COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[bluetonium]

Hope you get sorted and keep well. Just to let gou know though Im in Scotland and ours have been back nearly a month. After 5 months away loads of children have picked up coughs and colds and needed their families to isolate and test for a couple of days, puttingnpressure on the system. All in my area have been negative. Most schools in Scotland are still.clear.

if you go by the schools and colleges in america then there will be a massive rise in cases and several back to remote learning. The key is the rise in hospital cases and deaths,we are yet to see if that will increase, hope not , it is too early to tell. Many will have it had but stay at home and ride it out

Hope your babies are ok and it is just a cold


Excuse me if I use this rather than a new post
Quick update on me, finished prednisone on tues, my peak flow has dropped off a cliff again, getting a bit breathless on exertion again, nothing like it was when I had to go to hospital last time , i have this coming week of the peak flow diary then send it into the drs and they will decide what to do with my lungs,they are still not doing the Spiro test because of covid which is what i really need to do but the diary will have to suffice

Seen loads of people saying the same thing, that's what happens unfortunately when we don't mix and our bodies natural defences are not having to build any immunity to the day to day bugs we come across. Going to be a long winter with people off work and school constantly as they have a cough or another minor symptom. Hope your 2 kids are feeling better soon.

Thanks for all the well wishes. My little one is now out of hospital and crucially it was not Covid. However, what it does show and what the doctors and nurses all commented on is that generally exposure and immunity to viruses etc is at a very low level in communities, and that undoubtedly affects schools now. We thought we were compensating by ensuring our girls had their vitamins every day, lots of fruit and veg - they have a bowl of fruit happily each day - but even then within 2 days of attending school last week our 4 year old was floored by a virus. I guess that can only be due to reduced / no interactions for over half a year.

She's on antibiotics and has an inhaler which she may need to use for quite a while, has to be woken up twice per night to ensure she takes it to keep her breathing steady, but it goes to show its not just Covid now that will be contributing to school attendances. My fear would be that, and I really don't know if this is possible, but if children already weakened by one vrius then quickly catch another - we are definitely heading into flu season now - then the seriousness of the cases may increase, I do hope that isn't possible.

 

[HelloCity]

 

[quiet_riot]

we'll be back under lockdown come october

I don't think we will see a full-scale lockdown like the one we had, the economy is simply too important to the Tories. At most, I think we will see local lockdowns, businesses temporarily restricted and yeargroups isolating from schools.

 

[Mon Autre]

This is so true. Especially as the temperatures get lower and people are less likely to meet outdoors anyway.

Also have to laugh that it's fine to sit in a pub full of strangers as long as your group is no bigger than 5 people...

The thing is, I do accept we can't be in full lockdown forever and that the hospitality industry can't function in a work from home capacity. I support pubs and restaurants being able to open so long as they're operating as responsibly as they can.

But we have to support schools and hospitality being able to remain open, by limiting other things. It just beggars belief that the government, with the help of their friends in the media, are actively encouraging people back into offices when they are doing their jobs just fine at home. We need to allow space for industries that can't work from home to function. Or else we'll drag them back down with us if we have to have another a full lockdown.

And the government hasn't supported the lifting of restrictions properly. It's absolutely scandalous of them to have let testing capacity deplete like it has as we head into autumn. There can be no excuses about benefit of hindsight this time. And they've seemingly given up on tracing. We've been told time and time again that testing and tracing are vital. They can't just keep expecting the economy to carry on as normal unless they support reopening properly. Then telling people they can't gather outside as though that's the problem is making people even angrier and less likely to buy into the rules full stop.

 

[Healdplace]

Kaz, I don't know where Sky got the figure of deaths you quoted earlier from yesterday. But there were 32 all settings deaths yesterday. It was originally 30 and was put up as that but they added 2 more several hours later as Northern Ireland added two deaths from a hospital outbreak that they had to verify were Covid first. They delayed publishing their data to do so as I reported on here early afternoon.

That is - as I said last night - the highest for over a month. So is indeed a warning sign as there has been an increase in deaths to around such levels in Spain and France a week or two after their cases suddenly spiked upwards as ours now have in the past few days.

But it will as always depend on how we keep the vulnerable protected and how sensible the young who feel invulnerable are prepared to be. Mixing of these together is what will increase the death numbers.

I am hopeful we will never get near the numbers we saw before in terms of deaths in what is an inevitable winter increase unless and until we have a vaccine (though the news on the Oxford one is not helpful today - on hold whilst they investigate a patient who has gotten ill). There are multiple reasons to think we will handle the increase in cases better.

Though unless and until we get the test, test, test basis far better than we ever have in the UK over the past 6 months it will never be enough.

This is the one question our PM must be made to answer in the press conference at 4pm today. Why after six months in a country with one of the best pharma industries in the world are we so utterly useless at getting the testing right? I know someone who works in one of the labs and she is upset at the way this has been allowed to deteriorate and things not mobilised properly.

 

[MillionMilesAway]

Read that but also said it's routine for this to happen during trials and that it's actually the 2nd time they have had to do it for this vaccine trial. Also, isn't it just the 1 participant not "volunteers"?

Yes, not really an issue in itself. It may show up something it reacts badly with.

Regardless, all of the people currently under test are still under test - just a suspension in adding more people.

 

[Healdplace]

Kippax, on the numbers I post. These are literally the number of positive new cases per town as recorded from the tests done the previous day (though some sent off may have taken a couple of days to process most are faster than they were now).

So it is as up to date as you can be. The numbers tonight will be from yesterday being tallied now. The tests they do today will not be visible until at least tomorrow.

The per 100,000 population data they use to calculate league tables is often a few days old or even a week. So it is like a version of the Pop Score I print in my list every night.

This smooths out the obvious fact that towns and districts are not all the same size. So a city like Manchester getting 20 cases a day is a very different proposition to a small rural borough like Rossendale doing so because of the big difference in population size. So the Pop score creates a commonality that lets you compare the numbers.

The number you refer to is just a different version of that but is also often at least a few days out of date.

This is one reason the sudden rise in cases in Bolton was reacted to slowly by politicians. The weekly numbers did not catch up on this until it was well underway. It was much more obvious quickly from the data I put on here every day as we saw the case numbers literally escalate day to day in a sudden and rapid manner.

Both the weekly averaged out per population numbers and the day to day cases have significance but they are quite different in the t hings they tell us if instant response is needed. Less so if you have time to think and plan

The pop number and score per 100K on cases tells you how a place is doing relative to other places so is why they use these numbers to create a best or worst town list every week. It is comparative.

Leicester has by miles the biggest Pop Score in the UK at 1671 - but that does not mean everyone should be locked up now as it tells you mostly they have had a problem at some point in or slowly across the whole pandemic but not when or how it is faring now unless you watch how fast this rises every day which is not something easy or obvious for most people to do.

The case numbers per day and how they trend across two or three days, the week and the month charts the progress much better of a sudden outbreak that can get serious enough to require special measures somewhere. As it is obvious quickly from these numbers what is happening and there is less lag than waiting for weekly data to update.

The data I post looks complicated as I include all these things daily. But if you know how to read it then it tells you the picture better.

Its why we could see on here seemingly before most politicians what was happening in Bolton. It was such a sudden jump it stood out.

What is happening over the past few days in Tameside is another example. It is not a huge rise like in Bolton but a slow sustained rise to high numbers for here and so you know it is somewhere you need to watch in case it becomes another Bolton. It hasn't yet and hopefully never will and it might not even show on the population based national lists unlress it does. But it is triggering a rise in cases in Stockport next to it as these boroughs are linked by geography. So it is a danger sign the data shows that otherwise might be missed.

 

[grunge]

First UK death confirmed of COVID in December. So very likely those that thought they had it in December or January may well have done. Puts that argument as to when it was first here to rest.

there probably was the odd case. but no way was it wide spread. You can see large scale community spread almost to the day going by excess deaths.

 

[somapop]

Interesting discussion on the ‘Sweden’ thing (often mentioned by those opposing our own lockdown measures):

https://www.newscientist.com/articl...trategy-a-cautionary-tale-or-a-success-story/

 

[Healdplace]

To clarify - the day to day case numbers tell you how good or bad a place is doing versus itself and if there is a local outbreak that may need isolating. Right now that is critical.

Whereas the other data tells you how good or bad a place is across the pandemic or (via the league table based on how fast these numbers go up and down) if it is in the past week up or down as one of the worst in the UK so needs to be on a watchlist.