&E after a scuffle at wembley and people who caught covid in a scuffle at wembley.

The extra updates are much appreciated.

My phone suggests an emoji 🐱 is appropriate, no idea why!

I meant rock talk is as dull as shit 

That's "night climbing" as in exploring the medieval architecture of the city?  Probably a better hobby down south, the sandstone used for such buildings up our way is pretty choosy...

Yes, at various times it has been a bit of a thing in Cambridge. There was a book "The Night Climbers of Cambridge" published originally in the 30s that I think described some of the favoured routes, although I haven't seen a copy.  I think there was a reprint organised some time after I left. There were some good apocryphal stories such as a bunch of engineering students in the dim/distant past managing to climb to the roof of the senate house and then winch an old car up after them, or something. And of course it was a way of breaking in to expensive spring balls (I never did that, honest.)

In fact said Mr Whipple wrote an article about it if you have a Times subscription.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/confessions-of-a-night-climber-dftjxlwmg...

A bit more football analysis in here: https://www.ft.com/content/cb86d9a8-665d-467e-9b92-4b80e905060c

What is the desired product of all the statistical analysis that is going on? Maybe to understand how the virus behaves and direct future policies based on this new understanding. It appears that statistics can be manipulated in all sorts of directions to support particular hypothesis which often fly in the face of an individuals observable reality. I've come to the conclusion that we're exposed to a constant stream of double think. 

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.

They can, but they can also be used carefully and intelligently to understand and predict, as you note.   No different to any other way of presenting information.

Maybe it needs some performance art, eh Dan?

In reply to Si dH

I was approached by some night climbers after they saw me break into a college with a unicycle hooked onto my shoulder. I politely declined, I prefer my risk to be under my control...old buildings are too friable. The car was re-assembled on the roof. The book is commonly available these days eg.

https://onlineshop.oxfam.org.uk/the-night-climbers-of-cambridge/product/HD_...

That's fact free pap lacking the substance of mindless crap.

Copy and paste helps with profundity though.

It's George Orwell.  No idea why TradDad thinks its relevant to statistics

Give me a break offwidth, or would you rather I said nothing at all.

You need look no further than the media and governments for the fantastic work of theatre. Hancock's tears on GMB being the piece de resistance. 

How can pointing out the role of 'double think' which is clearly used to support all facets of this debate curry so much dislike. Statistics are (sometimes) another weapon to be used to direct beliefs, emotions and behaviours. 

I'd love to believe that the truth was to be found somewhere, cushioned softly between the output of Guardian and the BBC, if only. Fortunately we live in a country where the Guardian's truth is locked up in Belmarsh prison, panorama gives us Syria's children and the BBC provides a platform for Tony Blair to promote division and population control agendas live on TV. 

The passage from Orwell has value here as statistics have been a major part of the campaign to generate fear and confusion, Skinner has a lot to answer for as we all run around like rats living in a system of intermittent and unpredictable reward and punishment. 

You have a point that obfuscation, lies etc are a problem, not least by those in government currently.  However, to move from that to cynically claiming everything is false and there is no way of discerning facts is nonsense.  Double-think doesn't "support all aspects of this debate" and statistics used well don't lead to us running around like rats.

I agree, not everything is false and there are hard working, caring and honest people simply trying to get through this in the best and most responsible way possible. My post was a little over the top, I do stand by my opinions on the BBC and Guardian though. I read the Guardian for 20 years and watched the BBC / read it's news site daily. Very sad what has happened there, I literally wouldn't trust anything put out by them in the context of their complete corruption. 

I'm OK with you posting here. I just disagree with some of what you say but that's alright. Quoting Orwell is very welcome from me. If you're the same Dan who ruffled feathers on UKB I'd love to meet you one day.

On covid (what these threads are about), I've been anti-establishment in being critical of: SAGE not supporting an earlier lockdown in March 2019; in being pro mask science, and against the foolish views of SAGE, WHO and CDC for way too long; highly critical of the wider democratic checks and balances not stopping our PM delaying lockdown in Sept and Dec 2019 (at the probable cost of 40,000 lives);  for the government/SAGE not opening public restrictions on outdoor spaces earlier (given the low risk) at significant mental health costs to our population; pushing the scientists to not underestimate the risks of long covid and the risks of covid widening deprivation.

I'd add I recognise the Guardian bias but most of it is in the editorials and opinion pieces (with, outside a few named exceptions, which I rarely read)...the covid science has been as good as any major news publication. The BBC is quite good overall on covid but on the political front of really exposing how bad our government have been they have been clearly muzzled on the most watched TV news on BBC1. In contrast the Telegraph, Fail, Excess and Scum have been pumping plain lies on covid.

Id add that the massive rise of preprint (prior to peer review) papers, alongside the blight that is uncensored clear lies about covid in social media, has made the public perception of covid science as complex and difficult as any science topic has ever been. In that context most of the public have done pretty well.

I'm not really sure what you are getting at but if you are suggesting observations at a personal level are somehow better at coming up with a strategy for overcoming global pandemics compared to effective and open use of national scale statistical datasets then you are massively wrong.  Personally observations are at best highly biased to individual circumstances and at worst completely irrelevant, where as good data analysis (as presented on this thread) is about as un-Orwellian as you can get and absolutely the only real way to understanding what is going on / what we and policymakers need to do.

Allthough its human nature to base our world view on the things we see in day to day life you absolutely cant extrapolate that to the wider population, for that you need hard properly collected data.

Hey Offwidth, yes lets sit down for a brew or go for a climb sometime! PM me if you wanna arrange  

One story, amongst many, that bothers me intensely is the tale of a Canadian immunologist and university professor who appeared a shy and retiring man (he suffers with Tourettes Syndrome and described this as socially debilitating at times in his life). Anyway he gave a 10 minute radio interview based around some concerns about the vaccine and within 24 hrs was subjected to a significant and aggressive campaign to discredit and smear him including contents of an anonymous website set up in his name. This seems to repeat itself time and time again. No one can comfortably speak out, if only this could be boiled down to the dedicated professionals having a reasoned and open debate without fear of personal attack and de-platforming. 

My observed reality over the past 12 months has been broad enough to raise an eyebrow or 10 when faced with the crap being pumped out by the BBC / Guardian / Telegraph etc etc on a daily basis . 

Could it be that what you experience is from the viewpoint of a very small subset of the population and is not at all representative of society as a whole. For example I only know one person who voted for brexite, I got quite a shock after the referendum! 

As an elected climbing politician I really do need to access the widest range of views on rock climbing. Artistic influence in particular is not as common as I'd like.

At face value that Canadian Prof case sounds really bad but sometimes in such circumstances  it turns out the victim wasn't so innocent afterall. Peterson often played the victim long after he became a persecutor in the opposite direction and shared platforms with some who were making seriously nasty threatening behaviour.

I'm normally against personal attacks on here and have been pretty pissed off about how some odd sounding posters who turned out to be a bit 'on the spectrum' were treated. However there were quite a few blatant first time posters immediately into spouting misinformation against covid that I'm glad to see banned under the site rules. That's aside from one comedy regular (Rom) who must be heading into his thirties for accounts here. Plus some haters who have to hate to face percieved hate (a dismal view for anyone human).

Possibly, although I think it is a reasonably broad group of people from a wide range of backgrounds. 

Can you explain what it is about your observed reality that was so different from things being said in the BBC or guardian? What were/are they saying that was/is so wrong?

Please keep it concise

The thing is it has become a really intimidating proposition to ask questions or disagree or voice an alternative opinion / belief. I've no doubt that if I expressed some of my feelings and opinions I'd soon be facing the almighty wrath of the 'community'. What is worrying is that these aren't new beliefs to me, they existed comfortably pre covid but have suddenly become unacceptable with what appears to be an ever increasing creep in that direction. 

Try bokononism.  It's safest of all to know ones beliefs are b*ll*cks but still remain comforting and mostly harmless (slightly bigger athlete's foot risks).

Up we go again, 27k. I wasn't jigging but as someone else put it maybe foot-tapping a bit, but will stop for a bit.

I started to write a response but realised it's inviting too much trouble. A bit like on the other thread. Sorry I do hope it's ok to leave it there. 

That's all well and good but if your beliefs and opinions have direct implications on an ongoing public health crisis and have no basis in fact and is unsupported by peer reviewed research I think its fair to expect some robust questions!

That looks like the normal post weekend bounce.

Except quite a few of us here have called out aspects of the establishment presented scientific position and have been proved right and most of us have been wrong at times. What matters in the end is where the science leads (with due scepticism) and beng honest if and when we were mistaken.

Oh absolutely, I probably didn't phrase it very well there, what I meant was it needs to be science led, not belief led. As these threads show there are absolutely tonnes of unknowns about covid, and our response to it. But there is also tonnes of solid research (e.g. effectiveness if vaccines or mask wearing). Questioning is good to understand what is going on, but if you cant back it up with proper evidence you can bog off.

Anyway I promised myself never to post on covid threads but as a gov employed data scientist regularly dealing with bullshit policy decisions not based on data Traddad touched a nerve! 

Maybe that is partly behind many ordinary people's unease with our government, the establishment and the media. Truth has too often taken a hike in populist political times. It's normally a requirement for senior  govenment scientists to avoid questioning  political decisions based on their scientific information but when governments make covid policy decisions that will almost certainly needlessly cost tens of thousands of lives and damage the economy and health of others even more, by delaying restrictions, I think there is a  moral case to intervene. It's an ethical conundrum for sure, but to see not even a single  resignation after this happening twice really sticks in my throat.

Could just be an artefact of the day-of-week sampling effects and by-reporting-date data weirdness.  

The latest PCR rate constant plot shows us still in rapid decay. We're well in to the point the first infections from freedom day should be landing, perhaps that's why the halving time came out of freefall; if it remains a halving time and not a doubling time, it's hard to ask for more.

The last day to feed through in this plot is last Sunday; the provisional data beyond that is quite high.

Does your part do "job swaps" with the private sector?  Could film it for a Reality TV series...  I've been quietly worrying about morale for people in the actual data analytics roles below management, can't have been a kind year. 

One stand out thing for me is the open and timely release of data over Covid.  I've noticed the API is getting ever less responsive in the half hour after after it's updated; I think a lot of places must be pulling data down automatically these days.  

For a while I thought JVT was quietly building public support for himself, ready for something of a move beyond his remit like some outspoken comments, but I am known to have optimistic flights of fancy...

I can't imagine that being a scientific advisor over the last 18 months has been a happy role, and I suspect it's one I wouldn't last in for a week. 

We have discussed this before and will have to wait for the inquiry I guess. I don't lack in sympathy but in the end they are important and well paid jobs in service to the people, not 100% beholdant to the PM and his government. The fairly raised moral quandary was calling out Boris or resigning might make things worse and we can't see the inside position on that.

They've pretty much all been driven to quit social media citing ferocious abuse from both sides. Sad times. If only they'd found this platform....

(Does that mean this is an echo chamber? I don't care if it is. It's an informative one and I like it this way).

One scientist spoke out about the abuse they received after posting a reply to Yeadon when he was in full flow.  Some pretty grounded and polite rebuttal of some of the crap Yeadon was spewing.  Vast amount of abuse came by return through private and personal emails and phone calls to work etc.  It’s become very hard for scientists to speak out against the torrent.  I suspect many of the individuals “weaponised” in to this rapid response brigade of keyboard warriors are troubled themselves and are being used by people who have not a care for them.  

One scientist spoke out about the abuse they received after posting a twitter reply to Yeadon when he was in full flow.  Some pretty grounded and polite rebuttal of some of the crap Yeadon was spewing.  Vast amount of abuse (and threats IIRC) came by return through their work email from hundreds of Yeadon’s then followers - also personal emails an phone calls to work etc.  It’s become very hard for scientists to speak out against the torrent.  I suspect many of the individuals “weaponised” in to this rapid response brigade of keyboard warriors are troubled themselves and are being used by people who have not a care for them.   I doubt any of the people pushing and encouraging Yeadon had his back when he disappeared from Twitter.

Its easy to shrug off nasty emails, but it’s escalated at least once in to an armed attacker apparently planning on a rampage with a grenade launcher and serious guns (in Belgium). 

There’s almost no two regular posters who haven’t disagreed with each other on various things I think.  Most bring evidence and logic to their point and productive discussion happens.  

Nice use of "almost"

Edit: in other news, plot twist in the vaccine supply numbers this week. Tl; dr seems to be we've enough in the fridge now, thanks. But other interpretations may be available.

Yes well Jordan Petersonitis is a recognised condition in some circles.

I’d be interested to hear of examples of prominent figures dealing in false information on covid for nefarious ends. I’ve watched channel 4’s Wakefield expose which was a bit cobbled together and I’m not really interested in that or him. However there are some seemingly genuinely concerned people out there with relevant expertise and maybe I shouldn’t be listening to them. For example Byron Bridle, Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, Sucharit Bhakti as well as groups such as Hart and Bird and doctors for covid ethics / Tess Laurie etc etc. 
What do people think of these guys? Are they trying to create problems with false information for bad ends? 

I would have thought it was quite difficult to come across those people without being subject to a bit of algorithmic nudging in one's YouTube or FB feed, or similar: they're all quite obscure.

HART in particular is trying very hard to remain as obscure as it can. There's a good read on the group here: https://www.logically.ai/articles/hart-files-anti-vaccine-myths-westminster

Thanks, yes I’d imagine a lot of these people are very hard to find. I have to say I switch off to any article that uses terms like anti masker, anti vaxxer, conspiracy theorist and covid denier. For me it’s immediately delegitimising. 

I forgot to mention Luc Montagnier 

I have no idea of their individual motives but they all look very dodgy as a minimum: outside the full-on deniers all the articles that are supporting them are very suspicious (especially the 'total health' site) and set off serious alarm bells from my scientific experience, and they have all been fact checked and/or criticised by more conventional sources which show some really dangerous concerns:

Peter

https://factcheck.afp.com/us-cardiologist-makes-false-claims-about-covid-19...

Byram??

https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/byram-bridles-claim-that-covid-19-va...

Robert

https://firstdraftnews.org/articles/baseless-claims-about-mrna-vaccines-and...

Tess

https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/yellow-card-scheme-for-adverse-event...

Sucharit seems to be a full-on denier

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucharit_Bhakdi

Luc seems to have a problem with a ludicrous attributed quote he probably never made and he was wrong on something he did say about ADE

https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-health-coronavirus-idUSL2N2ND0WS

There are huge amounts of evidence across western democracies showing many people working in medical science who are completely 'tin-hatted' when it comes to covid and covid vaccines. That they are scientists is way less relevant (and actually pretty sad) than the actual science relating to the virus and the vaccines.

Back in the days when Alan Rusbridger was in charge, the Guardian wasn't afraid to challenge the establishment position - remember GCHQ coming round and smashing up their hard drives after the Snowdon leak! Since he left it has became a lot more compliant while at the same time its financial woes have evaporated; despite it only ever advertising itself 🤔

I'm interested to see what will happen, you're right a lot of these people have been fact checked and discredited by conventional sources, yet I wonder why they choose to speak out. What their motivations are. As far as I can see their concerns haven't been disproven. The truth will rest somewhere in the middle, it usually does. 

Also Wikipedia and 'fact checking' sites aren't reliable sources of information, to hold critique to the same standards I'd require peer reviewed hard evidence in a respected scientific journal that what they have to say is completely false. 

Was that around the same time they got rid of the comments section, f*cked over Assange and sold their souls to the devil.....

I’ve spent today editing fact checks for one service. Believe me, they are far more rigorous than the people behind most of the facts they are checking. 

Still, I think it’s important that everyone is held to the same rigorous scientific gold standard of the peer reviewed meta analysed double blinded randomised control trials. 

I'd start from the position that they're talking shite, then try to disprove that.

There's a large group of people who take your view on Dr Andrew Wakefield and MMR vaccine. Turns out he was crooked in all manner of ways, loads of conflicts of interest.

In terms of the covid vaccines, you don't need to understand the science (and most people don't). But in order to believe that the vaccines are dangerous, you have to believe that doctors/nurses and the NHS as a whole, the office for national statistics, and the government are complicit in keeping a secret from us. Only a lunatic would think that was possible!

I can assure you all of those points look very real and scientific to me having worked alongside experts in the field and none of the sources supporting the claims I've seen look in the slightest bit reliable. Tracking the detailed peer review of papers and claims is something I can't easily access anymore being retired and I'm also not your personal checking servant. The Wikipedia link is there because the individual looks such a bad actor he is beyond fact checking as far as I'm concerned.

You asked for views and I gave mine. I'd be very surprised if proved wrong on any of them and would apologise. Some general points made by some of them in writing (especially Robert) are good scientific precautionary points, alongside their specific incorrect claims.

It's a logical error to say scientific truth is in the middle: if something is untrue in science, it's usually just that, not half way to untrue or anywhere in the middle.

The Covid data crew consider they have a monopoly on 'the science' and use it to quash any views that don't fit their ideology. I have  a few problems with this:

Firstly, 'science' has been used over the past 300 years to justify all sorts of mad and dangerous theories, racial superiority being a classic example. Nazi Germany and colonial Britain were both obsessed with using science to justify their policies.

Secondly, science evolves and does so very quickly. For example a mere 100 years ago continental drift was a theory for crackpots:

"...they called Wegener’s “delirious ravings” and other symptoms of “moving crust disease and wandering pole plague.” The British ridiculed him for distorting the continents to make them fit and, more damningly, for not describing a credible mechanism powerful enough to move continents. 

But it was the Americans who came down hardest against continental drift. A paleontologist called it “Germanic pseudo­-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication.” Wegener’s lack of geological credentials troubled another critic, who declared that it was “wrong for a stranger to the facts he handles to generalize from them."

Thirdly, there is quite a lot of divergence of opinion even within the scientific community over Covid immunity and the best strategy for dealing with the disease. Much is yet unknown, but worringly - as you've pointed out - those voices which do not conform to the chosen dogma are often silenced. UKC is quite active on this front!

Finally, even if everyone agrees with the science, they don't have to agree on policy, which is also dependent upon political and philosophical considerations eg. should young children be vaccinated for the benefit of older generations? Some people on here are a little too convinced of the righteousness of their own moral viewpoint. It's good to see someone questioning that.

I think its a fair question to ask why the scientific establishment thinks medicines are safe after some of the past disasters. In the case of covid vaccines this evaluation was mostly well done but there was some unfortunate initial establishment denial in the UK about specific AZ side-effects which were very rare but in some cases fatal. Jim Titt picked up on this here in comparison with the German position. Such scepticism of an establishment position is perfectly reasonable when it fits real data and is explainable within the science (ie it doesn't just muddle correlation with causation).

Media bias is more about opinion that facts, and opinion is more about what you omit than what you publish. I don't think anyone's saying the Guardian publishes lies, just that its editorial slant has become a lot more conformist with regards to establishment policy in recent years.

Sorry offwidth I wasn’t trying to wind you up, I wanted point out that all involved should be held to the same standards. It’s easy enough to go online and find any number of sites convincingly discrediting in the direction of desired bias. 
That’s not my experience of ‘science’ particularly when it comes to health, Peter Doshi has written a piece in the BMJ recently raising this exact concern over the vaccine unknowns. 
Anyway I certainly wouldn’t expect an apology, I’m not offended and value your opinion. Christ I’m wrong about 99% of the time 😂

You are “Big Bruva” and “Barmat”, right?

Oh dear.  Yup.  First one of my threads to be Godwin’d by the way.

I think if you actually read these posts you’ll find a lot of different opinions and the only shared one is that there’s a lot we don’t yet know about immunity in the long term.  That in no way translates to uncertainty over the role of lockdown early on when the alternative was probably half a million dead in 4 months.  Or worse.

If you are “Barmatt” I suspect they/you were not silenced for holding a different view, but for a post where they wished death from untreated cancer on those who disagreed with them.   Yet you stand here speaking of righteousness from others?  Spare me.

I keep my righteousness confined to people deliberately or ignorantly misrepresenting the science.  This twisting of the science is often used to push unrealisable policy and I won’t mince my words there.

There are a couple of posters who advocate for policy which I personally dislike immensely and who don’t try and misrepresent what this would mean and don’t misrepresent or misunderstand the science.  I have respect for their position but not their goal.  

Is the solution then to choose the science that fits your opinion? Has science been wrong? Yes. Should that mean we don't bother with it? no. There are of course examples were medicine has got it wrong, but by following science, we have the longest life expectancy in history. If you're gonna take a probabilistic approach, I'd back science rather than YouTube. Compare the number of drug approvals that have been right with those that have been wrong. I suspect you'll find more in one column than the other

How do you know now that continental drift isn't actually a crackpot invention?

As to your last point, I agree entirely. Agreement on science does not necessarily lead to an agreement in policy.

Amen to that. The Nazi’s loved a bit of scientism 

Fauci recently declared ‘if you question me then you are questioning science’. He is the world lead on Covid policy right? 

Total bollocks in terms of science and the history of science but unlike your false claim you are free to spout it. Just don't expect any scientist to take you seriously.

Several of us here have criticised what we reagarded as incorrect SAGE/WHO and CDC positions at the time and have been proved right by the rapidly improving science around a novel virus.

There is more to vaccinating kids than philosophy. Long covid risk and various more serious but rarer conditions in children may be a risk large enough to justify government approval and parental choice.

Fauci was wrong on mask science initially (as it was not his speciality) and many around him were wrong as well (ditto).

I’m not sure medical science has increased our life expectancy so much as improved sanitation. However it does quite a good job of eeeking out the final years of life. 36 meditations on death is a good read on that subject. Meanwhile some NICE boffin somewhere is sat in an office with a bunch of commissioners working out our value life years or whatever metric it is...

I’ve been asking medical experts and scientists for a year to help me understand how masks reduce community transmission of COVID in pragmatic terms. Not one has shown me any clear evidence of there effectiveness. I did scour the CDC website where they had some fantastic anecdotes about people using a barbers shop somewhere as proof, while debunking the danmask study. Still it’s a moot point as people love their masks, the worlds greatest still face experiment. 

I assume you haven't had penicillin? Know anyone who's had appendicitis? My son was born prematurely. He wouldn't have survived 50 or 100 years ago, and even if he did make it, his asthma might have finished him off, so I think you're off the mark there.

As for NICE. You have a fixed budget and a number of people to treat. More people than you have money. Please explain how your method is better than the existing one, that results in a fairer outcome....bloody scientists saving as many lives as they can with the money available

You are right of course many scientific breakthroughs have led to amazing treatments for awful illness and I’m very thankful for that.
Re NICE, the commissioners and the sadomasochistic hierarchy of the nhs and the f*cked up politics associated with it. I’ve little to say about how they spend money, I’ll wager there’s millions being pissed up the wall by PHE on a yearly basis tho 

Possibly. On what sort of things?

Digitisation of health care and health informatics projects come to mind, the usual corrupt clusterf*ck of public - private partnerships. The endless piss take. 

Did you ever question mask efficacy before Covid? You must have noticed surgeons and dentists wearing them your whole life. If you’ve never questioned it before, ask yourself why you’re suddenly questioning it during a pandemic.

I wrongly assumed that surgeons and dentists wore a face covering to protect themselves from bodily fluids such as blood excrement and mucus finding it’s way into their orifices. Apparently not, it was all about reducing the quantity of aerosolised virions present in the air space. 

What's  wrong with these? That doctors are still writing letters to each other about patients is absurd.

And knowing what drives cancer (or whatever) seems like a good thing to me.

I was presenting examples of projects where money is pissed up the wall, not stating that the projects in themselves are a bad idea 

That's implementation, not simply science. And largely politics driven, due to contract award and poor management.

NICE is the meeting of science and politics to try to meet medical demand with finite resources. It's pragmatism, not science. Pragmatism is used in many aspects of human endeavour, otherwise we end up with the "it doesn't matter how much it costs, if it saves one life it's worth it" infinite cost.

You've gone from unsubstantiated assumption to blatant accusation to withering judgement in just 3 sentences. This doesn't surprise me. It's also not the first time you're wrong.

You smell something??

My assumption that you are those posters is not unsubstantiated.   I could be wrong, but I’m basing it on more than you just being another pop up poster who jumps right in to covid threads to spout nonsense.

Rather than wittering on about accusations, you could just tell us your previous posting identities… 

I love how these tag team accounts start out with an exaggerated and deliberately different manner and vocabulary, but then their copy always reverts to the house style when they start getting called out.

In reply to Rawn1962:

That's perfect then, because that's how the system works. The scientists present their thoughts, the politicians make the decisions.

And just to improve the situation even more, there's barely more than an o level in science in the cabinet

Absolutely, I understand that there a lots of factors that go into the decision of making treatments available, the book I recommended earlier 33 meditations on death (I got the number wrong) is a powerful look at some of these issues with regards end of life care from a consultant in elderly medicine.

One complication of NICE and policies driven by 'science' is that they are driven by best evidence (see below)  which leads to lots of treatments with low efficacy being delivered in a highly pressurised system. What the answer to this is I don't know, what seems clear to me is that the politics of health care on balance appears harmful. 

The health professions just as any group is full of ego driven dogmatism and adherence to particular models and ways of thinking. One observation is that treatments that appear to fit in with government policy become best evidence and will be funded and backed at the expense of thinking outside the box. Sometimes I literally hold my head in my hands despairing as clinicians become burnt out trying to implement ineffective treatment protocols. 

On a different note re- Robert Malone, he seems to fit into the concerned and discredited scientist role. He gave this interview last night. He is no Wakefield (who I reiterate I have zero time for). I'd be keen to get peoples opinions on this 

https://rumble.com/vkfz1v-the-vaccine-causes-the-virus-to-be-more-dangerous...

Not entirely coherent I know..... please be kind 

In reply to Rawn1962:

Your 90 year old grandmother sounds smart, can we get her on the line instead of you?

Man with letter after name says bad things in psuedo science about vaccine. Person who doesn't understand the science (most of us), takes man at his word.

Person who doesn't understand science but can add up, could take the trouble to look at case data amongst vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Could look at health outcomes data of vaccinated vs unvaccinated. Could see that 40 million people in UK had a vaccine, and that people have stopped dying of covid, and haven't started dying of something else.

In reply to Rawn1962:

You don't have a 90 year old granny do you?

I don't think he's suggesting that the vaccine isn't effective, it clearly is, just that he has concerns that there are early signs of ADE which has implications for continued vaccination / boosters / alternative treatments (repurposed) and also preparing for autumn - winter pressures when the role seasonality on the prevalence respiratory viruses becomes an issue. 

A discussion with Steve Bannon about a genuine  problem in some vaccines (vaccine enhancement has happened) that Malone claims is happening with Pfiizer according to information from an unknown government source who spoke to Malone, conveniently backing up his theory, at the same time the US government is making vaccines compulsory for its workers. It's like a full house in conspiracy bingo. Robert Malone is right to be concerned about vaccine enhancement, but it has not been evidenced as yet, and some previous claims he made on the subject were certainly wrong.

This sort of thing shows why vaccine compulsion is such a bad idea.

Back to masks, if what you say is true the scientists and medics you spoke to should be ashamed of themselves but they will fit neatly in line with many more famous scientists before them. Initially in the pandemic the best mask science about protecting the public from the wearer was barrier physics, and a lot of scientists got upset because they wanted epidemiological evidence, as you would for a medicine. There was a medical mask shortage back then, so a practical solution was home made multi-layer face coverings. Those pushing against face covering use based on no epidemiological evidence were being plain dumb, as face coverings were a practical measure that would clearly benefit with no downside to the majority of people. Anyhow that was then: the epidemiological work has been done now and the standard cheap masks  (not medical grade ones) have been found to be the equal top preventative covid measure, almost as effective as vaccines. As you seem to enjoy scouring, the epidemiology results are on various UK government and NHS websites and were most recently linked on these threads a few weeks ago. The UK public information on this has indeed been very poor, but that's little surprise given our government doesn't like masks and was recommending removing compulsion.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-failed-to-use-common-...

In terms of sources, an interview with someone by Steve Bannon is right off the bottom of the scale. He also doesn't appear to be the inventor of mRNA vaccines as is claimed. It seems more along the line of the Michael Yeadon playbook.

There's been no evidence of antibody dependent enhancement. If his claims are true then we should be seeing significant issues with deaths from infection in people who received the first Pfizer vaccines in December last year, but the opposite is the case.

Modern medicine des a great job at improving chances of seeing your first birthday, then seeing that something else doesn’t kill you whilst you still have lots to contribute to the world.

Compare infant mortality between now and 100 years ago, or even between the U.K. and less developed health care systems.

A couple of personal examples. My 20 year old step-daughter would not have seen her 1st birthday if she had been born 5 years earlier or outside of the U.K. (US as well, but at a cost). My 70 year old Dad is in good health and enjoying retirement, but nearly died in his forties of something which a decade earlier would have killed him.

Perhaps granny might have been “Leahgoodall” and “leahgoodall3”.

They were on here a few weeks ago spouting a view they clearly knew was deliberately one sided, and being all pompous about it, as well as chucking in an inferred slight of “making rubbish predictions” at me when I was making no predictions.  

Their usual trolling MO of lying and up/down voting posts with a sock puppet to make it seem clever, only they’re a bit slow and posted from the sock puppet after a while.

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_31-...

They dishonestly and deceitfully use multiple accounts on a single thread and between different threads, and act the petulant child when called out on it.  

I totally agree with everything else you said but I've gotta stop you there. This just isn't true. Staying at home and outside kicks the crap out of both of these. And all the studies I can find conclude face coverings are great if properly worn and fitted but range from meh to complete crap when not fitted fastidiously.

Still, to be clear, again, they're an easy win and I'm not in any way against their use, but by telling people they're this awesome you're potentially causing harm.

In reply to Rawn1962:

What is insulting or smearing about calling out your dishonest use of multiple accounts even on a single thread?  I’ve even linked to an example.

It doesn’t take a minute to note my thoughts on your deceitful posting conduct.

How much cash and time do you invest in the dozens (hundreds?) of email addresses and perhaps even IP addresses that your constant masquerade demands?  How much work goes in to managing your spreadsheet of email addresses, passwords and user account names?  Not enough given your recent slip ups…

edit to your edit:

I have no problem stating I find your conduct that of a nasty little troll.  

I am always open to private messages, and people who send me one that is identifiable to a real person either via their profile or their email almost always get a reply where I’m identifiable.  So, if you want to open such a private channel, you can.

In reply to Rawn1962:

Ah, that’s the problem.  You don’t actually understand what I’m writing.  

Why do you troll behind so many different accounts and get so touchy about it?  Why do you run multiple accounts on a single thread?  

You are back onto the effectiveness of a mask to protect the wearer, often used in a medical context, where it's not possible to social distance. Near 100% protection is needed  such circumstances.

I'm not wrong. The reported effectiveness of masks was for prevention of spread. Of course being outside or self isolating at home is a better protection but its not possible for everyone to avoid public indoor spaces and that's where the virus is spreading.

Public policy was to protect others from the wearer, using face coverings or masks, alongside social distancing in indoor public spaces. The epidemiology research backing the effectiveness of face coverings of various types has been posted a few times now, most recently by bruxist.  The research shows indoor mask use is an excellent measure for reducing covid spread. Even less than ideal face coverings make a useful difference.