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3 minutes ago, Aggy said:

There are a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions there. And yes, I would argue you do need to say more if you’re suggesting people’s livelihoods should be put at risk. 

1. Why are we assuming 10k? Figures in Ricardo’s link suggest 3899 today, 4322 yesterday, 3,395 the day before. 

2. On the graph in Ricardo’s link (for consistency), there were 2,919 on 10th September. So in the last ten days there has been an increase of 470 from 2,919 to 3,395 today. Certainly not doubling.

3. Whilst increased testing doesn’t account for all of the new infections, you’ve disregarded any impact from testing whatsoever. Yet as per Ricardo’s other stats on here, the percentage of positive tests being carried out remains around 2 per cent. So are the number of infections increasing as much as you suggest, or are they increasing slightly and we’re just finding out about others that have been there all the time?

4. What evidence is there that infections will continue to double every ten days? As per point 2, that’s already not the case. (And whilst haven’t checked figures for the rest of Europe just now, fairly sure they aren’t doubling every week or ten days either.)

Infections were at a minimal baseline when the increases started, because people hadn’t been allowed to go outside for four months. It is to be expected that infections will increase as people start to mingle. We might see that there’s an early upshot which levels off when we get to a new ‘normal’.

The issue isn’t that more people might get infected, the issue is ensuring infections don’t get to the level where hospitalisations swamp the hospitals. What evidence is there that this will happen?

5. We don’t know how many infections there were in early March - you’ve acknowledged yourself that there were certainly a lot more than we’re reported/identified through the limited testing we had then. So if we don’t know how many infections caused that many deaths, then we don’t know how many new infections is a “safe” amount. 
 

Without being able to say “last time, [200,000] new daily infections was the point where we started to have capacity issues”, I’m afraid it’s not good enough to be introducing legislation restricting people from leaving their homes without other indicators which might suggest capacity issues are imminent.

At the moment what other indicators suggest health infrastructure capacity issues are imminent?

 

6. You didn’t respond to my previous question - do you genuinely believe little has changed since early March when the only measure in place was being asked to wash your hands?

I'm not going to continue this discussion with you as seem intent on believing that in some undefined manner all will be well if we just carry on doing what we're doing else it affect your business.

I would however simply point you to the ONS data, the acknowledged delays and variability, lack of tests where needed in the daily 'test' figures which make it currently of poor quality for real-time interpretation (ZOE by comparison passed 10K today) and the general 'alarm' by the scientists and indeed hospitals (and also the govt.which will act) at what is likely coming - the Brum 'Nightingale' was placed on alert only a day or so ago.

Keep your fingers crossed.

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2 hours ago, ricardo said:

When will we know its too late? 

The evidence for a massive second wave looks very thin at the moment. In March / April we went from ten deaths a day to over a thousand in less than three weeks. I still don't  see this happening anywhere in Europe. Yes there are very high numbers of poitives in certain countries but with the unreliability of the PCR test the vast majority seem to be detecting small amounts of virus in a largely asymptomatic population.

The hospitalisation has risen a bit but is many orders of magnitude below what it was. By all means lets us follow sensible rules like mask wearing and social distancing but we should refrain from going to panic stations.

 

We are up at 10000 infections a day according to Imperial and numbers rising rapidly, if there was evidence that the virus had weakened I would be less concerned but I don’t see that in any studies. 
All our public health measures if properly adhered to will slow the rate of spread but once the virus gets hold in the community again I’m afraid it will take more drastic action to stop the transmission. The higher the numbers are at that point the harder it will be to get it back under control. I would prefer an ultra cautious  approach as we move into the winter and to take action sooner rather than later.

Edited by Van wink
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37 minutes ago, Yellow Fever said:

I'm not going to continue this discussion with you as seem intent on believing that in some undefined manner all will be well if we just carry on doing what we're doing else it affect your business.

I would however simply point you to the ONS data, the acknowledged delays and variability, lack of tests where needed in the daily 'test' figures which make it currently of poor quality for real-time interpretation (ZOE by comparison passed 10K today) and the general 'alarm' by the scientists and indeed hospitals (and also the govt.which will act) at what is likely coming - the Brum 'Nightingale' was placed on alert only a day or so ago.

Keep your fingers crossed.

A recurring theme today of people ignoring questions and ‘not continuing the discussion’ when faced with points they don’t like or asked to explain their theories. Perhaps I’ll give the thread a miss for a while.

Edited by Aggy

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1 hour ago, horsefly said:

Here we go again. You display a startling inability to read and understand the statistics, I suggest you try listening to the officials who provide them. Your claim that, " we can see and the NHS states, only 1,396 out of 29,705 have died FROM the virus --- All other deaths (28,309) had pre existing conditions." is simply wrong. ALL the deaths listed are attributed to the virus. The breakdown simply demonstrates that those with a pre-existing condition are more likely to die if they catch the virus. They were not expected to have died as a result of their pre-existing condition if they had not caught the virus, thus ALL their deaths are recorded as being a result of catching the virus. It really isn't that hard to read these statistics accurately so do try a bit harder

Do you have the source for this? I wasn't aware that there was a filter put to the figures.  

I dont think Jools is correct at all.  Whilst it is true that some of those were quite high up the reaper's list a lot of people with underlying conditions are still quite far from joining the South stand eternal.

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Well, I live in Bolton. We're the epicentre of the ****storm right now. And I'm not surprised as hardly any ****s wear masks.

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8 minutes ago, TheGunnShow said:

Well, I live in Bolton. We're the epicentre of the ****storm right now. And I'm not surprised as hardly any ****s wear masks.

Yes, the sad thing is that if the general public generally played along with the current restrictions in word and deed then we'd likely be in a much better position generally. That I suspect is a forlorn hope though so stick not carrot in the UK.

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10 hours ago, Barbe bleu said:

Do you have the source for this? I wasn't aware that there was a filter put to the figures.  

I dont think Jools is correct at all.  Whilst it is true that some of those were quite high up the reaper's list a lot of people with underlying conditions are still quite far from joining the South stand eternal.

Not quite sure what you mean by "filter", but the site is the one Fools cut and paste from: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/

Hilariously he doesn't seem to have noticed that the title of the page he pasted is: "Covid-19 daily deaths" and NOT "1,396 Covid-19  deaths and the rest are all due to another cause". They are ALL Covid-19 deaths (even the Government doesn't dispute this).

If you are interested, Radio 4's excellent maths and statistics programme "More or Less" has for many weeks covered the statistics relating to Covid-19. The programme employs genuinely impartial statisticians and scientists to provide analysis, and they are truly enlightening. 

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1 hour ago, horsefly said:

Not quite sure what you mean by "filter", but the site is the one Fools cut and paste from: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/

thanks,  i dont thi k it goes quite as far as you imply (ie that if it were not for covid these people would still be walking around) but it also doesn't go as far as saying anything that supports Jools.

My assessment (based on nothing more than 6 months of interest in the subject) is that in the overwhelming majority of reportrd cases covid was a significant contributory factor.

 

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Whitty and Valence.

Spoke plainly - told it as it is and tried to put to bed some wishful thinking. No fairy stories or political point scoring.

Clearly a prelude to some significant action.

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1 hour ago, Yellow Fever said:

Whitty and Valence.

Spoke plainly - told it as it is and tried to put to bed some wishful thinking. No fairy stories or political point scoring.

Clearly a prelude to some significant action.

It was much needed and fully agree about the wishful thinking. 

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it was a bit odd that they only presented 1 scenario and only the time frame of mid October. Whitty called it a 6 month problem so why not spell out what a 6 month scenario might look like?

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3 minutes ago, Tetteys Jig said:

it was a bit odd that they only presented 1 scenario and only the time frame of mid October. Whitty called it a 6 month problem so why not spell out what a 6 month scenario might look like?

They are trying to wake people up to what we could face very quickly if attitudes and behaviours don’t change now.

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Interesting that they stated currently 6000 new daily cases. Zoe reports post 10,000 now. 

It was refreshing to hear scientists rather than politicians. I think we will have tighter restrictions nationally or I am unsure how people will take heed of those strong words. Folk on regional TV are reporting a degree of confusion at all the rules and variability. Given those scenario charts, then the messaging needs to be clear and very simple.

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1 minute ago, sonyc said:

Interesting that they stated currently 6000 new daily cases. Zoe reports post 10,000 now. 

It was refreshing to hear scientists rather than politicians. I think we will have tighter restrictions nationally or I am unsure how people will take heed of those strong words. Folk on regional TV are reporting a degree of confusion at all the rules and variability. Given those scenario charts, then the messaging needs to be clear and very simple.

The message does need to be clear and simple and at a basic and most important level it is, wash your hands, social distance and wear a mask. Understand that you are more at risk indoors than out.

All the other stuff is a messy mismatch and a consequence of poor government policy and messaging, devolved government variation and trying to do things on a regional basis.  Non of that confusion however excuses people from following the basic and most simple advice 

 

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27 minutes ago, sonyc said:

Interesting that they stated currently 6000 new daily cases. Zoe reports post 10,000 now. 

It was refreshing to hear scientists rather than politicians. I think we will have tighter restrictions nationally or I am unsure how people will take heed of those strong words. Folk on regional TV are reporting a degree of confusion at all the rules and variability. Given those scenario charts, then the messaging needs to be clear and very simple.

6000 to 10000 is about 4 or 5 days worth of growth. That's the problem. It's fast once the djinn is out of the bottle. 

Edited by Yellow Fever

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3 hours ago, Barbe bleu said:

thanks,  i dont thi k it goes quite as far as you imply (ie that if it were not for covid these people would still be walking around) but it also doesn't go as far as saying anything that supports Jools.

My assessment (based on nothing more than 6 months of interest in the subject) is that in the overwhelming majority of reportrd cases covid was a significant contributory factor.

 

Actually it does, they specifically describe the cause of death as Covid-19. It's the underlying condition that is described as a contributory factor insofar as it makes the patient more vulnerable to being killed by Covid-19. But Covid-19 is definitely regarded as the cause of death in these statistics (hence the title). This point has been explained very clearly by a scientist in one of the "More of Less" radio episodes that I mentioned (I'm afraid I don't recall which weeks episode). I think we can trust the NHS here to label their statistics as "Covid-19 daily deaths" only if the statistics record precisely that.

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13 minutes ago, horsefly said:

Actually it does, they specifically describe the cause of death as Covid-19. It's the underlying condition that is described as a contributory factor insofar as it makes the patient more vulnerable to being killed by Covid-19. But Covid-19 is definitely regarded as the cause of death in these statistics (hence the title). This point has been explained very clearly by a scientist in one of the "More of Less" radio episodes that I mentioned (I'm afraid I don't recall which weeks episode). I think we can trust the NHS here to label their statistics as "Covid-19 daily deaths" only if the statistics record precisely that.

The point BB is making surely is that the stats are silent on whether or not they would have died a few weeks later from their underlying condition anyway. So it isn’t accurate to say they would definitely still be alive now if it wasn’t for covid or that “they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions” - how do you know that?. (But it definitely also isn’t accurate to say they definitely would have been dead, which is what Jools is saying.)

Edited by Aggy

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5 minutes ago, horsefly said:

Actually it does, they specifically describe the cause of death as Covid-19. It's the underlying condition that is described as a contributory factor insofar as it makes the patient more vulnerable to being killed by Covid-19. But Covid-19 is definitely regarded as the cause of death in these statistics (hence the title). This point has been explained very clearly by a scientist in one of the "More of Less" radio episodes that I mentioned (I'm afraid I don't recall which weeks episode). I think we can trust the NHS here to label their statistics as "Covid-19 daily deaths" only if the statistics record precisely that.

This seems to be common ploy by those that wish to downplay the effects of Covid. It's no different to flu deaths reported annually that we treat as flu deaths - or indeed many other ailments. We all have underlying issues - even if we don't know them (yet) which will be contributory factors - over-weight, diabetes, immuno-compromised, alcoholic - the list is endless.

 

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29 minutes ago, Aggy said:

The point BB is making surely is that the stats are silent on whether or not they would have died a few weeks later from their underlying condition anyway. So it isn’t accurate to say they would definitely still be alive now if it wasn’t for covid. (But it definitely also isn’t accurate to say they definitely would have been dead, which is what Jools is saying.)

Oh dear! I'm afraid you have totally missed the point again. The statistics state very clearly that they died from Covid-19. That is why they are labelled "Covid-19 Daily Deaths". They make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned where there were also underlying complicating conditions. The absolutely crucial point you need to be clear on is that in these cases the underlying conditions were NOT the cause of death, Covid-19 was. So for example (to use a real case I know of), a patient with angina was made more vulnerable to the virus because of his condition, but it wasn't the angina that killed him, it was Covid-19, and that is why it was recorded as a death from Covid-19. Exactly the same principle and practice applies to all those deaths recorded as Covid-19 deaths in the statistics quoted. 

Edited by horsefly
extra explanation

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26 minutes ago, Yellow Fever said:

This seems to be common ploy by those that wish to downplay the effects of Covid. It's no different to flu deaths reported annually that we treat as flu deaths - or indeed many other ailments. We all have underlying issues - even if we don't know them (yet) which will be contributory factors - over-weight, diabetes, immuno-compromised, alcoholic - the list is endless.

 

I think you're probably right about this, because it really shouldn't be that hard to understand these statistics (Even the Government is not stupid enough to conflate underlying conditions with the actual cause of death).

Edited by horsefly
spelling check
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34 minutes ago, horsefly said:

Oh dear! I'm afraid you have totally missed the point again. The statistics state very clearly that they died from Covid-19. That is why they are labelled "Covid-19 Daily Deaths". They make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned where there were also underlying complicating conditions. The absolutely crucial point you need to be clear on is that in these cases the underlying conditions were NOT the cause of death, Covid-19 was. So for example (to use a real case I know of), a patient with angina was made more vulnerable to the virus because of his condition, but it wasn't the angina that killed him, it was Covid-19, and that is why it was recorded as a death from Covid-19. Exactly the same principle and practice applies to all those deaths recorded as Covid-19 deaths in the statistics quoted. 

Yes, I know they make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned.

You stated that they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions.

If they make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned, how do you know they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions? 

The point you’re otherwise making is correct. Calm down.

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3 minutes ago, Aggy said:

Yes, I know they make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned.

You stated that they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions.

If they make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned, how do you know they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions? 

The point you’re otherwise making is correct. Calm down.

Sorry but you really are being quite silly now. I'm not sure whether you are just trying to be provocative or genuinely don't understand how to read health statistics. You say "if they make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned, how do you know they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions?". Whether they were expected to die from their underlying conditions or not is utterly irrelevant. The relevant point is that it was Covid-19 that killed them. I really fail to see what is so hard to grasp here. We are all expected to die of old age at some indeterminate point in the future but if you get run over by a bus this afternoon it will be the injuries thus caused that kill you not old age. And if old age was destined to kill you precisely 1 second after you were actually killed by your bus accident injuries, it will still be those injuries that killed you not old age. I really don't know how to make this any easier for you to understand. You need to stop conflating underlying conditions and life expectancy with the actual cause of death. Even this Government is not crass enough to do that and quite rightly accepts the statistics the NHS provides. It's simply a matter of science.

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4 minutes ago, horsefly said:

Sorry but you really are being quite silly now. I'm not sure whether you are just trying to be provocative or genuinely don't understand how to read health statistics. You say "if they make no prediction about the potential longevity of the patient concerned, how do you know they weren’t expected to die from their underlying health conditions?". Whether they were expected to die from their underlying conditions or not is utterly irrelevant. The relevant point is that it was Covid-19 that killed them. I really fail to see what is so hard to grasp here. We are all expected to die of old age at some indeterminate point in the future but if you get run over by a bus this afternoon it will be the injuries thus caused that kill you not old age. And if old age was destined to kill you precisely 1 second after you were actually killed by your bus accident injuries, it will still be those injuries that killed you not old age. I really don't know how to make this any easier for you to understand. You need to stop conflating underlying conditions and life expectancy with the actual cause of death. Even this Government is not crass enough to do that and quite rightly accepts the statistics the NHS provides. It's simply a matter of science.

This is getting worse than the Brexit thread.

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Positives remain below 2% of tests

Latest UK Numbers  continue to hovver in the same area

4368 - 11

Inpatients  1081  as Saturday so I pressume no update yet

 

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

Yesterdays European.

Italy   1587 - 15

France 10569 - 11

Spain  4588 - 56

Germany  1169 - 4

All not a million miles from what they were a week or more ago.

Edited by ricardo

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