COVID-19 — Coronavirus

[Healdplace]

Yes the internet has made it so much easier to be right when you are wrong and wrong when you are right and believed by a billion people either way.

 

[kaz7]

Kaz this thread was ahead of Sky News again here.

Not that I am claiming credit for that. But I have been tracking the situation on here for 2 weeks and pointed all this out over the past few days.

The raw facts disguise the nuance of how much longer it took to do that in the NW than it seemed it was going to do because numbers fell a lot over the past 10 days.

News bulletins are good at telling you raw data when some milestone is passed. Less good at seeing how they got to that point and what this means. As they are not tracking it day to day just telling a story when it happens.

With the greatest of respect i cant follow you because my brain literally cant read and digest it , it is easier to wait and get a top line number

 

[Millwallawayveteran1988]

There are now more COVID-19 hospital patients in both regions of northern England than at the peak of the first wave of the virus,, according to the latest official data.

In North West England, 2,948 hospital patients with confirmed coronavirus were reported on 9 November.

This is 58 higher than the first-wave peak of 2,890 on 13 April.

Meanwhile, in North East England and Yorkshire, 2,999 patients were reported on 9 November - 432 above the first-wave peak of 2,567 on 9 April.

Sky rolling news

What is going on up north ?

More people in hospital than the first wave, in the states

No way are we anywhere near the end of the second wave ,we are in the middle at best

Warrington hospital has more and there have been around 100 deaths in the last six weeks or so. Taking the total from 150 to 250 very quickly.

I’m not sure what is going on to be honest. I’ve generally found peoples habits to be similar wherever I have lived so can’t understand why North West towns like Warrington, Wigan and St Helens have been hit so much harder than cities such as Bristol etc. Warrington does not have that many houses of multiple occupation as far as I know but it does have a lot of Warehouses so perhaps being spread in workplaces although I haven’t read anything about that.

 

[kaz7]

Warrington hospital has more and there have been around 100 deaths in the last six weeks or so. Taking the total from 150 to 250 very quickly.

I’m not sure what is going on to be honest. I’ve generally found peoples habits to be similar wherever I have lived so can’t understand why North West towns like Warrington, Wigan and St Helens have been hit so much harder than cities such as Bristol etc. Warrington does not have that many houses of multiple occupation as far as I know but it does have a lot of Warehouses so perhaps being spread in workplaces although I haven’t read anything about that.

Thanks for the reply , i lived in bristol and it is packed with rented houses with multiple occupancy , nurses homes, student houses etc , i dont know why it would be any different up north, the key factor must be compliance

 

[Millwallawayveteran1988]

Thanks for the reply , i lived in bristol and it is packed with rented houses with multiple occupancy , nurses homes, student houses etc , i dont know why it would be any different up north, the key factor must be compliance

Thing is, people are generally the same everywhere. I get why affluent areas with an older population like Norfolk or the South West might be more compliant but for me Towns and Cities are much the same, with all the same issues and a broad age range. Masks are being worn in supermarkets etc here by almost everyone.

 

[Healdplace]

With the greatest of respect i cant follow you because my brain literally cant read and digest it , it is easier to wait and get a top line number

That's OK. I think many on here don't follow either as I know my posts will overwhelm the majority and that was not my point here.

Just that the raw fact as told by Sky is correct, of course. It was coming for weeks.

But that in simply spelling out raw facts when they happen as all mass media do and then move on it will likely miss the detail of how and why that event occurred.

Here for weeks I was noting how the NW was miles ahead of the other regions and bound to be the first to reach the levels of patients and ventilators (though less likely here) seen in the first wave.

But that was not what happened, Yorkshire accelerated. The NW slowed. And Yorkshire got there first and NW crawled over the line a couple of days ago.

That is the more interesting story - not the actual fact the inevitable happened. But why it happened differently from how it should have done.

For it might suggest things have peaked in the NW and might do so soon in Yorkshire too if this is true.

And that we can predict the wave will move south. Indeed in SW England (the part of the UK Boris was using as a reason NOT to have a national lockdown) patient numbers are rising far faster than in either the NW or Yorkshire and have more than doubled in the past week. They could well pass their first wave peak of patients within days.

This is actually far more important to the way this virus is developing and the wave unfolding than the truth that the NW crawled over that milestone whilst slowing down.

But it is that raw fact the media see - not the nuance.

 

[Healdplace]

The Russians claim their Sputnik vaccine is 92% effective and the Chinese are saying similarly good things .

Of course, we will think - well they would.

But if this gets independently verified and multiple vaccines become available and we are dishing these out to speed things up we will be in a unique situation.

What if they find some work better for certain vulnerable patients than others? A very realistic possibility.

What is the position about patients having further jabs if they have already had the less beneficial one for them? Have we ever been in a position with competing vaccines all out at the same time and is there a protocol?

Can you even HAVE two vaccines? Might they compromise one another or create unexpected side effects?

Is anyone even asking these questions as I doubt they have faced them before but many countries will have done what we did and hedged bets by buying up multiple vaccines in advance.

 

[NeilYoungIsBack]

Thing is, people are generally the same everywhere. I get why affluent areas with an older population like Norfolk or the South West might be more compliant but for me Towns and Cities are much the same, with all the same issues and a broad age range. Masks are being worn in supermarkets etc here by almost everyone.

But life expectancy does vary by a significant degree from local area to local area, which is of course linked to income levels, education, lifestyle factors (diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, etc.) etc.

e.g. A 65 y.o man living in Manchester can expect, on average, to die around 6 years earlier than someone the same age/sex living in South Lakeland.

There are proportionately more poor, unhealthy people living in the northern cities compared to many other parts of the UK so there are a lot more easy targets for Covid to get stuck into compared to more prosperous areas, including large parts of the South.

 

[Millwallawayveteran1988]

But life expectancy does vary by a significant degree from local area to local area, which is of course linked to income levels, education, lifestyle factors (diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol consumption, etc.) etc.

e.g. A 65 y.o man living in Manchester can expect, on average, to die around 6 years earlier than someone the same age/sex living in South Lakeland.

There are proportionately more poor, unhealthy people living in the northern cities compared to many other parts of the UK so there are a lot more easy targets for Covid to get stuck into compared to more prosperous areas, including large parts of the South.

Yes I agree with that for hospital admissions and deaths but still not sure why infection rates are higher. The areas where Covid is prevelant in Warrington are certainly those where perhaps the majority residents are less affluent but most towns and cities have these issues don’t they?

A lot of the elderly population here worked in factory settings when younger so maybe that has taken its toll on general health and perhaps one reason why more men are dying from it than women. I’m sure someone will write a detailed book on it in time and it will become a subject for sociology students in years to come.

 

[shemnel]

Just bollix.

If there was a significant degree of false positives such that we were misrepresenting the scale of the epidemic, we'd never have seen the low positivity rates reported in the July/August period/Sept period.

In the UK, positivity rates are now ~4%; in Denmark (highest testing rate in Europe) rates were close to 0.5% during the low point which gives you some idea of the worst possible rate of false positives.

Lateral flow tests as used in Liverpool are actually *more* likely to give false positives:

Coronavirus testing finally gathers speed

The imminent large-scale rollout of rapid coronavirus tests promises to aid public health responses to COVID-19 — but a rapid home test remains elusive.

www.nature.com

That's not to say that there are no issues with false positives, eg review here

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(20)30453-7/fulltext

i dont think it's bollix at all.

Covid-19 PCR Specificity is unknown but believed to be in the region of 95-99%.

If you have 150-200k tests a day, and a prevalence of 0.1 - 25% (REACT round 4), as we did in mid and late August, you have an expected range of false positives of about 1,000 to 5,000. The postive tests were about 1,100 to 2,500 for that time period. The prevalence study suggested it should have been more like 200 to 400.

Furthermore some studies suggest the specificity (and inversely the false positive rate) of the lateral assay test to be closer to 100% (for what they are looking for).

All i'm suggesting is perhaps assurances for false negatives instead of false positives could be examined.

An interesting aside; if you tested for covid in an ideal world where zero covid existed, you would get a death rate from covid directly related to the number of tests you performed.