Coronavirus Thread

[Guest Fktf]

4 hours ago, Mapperleyfox said:

Ok try to follow this scenario....

 

My understanding (might be wrong) is that I could test 'positive' for COVID. First it might be a false positive, but it goes on the Case Stats anyway. Then I die in a car accident within 28 days of my positive test. It's acceptable therefore during the post-mortem to put my death as an 'assumptive' COVID death. Which also goes on the Death Stats.

 

For deaths to be recorded as COVID the doctors don't have to be certain it's the cause, just that it could/might be. It's bonkers.

 

 

 

 

Not much sympathy here. If you'd have just followed the guidelines after your positive test result, you'd have probably been self isolating at home and not driving around in your car having accidents 

[dsr-burnley]

19 minutes ago, Kopfkino said:

Let's make a rough, basic estimate of the amount of people we'd expect to die of non-Covid cause in a population the size of the official Covid death toll

- Let's take the number of people that are registered as having died within 28 days of a positive Covid test in the UK, currently 42369.

- Let's assume that they are all over the age of 65. For ease, we'll have to assume that it's a representative sample of over 65s, it isn't because those that have died from Covid were more likely to have conditions that might cause mortality, more likely to be men etc. We will get an underestimation as a result.

- Let's use the ONS's stats for leading causes of deaths in the over 65s last year (I've excluded flu and pneumonia) and make them a proportion of the total over 65s, roughly 12m. The ONS stats actually breakdown cancers by type so they are separate causes but I've included it as all neoplasms.

- We can say that the Covid deaths cover a period of roughly 7 months and let's just the Covid death within 28 days of a test covers exactly one month too, so that's the timeframe we will use for other deaths. For ease, we must assume that they are evenly spread across those 7 months, in reality they weren't because a huge chunk came in a 2 month period. This means I'm designating an equal risk of, for example a heart attack, across 7 months to people who only didn't get the full 7 months of risk. Creates an overestimation.

 

	Annual	7 months	7 month deaths as a proportion of over 65 population	Expected deaths when n=42369
Neoplasms	122077	71212	0.005934298611	251
Dementia and Alzheimer disease	66155	38590	0.003215868056	136
Ischaemic heart diseases	46493	27121	0.002260076389	96
Chronic lower respiratory diseases	28235	16470	0.001372534722	58
Cerebrovascular diseases	27210	15873	0.001322708333	56
				598

 

So for the applying the rate of the 5 leading causes of deaths in over 65s last year we would have expected 598 deaths in a sample of 42369. So then it follows that we could say that 598 of the 42369 that have died within 28 days of a positive result died of something that was absolutely nothing to do with Covid. 

 

This doesn't deal with the interactions of illnesses, for example Covid killing people off who were weak/didn't have long left anyway. It just states how many people you might have expected to die within a sample which can then be extended to give a picture of people that could have had a positive test but died of something not Covid related, just from usual leading cause of deaths

 

We can do it for other things. Let's take your road traffic accident example. Road traffic accident deaths are roughly 1800 every year, 150 monthly, so 1050 every 7 months. For super simplicity just to illustrate the point, let's pretend every single one was over 65. In our sample of 42369, 4 people would have died in a 7 month period. Or 6507 people died as a result of suicide in 2018, monthly that's 542 and so over 7 months that's 3796. Again super simplicity for consistency, let's pretend they were all over 65, our sample 42369 produces 13 deaths.

 

Long story short, you're dealing with low numbers and the fact you have died within 28 days of a positive Covid test gives you quite a high likelihood that it was Covid that was, at least in some part, responsible.

 

 

 

 

 

The bold part is where your logical fallacy comes in.  

 

Let's try it for flu and pneumonia.  95,000 people die each year in England with flu or pneumonia on their death certificate.  Of those 95,000, using your figures, you would expect about 1,000 to die of natural causes and the other 94,000 died of flu and pneumonia.  And yet the annual deaths attributed to flu and pneumonia are, at worst, about 30,000 per year; the rest are where flu and pneumonia was a secondary cause.

 

For this particular purpose you have to deal with interactions with other illnesses or the figures don't make sense.  It's very likely true that Covid was in some part responsible for most of the deaths, in the sense that (like the motor neurone Covid victim I linked above) they wouldn't have died yet.  They were dying, but it was hastened.  And that's the big question for the government.  We can say in a blase manner that all lives are important, but for the purposes of government they aren't equally important.  The damage to the economy (and to the future health of the survivors, let's not forget) has to be weighed against the lives being lost.  And if the lives being lost are 50,000 young, healthy people with years left in them, those lives will have higher value (for the purposes of government) that if say 40,000 of them are already dying of a range of other illnesses or extreme old age.

 

With flu and pneumonia, two thirds of the deaths were people already on death's pathway.  Is that also true of coronavirus, another respiratory disease?  Probably.

[Stivo]

In the real world there is no such thing as perfect data.
 

In Covid 19 the best figure is the ONS statistics which are based on death certificates (52K) signed by a doctor.  These are meant to discount cases where covid19 was not a direct cause.  Even with these though  there are some dubious examples - the Oxford CEBM estimated that perhaps 7%( if I recall correctly)  were perhaps questionable. 
 

The problem with using these death certificates for a real time dashboard is that they need to be filled in, collected and analysed.  This creates a lag.  To speed up this process the government came up with the dashboard based on deaths soon after a test.  Overall this underestimates because not everyone who died at the peak could get a test  and it excludes people who spend a long time in  hospital before dying.  
 

But although it isn’t 100% accurate  it still provides a good estimate because almost all people in a sample will live more than 28 days into the future exactly as Kopfkino explains. 
 

 

[Kopfkino]

11 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

The bold part is where your logical fallacy comes in.  

 

Let's try it for flu and pneumonia.  95,000 people die each year in England with flu or pneumonia on their death certificate.  Of those 95,000, using your figures, you would expect about 1,000 to die of natural causes and the other 94,000 died of flu and pneumonia.  And yet the annual deaths attributed to flu and pneumonia are, at worst, about 30,000 per year; the rest are where flu and pneumonia was a secondary cause.

 

For this particular purpose you have to deal with interactions with other illnesses or the figures don't make sense.  It's very likely true that Covid was in some part responsible for most of the deaths, in the sense that (like the motor neurone Covid victim I linked above) they wouldn't have died yet.  They were dying, but it was hastened.  And that's the big question for the government.  We can say in a blase manner that all lives are important, but for the purposes of government they aren't equally important.  The damage to the economy (and to the future health of the survivors, let's not forget) has to be weighed against the lives being lost.  And if the lives being lost are 50,000 young, healthy people with years left in them, those lives will have higher value (for the purposes of government) that if say 40,000 of them are already dying of a range of other illnesses or extreme old age.

 

With flu and pneumonia, two thirds of the deaths were people already on death's pathway.  Is that also true of coronavirus, another respiratory disease?  Probably.

 

There is no logical fallacy because I was responding to a post talking about the absurdity of someone dying in a car accident being included in the figures when that has nothing to do with Covid because of the way it is recorded as a death within 28 days of a positive test. You can't create a logical fallacy by applying my logic to something of significant difference. I presented a picture of how many deaths might have expected to see in the complete absence of Covid if the sample was representative. This was to illustrate that the number of deaths in the sample that had absolutely nothing to do with Covid, but are recorded as Covid is likely to be small. I made clear that the assumption that it is representative is incorrect and I have also made clear, as the Sherlock Holmes in you has noticed, that I wasn't attempting to think about the interaction between illnesses, all I wanted was to get to proxy figure for the number of people that might have died of something completely unrelated to Covid having coincidentally tested positive with Covid in the previous 28 days. I did not say that the 42369-598=41771 deaths were absolutely Covid-only deaths, all I said that you could maybe take out 598 deaths to cover randomness. 

 

The figures make perfect sense in the strict context that I applied them. They admittedly don't make sense if you apply them to a much different context. Just like if the top scorer of my local U9s scored 40 goals last year, that doesn't make him better than Ashley Barnes. The correct extension of my logic would be to have a stat of people that died of flu/pneumonia within a specified timeframe of them being confirmed as having flu/pneumonia and then seeing how many of those people we might have expected to have died in the complete absence of flu/pneumonia. You would not start talking about death certificates and primary/secondary causes because I didn't refer or talk about that, deliberately so. For death certificate registrations, you'd treat the numbers differently, namely because they are influenced by medical opinion on clinical signs rather than being a simple stat of a death within a timeframe from a previous event. Therefore, if I was to talk about death certificate registrations, I would expect Covid's presence on the death certificate to rule out a lot of the randomness that might be included in the 'death within 28 days stat'. 

 

In looking at the seriousness of Covid, yes you do have to look at it's interactions with other illnesses and what that might tell you about the 'value' of lives being lost. As you kindly brought up death certificates, let's examine the data we have on this wrt Covid. Thankfully, the CEBM have done the work for me, in that Covid is mentioned as the underlying cause (what you might refer to as primary) on 92.2% of death certificates up to the 28th August, 45683 as the raw figure. WHO defines underlying cause as “a) the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death, or b) the circumstances of the accident or violence which produced the fatal injury”. However, they notice that in the weeks upto the 28th, this has fallen to 71.2%, this could be because of an administrative change or because the people dying in that period were more likely to have a significant existing problem.

 

As you note, the 5 year average for flu and pneumonia as an underlying cause of death is 28188. You say 95000 people die from flu/pneumonia a year, so ~30% have it as the underlying cause, the rest were already on the pathway as you put it. Let's just imagine 95000 people died a year from Covid, the smallest figure we have for underlying cause is 71.2% or raw figure 67640 and if we use the 92.2% figure, it would be 87590 with Covid as the underlying cause. Point being that, using these figures, Covid directly causes far more deaths than flu and pneumonia, not just knocking out those ready to go. But we know, that in all likelihood, if Covid is left to run in the absence of a vaccine, limited population immunity, with far higher infectivity than flu/pneumonia, with limited treatment options, immense strain would be put on hospitals and total deaths would be higher than 95000, the significant majority of which would see Covid as the underlying cause. 

 

However, yes, this doesn't allow us to put a value on the quantity and quality of years lost. I'm sure my Mum's underlying cause went down as pneumonia but she probably only had max 6 months left anyway. There has to be a holistic approach to public health that tries to factor this in, along with long covid effects, weighed against consequences of actions for sure. You didn't the YLL studies before that attempted to contextualise the deaths. You keep saying that maybe it's people dying who were on the path to death anyway but you don't really come back with anything to demonstrate that the burden of this to the rest of us is too great for the value of what's being saved.

 

 

 

 

[Nalis]

Long covid has to be treated in the same manner as the long term psychological and economic impact to society, in other words no one really knows the true cost of either.

[Leicester_Loyal]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8810281/Labour-savages-Matt-Hancock-having-NO-idea-contacts-need-traced.html

 

Matt Hancock warns cancer patients will only be guaranteed treatment if Covid-19 stays 'under control'

[st albans fox]

Apparently nearly 500 people were admitted to hospitals in England on Sunday with covid ...... an increase of 92 on Saturday. Of course we don’t know if there is a current approach of widespread admissions even for minor concern whilst hospitals are not overloaded but I’m a little spooked by that number on one day. early on in the year, we saw approx a third of hospital admissions result in a fatality. if that’s halved due to better treatments, we will see approx 85 deaths per day within a few weeks from current hospital admission rates alone.  

 

I really hope that expectations of several posters that we won’t see deaths increase within a few weeks is borne out - I’m not so confident myself 

[Sampson]

21 minutes ago, st albans fox said:

Apparently nearly 500 people were admitted to hospitals in England on Sunday with covid ...... an increase of 92 on Saturday. Of course we don’t know if there is a current approach of widespread admissions even for minor concern whilst hospitals are not overloaded but I’m a little spooked by that number on one day. early on in the year, we saw approx a third of hospital admissions result in a fatality. if that’s halved due to better treatments, we will see approx 85 deaths per day within a few weeks from current hospital admission rates alone.  

 

I really hope that expectations of several posters that we won’t see deaths increase within a few weeks is borne out - I’m not so confident myself 

Yeah, covid hospitalisations jumped by 25% today from 386 to 478. That's probably the grimest stat we've had since May and probably the most stark statistics we've had that this 2nd wave is starting to take hold again and take hold amongst the vulnerable. Really hope that trend of quickly increasing hospitalisation doesn't continue.

Edited 6 October 2020 by Sampson

[st albans fox]

If people aren’t prepared to take this upsurge seriously then we run the risk that it does lead to too many deaths and too much stress on the NHS. That will lead to more severe restrictions than we have now. isn’t it worth doing what we’re currently advised to do to maintain the lowish level of constraints we currently have ???  of course the govt could be wrong but is it worth taking that chance ?

[leicsmac]

And now Stephen Miller has it, apparently.

 

Well, that's conclusive proof of the non-human Covid contraction theory.

[Mapperleyfox]

16 hours ago, Fktf said:

Not much sympathy here. If you'd have just followed the guidelines after your positive test result, you'd have probably been self isolating at home and not driving around in your car having accidents 

It's a hypothetical scenario, not a real life example. 

[Mapperleyfox]

16 hours ago, dsr-burnley said:

The bold part is where your logical fallacy comes in.  

 

Let's try it for flu and pneumonia.  95,000 people die each year in England with flu or pneumonia on their death certificate.  Of those 95,000, using your figures, you would expect about 1,000 to die of natural causes and the other 94,000 died of flu and pneumonia.  And yet the annual deaths attributed to flu and pneumonia are, at worst, about 30,000 per year; the rest are where flu and pneumonia was a secondary cause.

 

For this particular purpose you have to deal with interactions with other illnesses or the figures don't make sense.  It's very likely true that Covid was in some part responsible for most of the deaths, in the sense that (like the motor neurone Covid victim I linked above) they wouldn't have died yet.  They were dying, but it was hastened.  And that's the big question for the government.  We can say in a blase manner that all lives are important, but for the purposes of government they aren't equally important.  The damage to the economy (and to the future health of the survivors, let's not forget) has to be weighed against the lives being lost.  And if the lives being lost are 50,000 young, healthy people with years left in them, those lives will have higher value (for the purposes of government) that if say 40,000 of them are already dying of a range of other illnesses or extreme old age.

 

With flu and pneumonia, two thirds of the deaths were people already on death's pathway.  Is that also true of coronavirus, another respiratory disease?  Probably.

Try telling that to the lockdown obsessives and those who exclusively follow the cult of Vallance and Whitty. They'd have you under restrictions forever while they have their fingers in their ears saying 'la la la'...

 

There is absolutely a debate to be had about an alternative pathway out of this, if only the media and government would allow the conversation. 

[Bryn]

12 hours ago, Sampson said:

Yeah, covid hospitalisations jumped by 25% today from 386 to 478. That's probably the grimest stat we've had since May and probably the most stark statistics we've had that this 2nd wave is starting to take hold again and take hold amongst the vulnerable. Really hope that trend of quickly increasing hospitalisation doesn't continue.

 

We're expecting a 25% reduction in mortality from COVID due to better knowledge of who, when and how to ventilate, as well as use of dexamethasone and remdesivir. This is obviously a good thing, but it also means there will be more patients in non-critical care beds recovering. This backs up into A&E and critical care. Not really seen this reported but it's going to be a really serious factor over winter.

[Nalis]

Interesting to see how we solve the problem of the infection rates climbing in the northern cities despite more restrictions.

 

Can't see how the rate is going to fall while schools and universities are still open.

[yorkie1999]

5 minutes ago, Nalis said:

Interesting to see how we solve the problem of the infection rates climbing in the northern cities despite more restrictions.

 

Can't see how the rate is going to fall while schools and universities are still open.

Herd immunity, which probably means they're not confident of a vaccine being a long term solution, it also takes us back to where we started.

 

https://news.sky.com/story/scientists-and-politicians-split-over-how-to-tackle-rising-covid-infections-as-northern-leaders-say-restrictions-are-not-working-12096597

 

Also, was listening to talksport this morning who we're comparing allowing 3500 in a 5200 seater indoor albert hall with allowing 25% of football fans back into the grounds where, obviously there's more people who will congregate at pubs etc but, it's not illegal to actually go to a pub as they're open and have measure in place under present guidelines, and there's more pubs etc around football grounds that can cater for a lot larger volume of people. If fans want a drink, take a four pack and have a drink in the street at the ground which is a fairly simple solution. But their argument is that there's an obvious hidden agenda behind keeping fans away because football can't be seen as the "poster boy" of the country returning to some sort of normality.

 

https://talksport.com/football/770364/adrian-durham-plea-let-fans-in-premier-league-efl-fa/

[Milo]

25 minutes ago, Nalis said:

Interesting to see how we solve the problem of the infection rates climbing in the northern cities despite more restrictions.

 

Can't see how the rate is going to fall while schools and universities are still open.

I believe the thinking is primary school children pose a negligible risk of virus transmission, secondary school kids slightly higher and then 6th form and University students are categorised as an adult would be. 
 

Doesn’t take into account teachers and drop off/pick up procedures, but it looks like the direction is to keep schools open for younger kids and maybe go down the herd immunity route for the young adults. 🤷‍♂️ 

[Innovindil]

Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Poland and Ukraine have all reported record numbers of daily infections.

 

Czech health officials said there were 4,457 cases in the past 24 hours. The country has reported the highest number of new cases per 100,000 inhabitants (326.8) over the past 14 days in the EU, overtaking Spain.

 

Ukraine confirmed 4,753 new cases, including 219 infections in children, and 77 deaths.

 

Meanwhile in Poland, there were 3,003 new cases and 75 virus-related deaths. In comparison, the daily record for new cases in spring was 599. The number of deaths broke the previous record of 58 set yesterday.

 

In Bulgaria, there were 436 cases and eight deaths in the past 24 hours.

 

 

Gonna be a cluster**** of a winter ain't it. 

[leicsmac]

If what is being shown about winter is true, then a vaccine available asap is almost a matter of necessity.

[dsr-burnley]

42 minutes ago, Milo said:

I believe the thinking is primary school children pose a negligible risk of virus transmission, secondary school kids slightly higher and then 6th form and University students are categorised as an adult would be. 
 

Doesn’t take into account teachers and drop off/pick up procedures, but it looks like the direction is to keep schools open for younger kids and maybe go down the herd immunity route for the young adults. 🤷‍♂️ 

What's galling is that the measures they are putting in place are useless.  They're playing about at the edges.  If they want to stop the spread of the disease they need pretty much total lockdown - at least as bad as it was March-June probably worse.  But if they are going to keep the schools, universities and workplaces open, there is no point faffing about with the ban on old people seeing their families.  If they won't impose meaningful wholesale bans, they should lift the petty bans, let the people themselves decide whether seeing families is an unacceptable risk.

[joachim1965]

16 hours ago, Leicester_Loyal said:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8810281/Labour-savages-Matt-Hancock-having-NO-idea-contacts-need-traced.html

 

Matt Hancock warns cancer patients will only be guaranteed treatment if Covid-19 stays 'under control'

what an absolute cvnt.

[Guest Fktf]

2 hours ago, Mapperleyfox said:

It's a hypothetical scenario, not a real life example. 

Thanks for clearing that up mate.

 

[SpacedX]

On 06/10/2020 at 12:16, Nalis said:

I would hope people would formulate their opinions from a range of sources as not just foxestalk, key word being hope.

You Tube, Facebook and Twitter. 

[Voll Blau]

Looks like Labour will oppose extending the 10pm rule if today's PMQs are anything to go by. There's still been no scientific basis presented for it and the longer it carries on, the greater the need there is for one to be made publicly available (if one does exist).

[yorkie1999]

Just now, Voll Blau said:

Looks like Labour will oppose extending the 10pm rule if today's PMQs are anything to go by. There's still been no scientific basis presented for it and the longer it carries on, the greater the need there is for one to be made publicly available (if one does exist).

You're not going to encourage less pub goers to be present in a pub by closing earlier, what you end up with is the same amount of custom but in a shorter period of time, effectively meaning there are more people in a pub at any one time.

[twoleftfeet]

50 minutes ago, joachim1965 said:

what an absolute cvnt.

Really the truth is either you treat Cancer or covid in a hospital. its a difficult one prioritising one persons treatment over another's