Recommissioning after Coronavirus

According to someone who claims to be talking from some informed position:
60% of people have had/will get corona virus and have no noticeable symptoms.
Of those who get the virus and have symptoms, 80% will be relatively minor, not requiring hospital treatment
Of those who require hospital treatment (8% of all infected people), 99% will recover.
Clearly for the remaining 1%, it isn't good news. They are though 0.08% of those infected.

Paraphrasing someone else who claims to know what they are on about: "Corona(or covid or whatever) has doubled anyone's chance of dying on any day. For most, that chance is minutely small, so doubling the likelihood is still minutely small. Only for those in the "at risk" group is there any significant risk.

 

I should treat those figures with more than a bit of caution. For instance, they state that "Of those who require hospital treatment (8% of all infected people), 99% will recover". It is a published fact that there have been 27,000 hospital deaths in the UK due to Covid 19. This would mean, based on the figures stated in your post, that the hospitals had successfully treated and released 2.7 million Covid affected patients thus far. I think not..!!

This is one of the problems with the spread of fake information on social media.

Andy

 

I treat ALL the publicised information with a great deal of scepticism, including the "27,000 deaths". Currently it seems to suit certain agenda to inflate the number of corona deaths as much as possible. If I suffer from pleurisy, catch corona and die, my death will be attributed to the virus, whereas in more normal times it would be blamed entirely on me smoking from the age of 14....

Edit-I don't have pleurisy

 

So how many Covid 19 patients do you think have died in hospital then? Those numbers are compiled from the death certificates.

Andy

 

Yesterday the ONS said an extra 50,000 people had died in the last six weeks in the UK over what would normally be expected, that's horrendous.
Dave

 

There's big difference between "have had" and "will get" though! They mean quite different things.

I haven't seen any statistics form this country as to how prevalent it is. Whether the number who have had the disease and recovered is 0.5% or 5% or 50% of the population; and whether it is possible or not to catch it again having once had it; taken together have pretty profound implications for what the future might hold, but I haven't seen any data to show what the actual situation is.

Tom

 

I’ve seen elsewhere that the assumption that 80% will catch the virus is based on omitting the key phrase “if no action is taken”.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

I do not know. I think truth was an early casualty in all this. Apparently 550,000-615,000 people die each year, which is 50,000 per month. It also appears that currently the statistic is rather lower than average. I am not well enough informed, or clever enough to attempt to draw any conclusion one way or another

 

For the four week period ending 24th April 2020 the total number of registered deaths in England & Wales (but excluding Scotland) was 79,251. The average number for the same four-week period over the previous five years was 41,758, giving a figure of no less than 37,463 excess deaths above norm. That can in no way be described as "rather lower than average'.

The information is taken from the published ONS statistics https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/weeklyprovisionalfiguresondeathsregisteredinenglandandwales

Andy

 

Fine. I had clearly misunderstood when a government spokesman stated a few weeks ago that the death rate at present was below average.

 

Of course whether all the excess is directly attributable to the virus or not is another matter. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that some will be as a result of the reluctance of some to seek medical treatment for fear of being in hospital. A somewhat understandable fear I think. Speaking as one who had reason to visit the A&E of large hospital last week, it was noticeable how very quiet the hospital was. Before anyone says it, I am not disputing that the overwhelming majority of the excess deaths are most likely covid-19 related. However you look at it, it is a pretty horrible number.

 

Excess deaths are agreed to be the best way to judge excess deaths, funnily enough, rather that counting the number of times a specific thing occurs on a death certificate in particular settings, which is liable to miscounting (not to purposefully deceive, I hasten to add). And excess deaths are predicted to now stand at over 60,000, 50,000 being the last "official" number: https://twitter.com/ChrisGiles_/status/1260568972929519616

Assuming a mortality rate of about 1-2%, that's somewhere between 3 and 6 million people who have actually had the disease so far, or 4-8%. That's a long way short of 60%, and a lot longer to go and a lot more deaths before we reach a state of herd immunity.

I've no idea to what you're referring to, but I seem to recall reading that the death rate before the virus took hold was slightly lower than the 5 year average used to calculate excess deaths. That would suggest that the excess deaths calculated could actually be a slight underestimate.

Suffice to say, by no measure is the number of coronavirus deaths being over-reported, and by many measures actually being under-reported, and it doesn't matter how many anecdotes of "So-and-so actually died of this but happened to have COVID-19 so it went on the death certificate" get trotted out.

 

Indeed, and equally, you've also got to bear in mind that presumably deaths due to traffic accidents and the like are also lower as well. To what extent one is offset by the other who's to say. But if we're using excess deaths to calculate how successful our overall response is rather than just arbitrarily counting deaths due to the disease, then I'd argue that death due to people not going to hospital are an important part of that picture anyway. If we had a proper lockdown earlier we could have got on top of this sooner so people could go to hospital for normal things sooner.

 

The idea that the number of deaths from Covid 19 have been artificially inflated does not actually pass muster when you look at the ONS figures. For instance if we take the week ending 1st May 2020, the total deaths recorded in England & Wales are 17,953. There were 1,272 deaths where Covid 19 was the underlying cause, and an additional 6,035 deaths where Covid 19 was mentioned on the death certificate, giving a total of 7,307 Covid related deaths in week. If we subtract these from the weekly total we get a figure of 10,286 deaths from other causes. The average number of deaths in the same week over the previous five years is 9,941.

Andy

 

Of course A&E departments are quieter then normal during the lockdown.

Pubs and clubs are shut, and roads are quieter.

 

Newspapers and the media will always use shock information to grab the headlines. My daughter is an intensive care and A & E consultant at a large city hospital. There has never been any problem with PPE there. The wards are much quieter than the norm and the number of admissions for heart attacks and strokes has dropped alarmingly, although DIY accidents are slightly up. At the moment there are just four patients with Covid 19 and all are recovering. Work for her is actually quieter than the usual. Apparently it is a similar story at other hospitals which she is in regular contact with.

 

the plural of anecdote is not data - that cuts both ways. Just because there is no shortage where your daughter works doesn't prove there isn't a shortage elsewhere. In the world of institutional politics, I would submit that a large city hospital is probably able to shout louder than others, so I have no more confidence that that position is representative than any other. If medical staff are willing to protest after working 12+ hr shifts, I suggest they feel there isn't enough.

We are all navel-gazing to huge extent anyway.

 

Getting back to heritage railways - someone asked earlier about on train toilets making distancing harder as people walk past others to get to them...the obvious answer is to shut them off and allow slightly longer station stops (I believe the journey time between stops is rarely more than 15 minutes on any heritage line).

Clearly measures like this need 'advertising' up front, but could remove an obstacle.

Similarly the shops etc would need a finite capacity and a queuing system, possibly even supermarket style perspex screens...

 

because you wipe out the under-5s market? (or at least seriously de-attract it). 15 minutes is a long time for a toddler's bladder (having refused to go at the previous station...)

 

I wonder if the "trains as theatre" idea has something to show for it. But then to keep the show interesting, you need more trains. and refreshment and all the other things, which may put you back to square one.

Many years ago, I drove an ice-cream van and had a pitch at a WW1 Proms. It seemed a daft idea on paper, but a warm summers' evening with an orchestra playing suitably obvious stirring classics and a biplanes trundling overhead like very large moths worked really well.

I wonder if some of the lines closer to centres of population will manage to get a late summer season of some sort, but for the more rural ones, there will be the double-whammy of no tourists and no money in the local economy provided by tourists.

Perhaps a reversion to the old Wakes Week tradition of certain towns going on holiday to certain resorts en masse at certain times, minimises the transmission between social groupings?