COVID-19 UK & Beyond

[mojomonkey]

Reports that Dominic Cummings has developed symptoms and is self-isolating, perhaps he didn't run out of No. 10 fast enough.

[Rog]

12 minutes ago, mojomonkey said:

Reports that Dominic Cummings has developed symptoms and is self-isolating, perhaps he didn't run out of No. 10 fast enough.

Our government, especially the government ministers, have been putting themselves and their families at great risk in spite of knowing the probable consequences in order to govern our country and deliver the best advice to us based on the best advice being given to them.  We really should admire them and abide by their instructions rather than try to make cheap and silly "jokes".

[mojomonkey]

1 minute ago, Rog said:

Our government, especially the government ministers, have been putting themselves and their families at great risk in spite of knowing the probable consequences in order to govern our country and deliver the best advice to us based on the best advice being given to them.  We really should admire them and abide by their instructions rather than try to make cheap and silly "jokes".

Bit rich coming from someone with the empathy of a mushroom.

[manxman1980]

17 minutes ago, Rog said:

Our government, especially the government ministers, have been putting themselves and their families at great risk in spite of knowing the probable consequences in order to govern our country and deliver the best advice to us based on the best advice being given to them.  We really should admire them and abide by their instructions rather than try to make cheap and silly "jokes".

Perhaps if these hardworking Government ministers and advisers actually followed their own instructions then I may be more sympathetic. Amazing how Boris Johnson has just discussed the "wizardry" of video conferencing when he should have been doing it as soon as he instructed everyone else to work from home and social distance.

Don't worry though these ministers will all have private healthcare so won't be a burden on the NHS. 

[P.K.]

Germany

Infected 60,659

Deaths 482 - 0.8%

ICU beds per 100k pop 29.2

Tests 500k per week

UK

Infected 19,522 (tested at hospital, unknown numbers self isolating)

Deaths 1,228

ICU beds per 100k pop 6.6

Tests 130k total to date

[TheTeapot]

There quite simply isn't enough accurate data about cases and death rates. FT article https://www.ft.com/content/f3796baf-e4f0-4862-8887-d09c7f706553 paywall but

Quote

The mystery of the true coronavirus death rate

In the UK, about 150,000 people die every year between January and March. To date, the vast majority of those who have died from Covid-19 in Britain have been aged 70 or older or had serious pre-existing health conditions.

What is not clear is how many of those deaths would have occurred anyway if the patients had not contracted Covid-19.

Without comprehensive testing and more precision over the cause of fatalities global comparisons should be treated with caution

The figure at the root of so much global angst about coronavirus is currently 4.7 per cent. That is the proportion of people, as of Sunday afternoon, who have died after being diagnosed with the virus — 32,137 out of the 685,623 who have tested positive for Covid-19 around the world.

It compares with a death rate of around 0.1 per cent for seasonal flu and 0.2 per cent for pneumonia in high-income countries. However, 4.7 per cent is not only changeable but frustratingly unreliable, both for governments seeking to calibrate their policy response and for citizens trying to gauge how much they should worry.

The proportion of people who have died from the disease varies strikingly from country to country. Researchers warn that there are so many uncertainties — not least over the true number of infections — that it remains almost impossible to draw firm conclusions about the death rate.

Mike Ryan, executive director of the World Health Organization’s health emergencies programme, has outlined four factors that might contribute to the differing mortality rates: who becomes infected, what stage the epidemic has reached in a country, how much testing a country is doing, and how well different healthcare systems are coping.

But there are other sources of doubt too, including how many coronavirus victims would have died of other causes if no pandemic had occurred. In a typical year, about 56m people die around the world — an average of about 153,000 per day.

Many infected people will display either mild or no symptoms, and will remain absent from the data unless they are tested. Since resources are limited and different countries are testing to different extents, the size of the information gap varies from place to place.

John Ioannidis, a professor of epidemiology at Stanford University, has branded the data we have about the epidemic “utterly unreliable”.

“We don’t know if we are failing to capture infections by a factor of three or 300,” he wrote last week. If thousands more people are surviving than we know about, then current mortality rate estimates are too high — perhaps by a large margin.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong have estimated that, in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, the likely death rate was 1.4 per cent — much lower than the previous estimate of 4.5 per cent, which was calculated using official statistics on the region’s cases and deaths.

In the UK, where the government has been criticised for a slow initial response, only the most serious cases are being tested. In total 1,231 people have died out of 19,758 confirmed cases, giving a death rate of 6.2 per cent.

Rosalind Smyth, professor of child health at UCL, said official UK coronavirus data was “so misleading that it should not be used”. Using conservative estimates, the true number of people infected “is likely to be 5-10 times higher”, she said.

Much depends on who gets infected, how old they are and whether they have underlying health conditions. It is well known that those who are older are more likely to become seriously ill and die. But Robin May, professor of infectious diseases at Birmingham university, notes: “There are 70-year-olds who are wheelchair bound and others who run miles every week.”

Italy has to date been the worst affected country in Europe, with 10,023 deaths and 92,472 infections, giving a crude mortality rate of 10.8 per cent. But the average age of Italians who have tested positive is 62, and the vast majority of those who have died have been 60 or over.

“Italy has been a poster child for healthy people living into old age,” said Dr Ryan. “Unfortunately, in this case, having that older population may mean that the fatality rate appears higher because of the actual age distribution of the population.”

But different countries are also reporting cases and deaths in different ways: in Italy, Covid-19 is listed as the cause of death even if a patient was already ill and died from a combination of illnesses.

“Only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus,” said the scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health last week.

Spain’s national government simply lists how many people with confirmed cases of coronavirus have died and provides no extra information on any other medical conditions.

In South Korea, which has a younger population than Italy, about a third of confirmed cases were in people aged 30 or under: 152 people have died so far out of 9,583 infections, giving a mortality rate of 1.6 per cent. In Germany, which has recorded 455 deaths, the majority of infections have occurred in people aged 15 to 59. Based on the available data, the country’s death rate is about 0.8 per cent, but this may also reflect its aggressive approach to testing people with milder symptoms.

In the UK, about 150,000 people die every year between January and March. To date, the vast majority of those who have died from Covid-19 in Britain have been aged 70 or older or had serious pre-existing health conditions.

What is not clear is how many of those deaths would have occurred anyway if the patients had not contracted Covid-19.

Speaking at a parliamentary hearing last week, Professor Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, said it was not yet clear how many “excess deaths” caused by coronavirus there would be in the UK. However, he said the proportion of Covid-19 victims who would have died anyway could be “as many as half or two-thirds”.

What stage of the outbreak preparations begin

At what stage in the epidemic cycle a country begins to prepare its healthcare system is crucial.

If a healthcare system becomes overwhelmed, as happened in Italy and parts of China, the standard of care that patients receive is likely to fall. This is likely to increase the mortality rate.

In one hospital in Lombardy, northern Italy, a chronic shortage of equipment means staff are using snorkelling masks bought from Decathlon, a leisure goods chain, to hook up patients to oxygen supplies.

Given the number of patients in intensive care in the region, the WHO’s Dr Ryan said last week, the fact that doctors are saving “so many is a miracle in itself”.

Dr Clarke said it was “not a given that [the UK and Germany] will end up in exactly the same place that Italy is in,” because “you can’t draw any cast-iron conclusions from a trajectory on a graph”.

Being behind the curve gives countries longer to prepare for an outbreak and learn from others’ mistakes.

 

[mojomonkey]

7 minutes ago, P.K. said:

Germany

Infected 60,659

Deaths 482 - 0.8%

ICU beds per 100k pop 29.2

Tests 500k per week

UK

Infected 19,522 (tested at hospital, unknown numbers self isolating)

Deaths 1,228

ICU beds per 100k pop 6.6

Tests 130k total to date

What's the point that you're trying to make? It is inevitable that different try different strategies, some will work and some won't. Although they are currently accepting patients from other countries Germany is still expecting to be stretched at some point.

[P.K.]

Dr Rupert Read

The coronavirus letter you've just been sent by Boris Johnson is a lie:

https://youtu.be/aKTwBbge4lQ 

Uncomfortable watching for all those who want Boris Johnson's baby. Well face it, plenty have....

 

[mojomonkey]

8 minutes ago, P.K. said:

Dr Rupert Read

The coronavirus letter you've just been sent by Boris Johnson is a lie:

https://youtu.be/aKTwBbge4lQ 

Uncomfortable watching for all those who want Boris Johnson's baby. Well face it, plenty have....

 

He isn't a medical doctor is he?

[P.K.]

8 minutes ago, mojomonkey said:

What's the point that you're trying to make? It is inevitable that different try different strategies, some will work and some won't. Although they are currently accepting patients from other countries Germany is still expecting to be stretched at some point.

I think it's only right that folks know that statements like this are bollox:

16 hours ago, Chinahand said:

Nothing is perfect but the NHS is more resilient and robust than the collapsing crisis ridden caricature portrayed by the left for the last 40 years. 

We are all proud of our NHS, or should be. However because of that we seem to have become blind to the fact that the (pre Brexit) fifth largest economy have an NHS that is the SECOND FROM BOTTOM in terms of capacity and therefore capability compared to the rest of the EU entities. Be aware that is the second from bottom capacity to service the SECOND FROM TOP EU entity in terms of population!

Add to that policies that have completely lost control of the virus and you have a recipe for disaster...

[P.K.]

7 minutes ago, mojomonkey said:

He isn't a medical doctor is he?

NFC. I seem to recall he had something to do with XR.

Not that it makes anything he says any less true.

Believe it or not? From the 3rd March:

[woolley]

Smart work.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-52087002

[Freggyragh]

Great work from Mercedes-AMG, Ford, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Airbus & BAE. EU companies that have been good to Britain, and patriotic British companies that warned against brexit. Shame they’ve been treated so badly by the market manipulating spivs.  

What happened with vote leave’s plastic Malaysian hoover company’s efforts?

Edited March 31, 2020 by Freggyragh

[woolley]

17 minutes ago, Freggyragh said:

Great work from Mercedes-AMG, Ford, Rolls-Royce, Siemens, Airbus & BAE. EU companies that have been good to Britain, and patriotic British companies that warned against brexit. Shame they’ve been treated so badly by the market manipulating spivs.  

What happened with vote leave’s plastic Malaysian hoover company’s efforts?

FFS give it a rest. They are commercial companies. Nothing to do with the EU. There long before the EU trading internationally and will be there trading internationally after the EU is consigned to the dustbin of history. I appreciate that it is standard EU practice to claim credit for anything positive that happens in the world. So for once, could we just applaud a brilliant collaborative innovation by engineers wherever they are from in the struggle against disease without the snarky derailment  agenda?

[P.K.]

44 minutes ago, woolley said:

Smart work.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/health-52087002

Absolutely amazing work. Particularly the CPAP as it has ALL the advantages of cutting edge design. it's simple to operate so minimal training required, easy to produce so tooling is not an issue, cheap so funding is not an issue, reliability in the field?

Early reports from Lombardy in Italy suggest about 50% of patients given CPAP have avoided the need for invasive mechanical ventilation.

UCLH critical care consultant Prof Mervyn Singer said: "These devices are a halfway house between a simple oxygen mask and invasive mechanical ventilation which requires patients to be sedated.

"They will help to save lives by ensuring that ventilators, a limited resource, are used only for the most severely ill."

I wonder if they will cancel the efforts of the brexit-loving tory-donating sucker?