LOCKDOWN 2 - the November experience

[Thomas]

It is also problematic to assume everyone in the UK has already had CV because that begs the question as to why there is a 2nd wave.

you are contradicting yourself here again , and putting forth a straw man argument.

First of all who has assumed the whole of the uk has already had covid 19? I havent heard this on any news platform media outlet or forum i have been on . At best may be 10 % or so of the uk in total may have had it?

Secondly , the contradiction is even if the whole uk had already had it , you were arguing earlier on immunity might not last , hence why there will be a second and third wave.

The question is how does the world deal with covid 19 without any vaccine? Do you think continual non stop lcokdowns and restictions are the answer while sitting on our hands praying for a vaccine or the virus goes away at some point in the future?

Bandying about figures and pulling them left right and centre to political point score means feck all.

if your testing regime is very limited eg only people admitted to hospital, you will miss a lot of cases.

so in light of this statement why are you using the ons/ government figures to portray a higher death rate when for weeks if not months folk like you have been arguing governments across the uk havent been testing enough people so dont have a f**king clue who has or hasnt had covid 19.

You are undermining your own mortality rate .

If governments have missed a lot of cases ( which is what the WHO have said with their 1/780 estimate) then the mortality rate of 3/4% that has been bandied about is by your own admission a nonsense.

guy from cambridge there on the telly ( spigelhalter) has just bascially said the uk government graph of 4000 a day dead if england hadnt locked down was a load of bollocks .

lies and damn statistics indeed.

[BeElBeeBub]

So how do you factor in unknown asymptomatic cases using your calculation?

That's the tricky thing.

That's why the *case* fatality ratio can be misleadingly high (say 25%) - if your testing regime is very limited eg only people admitted to hospital, you will miss a lot of cases.

However there are studies that look at what the asymptotic rate is.  As you would expect it varies by age.  The methodology is also key.  Some look at a captive population (cruise liners a a good option), some do random studies. Some look at antibodies.

All have their strengths and weaknesses.

That is why the NYC case sets the lower bounds of IFR.

We know 19k died and there were at most 8.4m infections. 

So 0.2% IFR in a developed nation with a surge of cases due to uncontrolled infections.

If we take the UK as a whole we have 50k deaths and 65m people.  That would be an absolute minimum of 0.08% assuming every single person in the UK already caught it or was already immune to it.

Let's round that up to 0.1%.

The flu typically causes less than 30k deaths a year.

If the IFR for flu was 0.1% that would imply half the country gets flu every year for 30k to die.

Whichever way you slice it you have to believe that we are incredibly bad at estimating CV infections but amazing at spotting influenza infections.

It is also problematic to assume everyone in the UK has already had CV because that begs the question as to why there is a 2nd wave.

[Nick]

It's the number dying divided by the actual number of cases.

So how do you factor in unknown asymptomatic cases using your calculation?

[papasmurf]

Free speech means allowing people to say what they believe, whether they are right or wrong.

I'm sure the government will get their precious lockdown approved, although there is a list of Tory MPs who are going to rebel

I suspect that list will be a lot longer come the vote.

[Barry]

You should be barred from using the internet for making what are false statements given the numbers of dead from Covid-19 and the many thousands suffering from long Covid.

Free speech means allowing people to say what they believe, whether they are right or wrong.

I'm sure the government will get their precious lockdown approved, although there is a list of Tory MPs who are going to rebel
Graham Brady
Esther McVey
Philip Davies
Charles Walker
Desmond Swayne
John Redwood
Robert Syms
Andrew Rosindell
William Wragg
Chris Green
Mike Penning
Marcus Fysh
Richrd Drax
Andrew Bridgen

I wonder if they will all have the whip withdrawn and expelled from the party? I think not.

[BeElBeeBub]

we've been arguing about how deadly CV is back and forth with some claiming it's comparable to the flu and some saying it's around 10x worse.

However I'd like to put that to the side and look at the other issue.  Hospitalisations

I posted this elsewhere but:...


Let's assume everyone under 20 is completely asymptomatic. No problems at all.

Lets also assume all over 60's are perfectly shielded so zero CV related problems either

Roughly speaking there are 8.5 to 9.0m people in each decade between 20 and 60 in the UK.

The rough figures for infection to hospitalisation rate for each decade are

20's - 1.0%
30's - 3.4%
40's - 4.3%
50's - 8.0%

And as we said, we'll assume the below 20's are unaffected and the over 60's are perfectly shielded so contribute zero CV hospitalisations.

Let's also assume we have perfected treatment and everyone can recover from CV if they get treatment (drugs, oxygen etc).  The death rate will then be 0 assuming we can treat people.

Those figures give approximately 1.5m hospitalisations.

If we let CV run unrestricted these hospitalisations will occur over a few months.

On average the NHS has around 10k beds available out of the 100k acute beds

the bottle neck isn't the physical beds it's the staff.

In order to cope with the surge in demand the NHS will need to start choosing between patients.  Elective surgery will go first, hip ops, cataracts etc.

But pretty soon we will have to start cutting less easy procedures.  Cancer treatment and diagnosis, heart ops, emergency services etc.

Do we keep other services by going "if you've got CV you're on your own"?  That would be an option, but how many people would go to pubs or work knowing there is a highly contagious virus that has a 1-10% chance of putting you in hospital and if it does you wont be allowed in?

On the other hand we could cancel other procedures but that means more cancers, strokes, heart attacks etc etc. 

[BeElBeeBub]

but thats a false argument right there yet again , firstly , we only know the numbers who have died within 28 days of testing positive for covid 19 . Covid 19 might not have killed the person , so the death toll is very ambiguous.

You are right, the "28 day" figures they release daily are somewhat crude and do count the hypothetical bus victim.

It's used because it is the quickest measure available.

However the ONS (professional statisticians who do things like death rates from diseases for a living) go through the death certificates and check the cause of death.  This takes time so the figure is lagged by about 14days.

Up to mid October that figure was 53,700.

Also of note is the fact weekly deaths in mid October were 670, up 4 fold from the 139 in mid September.
[/Quote]

Secondly we dont know the actual number of cases do we? The WHO admitted this a few weeks back , when they said the official number of world wide cases is much much less than their estimates of ten per cent  of th world being infected which brings the death rate right down to as barry said 1/780 , way below the 3/4 % hysterical figure often quoted.
[/quote]
There is a difference between case (someone officially diagnosed) and infections (which also includes people who were never diagnosed either because they had no symptoms or because they never saw a health worker).

The official figure of 43m *cases* is almost certainly the lower limit of infections.

Gauging infections is much harder and necessarily involves some assumptions.

The "1 in 10" estimate of the WHO is their best guess at a single number but will (unreported because the media hates things like confidence limits) include a likely upper and lower band.

If you assume 10% is the real figure, that's approx 760m and if you also assume the death figure of 1m is correct then you get 1/760, not a million miles from 1/780.

However you have to assume that the death figure is under reported. The UK death figure  (28 day measure) Is under reported by at least 10% (46k reported today Vs an actual of 53k 2 weeks ago).

So that pushes the death rate up a bit

Then you have the demographic issue. We know the fatality increases with age.  An outbreak in a student hall of 100 will probabky not result in any deaths and only 1 hospitalisation.

An outbreak in a retirement village of 100, will result in 20 or so hospitalisations and around 10 deaths

The world skews younger than Europe and N America.  So the overall IFR for the world will be lower than the IFR for the UK.

To take your accusation that NY is the "worst case".  Demographically, in particular art age, it's similar to the UK, at least more so than migrant workers in Dubai or other study groups that were used in the "0.2%" report.

NYC shows the IFR of CV runs out of control is at least 0.2% and that's making some pretty unrealistic assumptions. If you take a more realistic assumption that 20% caught it (still double the world average) you get 1% IFR.

Even if you look across the USA, where the "worst case conditions" you identify aren't prevalent, CV has killed at least 3x more people than the worst winter flu in decades, and it managed to do so over the summer whilst many restrictions were in place.

In order to claim CV is equivalent to winter flu you need to makes some extremely easy assumptions.

1% (varying by age) is a reasonable estimate.  In absolute terms it's not catastrophic. Imagine if it was 10% across the board, or even 5% but only affecting the under 30's.  That would cause massive societal damage.

The risk to an individual is not overwhelming.  Even an obese 74 year old living on a junk food diet has a good chance of surviving if they have access to experimental, money no object round the clock care.

The risk to society and the economy of doubling the number of deaths in a year are very large

Finally i think borkie is pulling your leg beelbeeb

[Thomas]

It's the number dying divided by the actual number of cases.

but thats a false argument right there yet again , firstly , we only know the numbers who have died within 28 days of testing positive for covid 19 . Covid 19 might not have killed the person , so the death toll is very ambiguous.

Secondly we dont know the actual number of cases do we? The WHO admitted this a few weeks back , when they said the official number of world wide cases is much much less than their estimates of ten per cent  of th world being infected which brings the death rate right down to as barry said 1/780 , way below the 3/4 % hysterical figure often quoted.

Finally i think borkie is pulling your leg beelbeeb.

[BeElBeeBub]

Just curious. Speaking as someone who has actually stood in a lab, and tried running DNA through gel electrophoresis, and shown how rubbish THAT was as a separation technique what exactly was your degree again ?


I know exactly why a minor sniffle turns into a case of you flat on your face with consultants fighting to save your life.  It is entirely down to the susceptibility of the transport proteins in the cell surfaces of the cells in your major organs to being fooled by the compound in the spikes of the corona pox virus. It masquerades as a messenger chemical normally transmitted by the adrenal glands as a last gasp attempt to tell you to slow your heart down before you bloody explode and that is a VIP pass for the payload.


Were I a serious conspiracy theorist I would be quite keen to think a little on the published work of about three hundred people over the past thirty years all of whom were trying to find a way to exploit this sort of mechanism to accurately deliver nanodoses of toxin to cancer cells and thereby revolutionise chemotherapy. But I'm not


Now, you can try playing the doom gloom and end of the world bollox but it won't wash with me.

Engineering

Are you making a variant of the "it's all false positives" argument?

If so how do you account for the fact we have managed to get a consistently low positive rate of around 0.5% over the summer?

The REACT study got a positive rate below 0.1% over the summer.

We are now seeing positive rates an order of magnitude higher.  It stretches credulity to say that it's purely a measurement error.

[BeElBeeBub]

As I have said on numerous occasions, I have a crap degree from a crap poly, but it is a degree in maths, so I reckon I know as much about stats as anyone else on this forum. And my take on the matter is that this bug is fairly mild and that we are at greater risk from bleeding to death as a result of running around and shitting razor blades.

If you have a degree in mathematics and know more about statistics than anyone else here then you will know the correct way to describe fatality of a disease is not the number dying divided by the population.

It's the number dying divided by the actual number of cases.

At it's peak, CV was the biggest killer in the UK, killing more than heart disease, cancer or anything else.

Unless you make unreasonable assumptions about the actual number of flu or CV cases (either hardly anyone gets flu and everyone has had CV) the infection fatality rate is much higher for CV.

So which assumptions are you making to claim CV is a minor  sniffle (so minor it's already been responsible for around 10% of deaths in the UK this year)?

[johnofgwent]

the true number of infections will always be an estimate.

But flu has been circulating for decades and they have a pretty good handle on it's fatality, somewhere below 0.25% (often well below that)

You can only make that figure higher if you assume less people got it than thought, which seems unlikely.  If you assume more people got it (people who as you say "felt like shit but laughed it off and how many had no issue") that makes flu even less deadly.

On the other hand we know that the maximum number of cases in NYC is 8.4m, because that is the population.  There can be no more cases than that.

So even if we assume the (very implausible) scenario that everyone in NY had CV and 19k died of it, we still get the least that the IFR can be as 0.2.

So in order to believe that CV is no worse than flu we have to believe

a) The CDC managed to count every single flu infection (even the asymptomatic ones)
b) All 8.4m New Yorkers have already caught CV.

If the CDC under count flu cases the flu becomes less deadly.  If not every New Yorker got CV then CV becomes more deadly.This is a super common claim.

A false positive is an instance where somebody who didn't have CV gets a positive result.

Over the summer we were conducting somewhere around 100-125k tests a day, with around 500 positive results.

That's a rate of around 0.5% (I'm using round figures for ease).

Now the false positive rate can never exceed the actual positive rate.  That is to say the worst case scenario is that every single positive result is a false positive.

So if we assume (again unlikely) that every single positive result over the summer was false, you get a false positive rate of 0.5% at most.

We are now seeing positive rates of over 5% so the majority of cases are in fact real and the case count is going up.

You mention people with inert RNA in their nasal passages.  It's possible tests are picking up old infections that are no longer infectious.  That is an issue if we are then asking the (now non-infectious) person to isolate.

However from the case count perspective and old infection is still an infection.  If we had caught it when it was live it would simply have been in the count last week or last month.
The count released daily is deaths within 28 days of a CV positive result.

It's true that it would catch the hypothetical asymptomatic, recovered patient hit by a bus 27 days after their positive test.

However it would also miss the healthy 38 year old who died 29 days after their test.  As we get better at testing people earlier (before they even get symptoms in some cases) and better at keeping people alive this type of under count can become an issue.

This exact question was examined by professional actuaries who concluded that the number of people hospitalised "with" rather than "from" CV was less than 1 in 7 (https://www.covid-arg.com/bulletins)

The "gold" standard for CV deaths is the ONS study which examines death certificates.  These contain the train of events that caused death eg Cardiac Arrest caused by Hypoxia caused by CV Pneumonia

This excludes your hypothetical bus victim in the same way he wouldn't be classed as dying from HIV if he had that.

The weight of evidence from across the sectors and across the world all points to the fact that CV is significantly more fatal than seasonal influenza.

Just curious. Speaking as someone who has actually stood in a lab, and tried running DNA through gel electrophoresis, and shown how rubbish THAT was as a separation technique what exactly was your degree again ?


I know exactly why a minor sniffle turns into a case of you flat on your face with consultants fighting to save your life.  It is entirely down to the susceptibility of the transport proteins in the cell surfaces of the cells in your major organs to being fooled by the compound in the spikes of the corona pox virus. It masquerades as a messenger chemical normally transmitted by the adrenal glands as a last gasp attempt to tell you to slow your heart down before you bloody explode and that is a VIP pass for the payload.


Were I a serious conspiracy theorist I would be quite keen to think a little on the published work of about three hundred people over the past thirty years all of whom were trying to find a way to exploit this sort of mechanism to accurately deliver nanodoses of toxin to cancer cells and thereby revolutionise chemotherapy. But I'm not


Now, you can try playing the doom gloom and end of the world bollox but it won't wash with me.

[Thomas]

You should be barred from using the internet for making what are false statements given the numbers of dead from Covid-19 and the many thousands suffering from long Covid.

Get a sense of humour , and secondly have you not learned your lesson about reporting posts and calling for people getting banned?

You are eventually going to push the mods one time to many and get yourself banned for life as you were on the old forum.

[Thomas]

.

Lockdowns are the result of the UK's inept government failing to use the time we all bought them with our sacrifices earlier in the year to do anything productive, instead using it to bung cash at their mates.

So why are lockdowns happening again all around the world to a lesser or greater degree if its simply down to the uk governments fault?

My brother in law lives in south east France and they are going into a much stricter lockdown yet again than England is. Germany and other countries are too.

In your few posts on this subject beely there are so many things to address , but the simple fact is you are over egging the pudding to try and emphasise your stance and make a political point.

Take your new york example.

New york was one of the most badly hit cities not just in america but the western world. With a popualtion of 8.4 million , it has half the covid 19 death toll of the entire 67 million multi national uk state.

The reasons for this are many and varied , cramped city , political indecision and new york often being the first point of call for european travellers spreading the virus.

So you have taken a worst case covid 19 example , used it as a benchmark to portray it as the norm , and then compared it originally to barrys WHO estimate of a death rate of 1/780.

Thats just typical of you bellbeeb , offering up false dichotomys and worst case scenario figures to over emphasise the point as we have all been accustomed to.

I dont believe covid 19 is simply as bad as the flu , i think it is worse, but i keep reiterating not as bad as you with your worst case scenario figures and cherry picked examples are making out.

The figures you keep quoting are a nonsense as john of gwent and others keep mentioning. They are guesstimates nothing more , and what hard figures we do have are simply a small part of what is going on.

This whole covid 19 scenario is going the exact same way as the brexit debate.....virtue signallers on one side spouting armageddon , with everyone else trying to make sense of whats going on.

Clearly the politicians across many countries dont have a feckin clue how to deal with all this....the inconsistencies being flagged up not just in your country , but mine and many others in terms of partial lockdowns are many and varied.

Finally i would agree the uk governemt has handled this ineptly , to put it in perspective though , labour wouldnt have done any better , and the uk government is inthe same boat as many other governments on this.

If we got less hysteria , less self righteous cunts lecturing and blaming , less cherry picked figures to paint armageddon to political pont score , and a bit of common sense and thought for different peoples situations around about us  , then we might be in a better place.

...but we wont.

[papasmurf]

As I have said on numerous occasions, I have a crap degree from a crap poly, but it is a degree in maths, so I reckon I know as much about stats as anyone else on this forum. And my take on the matter is that this bug is fairly mild

You should be barred from using the internet for making what are false statements given the numbers of dead from Covid-19 and the many thousands suffering from long Covid.

[Borchester]

So I think I stuck my hand in my pocket fairly deeply.  I'd like to not have to do it again because idiots watch a YouTube video from ex-plaster Dave aka "UnmaskedFreedomFighter38596" and suddenly think they know more about statistics and epidemics than statisticians and epidemiologists.

.

As I have said on numerous occasions, I have a crap degree from a crap poly, but it is a degree in maths, so I reckon I know as much about stats as anyone else on this forum. And my take on the matter is that this bug is fairly mild and that we are at greater risk from bleeding to death as a result of running around and shitting razor blades.