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Coronavirus Thread

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9 hours ago, StanSP said:

More than half a million first doses up to and including yesterday! 

 

503,116 first doses 

5,647 second doses

 

14,012,224 total first doses 

530,094 total second doses

 

:appl:

 

8 hours ago, Leicester_Loyal said:

Look at some of the figures on here of daily doses, just shows how well we're doing.

 

UK: 434,444

France: 96,708

Germany: 110,327

Spain: 65,024

Portugal: 10,287

As bad as the past year has been for them, the Govt have really excelled themselves with the vaccines.

The vaccine figures compared to the other European countries are quite astonishing.

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8 hours ago, davieG said:

Crowds sledging on Cow Hill on Newcastle Town Moor

 

Police were left "outnumbered" and "hugely frustrated" when hundreds of people gathered to sledge in snow.

Large crowds congregated to frolic on Newcastle's Town Moor and Flatts Lane Country Park in Middlesbrough on Wednesday and Thursday.

 

7 hours ago, Nalis said:

Nicely angled pic from the paparazzi there.

 

7 hours ago, Parafox said:

Maybe an aerial photo from a drone would show a different scene. But why bother when all you want to do is to easily sensationalise everything to drive sales for the Mail or whatever other rag.

I'm very disillusioned with the press in general, throughout all of this. 

 

7 hours ago, z-layrex said:

I think journalists have a lot to answer for over the past decades. They quite literally cause deaths and ruin lives with zero accountability.

Before laying into media/press/paparazzi you might want to watch the video on the Beeb website to see how busy it was

>>> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-56039285

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5 hours ago, z-layrex said:

What do you mean by double vaccinate? Two doses? That's the same everywhere, you need both doses.

I meant - if there are, as an example, a 100 doses available that would go to 50 people first rather than 100.

 

I thought your reference in your original post to Portugal, by inference, recognised the well documented fact that doses are not readily available.

 

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6 hours ago, UpTheLeagueFox said:

 

As bad as the past year has been for them, the Govt have really excelled themselves with the vaccines.

The vaccine figures compared to the other European countries are quite astonishing.

They employed good people, and got lucky with how effective vaccines have been in addition to the NHS smashing it. I don't think our vaccine rollout has been astonishing rather that the EU's attitude towards the vaccine rollout has been astonishingly bad (and of course we have to compare everything to the EU these days).

 

I would argue that if this vaccine rollout is enough for a person to exonerate and forgive the government for their utterly appalling handling of this pandemic then you're an incredibly fickle, easily led person.

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1 hour ago, Lionator said:

They employed good people, and got lucky with how effective vaccines have been in addition to the NHS smashing it. I don't think our vaccine rollout has been astonishing rather that the EU's attitude towards the vaccine rollout has been astonishingly bad (and of course we have to compare everything to the EU these days).

 

I would argue that if this vaccine rollout is enough for a person to exonerate and forgive the government for their utterly appalling handling of this pandemic then you're an incredibly fickle, easily led person.

Doesnt sound like us lot to be fair.

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9 hours ago, dsr-burnley said:

This is news to me about the R number, because I certainly don't know how it works.  This much I do know, the R number represents an estimate of the number of people who will be infected by someone with coronavirus.

 

So correct me if I am oversimplifying, but surely if the R number is more than one, cases will rise, and if the R number is less than one, cases will fall.  Stands to reason.

 

So how come cases have fallen by three quarters in the last month while the R number was above 1?  Between 26th December and 16th January, a time when the R rate was apparently above 1, there were 1,084,790 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and each of those people, we are told, infected (on average) more than 1 other person.

 

since 16th January, there have been a further 516,821 confirmed cases.  Where are the missing 567,969 victims who were infected by all these people with R number greater than 1?  What am I missing?

Everything you ever wanted to know about R...  as it explains its a lagging indicator

 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk

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8 hours ago, Dunge said:

My guess is a couple of factors here: Firstly that you need to decide when you measure R. For instance, do you measure it half way through an infection or at the end of it? ie I’m assuming the idea to be that you can only measure R for people who are no longer infectious and can’t spread the disease. Secondly, while someone’s harbouring the disease you don’t know how many people out there are infected but still waiting for any symptoms to appear.


Both of these taken together should therefore add reporting delays at both the end of one infection and the start of another, making accurate measurements only possible weeks afterward. So, we say now that R is officially “Below 1” because this is our first chance to properly measure it. In practice, a theoretical continuous R given the restrictions will have been below 1 for weeks. But it wouldn’t really add much for the government and scientists to explain this other than further confusion to the populace, so they’ve just stuck with R and people get the right basic idea, as you say:

R < 1: Good

R > 1: Bad.

How would they determine this though, do they just say a person is negative 2 weeks after a positive test. Most people i know who've tested positive stay at home for a fortnight and then assume they've got over it. Are you supposed to go for a test to see if you're negative? and if you are, is this cross referenced against the positive result?. I always thought the R value was calculated from the amount of people who are have tested positive v the increase in people who test positive. So if 100 people have it one week, and the R is 1.2, 120 people have it  the next week and then 144 the next week and so on, I don't know how they account for people recovering 

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4 minutes ago, yorkie1999 said:

How would they determine this though, do they just say a person is negative 2 weeks after a positive test. Most people i know who've tested positive stay at home for a fortnight and then assume they've got over it. Are you supposed to go for a test to see if you're negative? and if you are, is this cross referenced against the positive result?. I always thought the R value was calculated from the amount of people who are have tested positive v the increase in people who test positive. So if 100 people have it one week, and the R is 1.2, 120 people have it  the next week and then 144 the next week and so on, I don't know how they account for people recovering 

The link @Stivo provided above is really good; essentially what people tend to think of as R is actually the growth rate - a measure as you describe above (number of people who have the virus or number of cases compared to a previous date of your choosing). R is a measure of how many people are infected by another person, which has a similar end but is slightly different in terms of its scientific definition, and hence why it’s lagged behind in both lockdowns.

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43 minutes ago, Stivo said:

Everything you ever wanted to know about R...  as it explains its a lagging indicator

 

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk

If R is a lagging indicator, then what it's saying is that some time ago the rate of spread of infection started dropping.  Is that telling us something we don't know?  The 7-day average number of positive tests has been dropping since 5th January, from 59,000 down to 17,000, which is a lot more than 10%-30%.  

 

Wouldn't it be more practical to use the more or less immediate results from actual number of cases, rather than long-delayed hypothetical results which are by their nature more subjective and almost certainly less accurate?

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3 hours ago, Lionator said:

They employed good people, and got lucky with how effective vaccines have been in addition to the NHS smashing it. I don't think our vaccine rollout has been astonishing rather that the EU's attitude towards the vaccine rollout has been astonishingly bad (and of course we have to compare everything to the EU these days).

 

I would argue that if this vaccine rollout is enough for a person to exonerate and forgive the government for their utterly appalling handling of this pandemic then you're an incredibly fickle, easily led person.

Luck, of course, works both ways and long may they continue to employ good people and make good decisions because that benefits the whole country.

 

I think most rational people will judge the Govt on what they've fvcked up and what they've got right when it comes to voting (along with what the alternatives are like).

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18 minutes ago, UpTheLeagueFox said:

Luck, of course, works both ways and long may they continue to employ good people and make good decisions because that benefits the whole country.

 

I think most rational people will judge the Govt on what they've fvcked up and what they've got right when it comes to voting (along with what the alternatives are like).

This is a fair starting point, but when it comes to taking in to account what they've fvcked up and what they've got right, some people will see that the former outweighs the latter. And that's their prerogative :) 

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58 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

If R is a lagging indicator, then what it's saying is that some time ago the rate of spread of infection started dropping.  Is that telling us something we don't know?  The 7-day average number of positive tests has been dropping since 5th January, from 59,000 down to 17,000, which is a lot more than 10%-30%.  

 

Wouldn't it be more practical to use the more or less immediate results from actual number of cases, rather than long-delayed hypothetical results which are by their nature more subjective and almost certainly less accurate?

I think that there is a confusion between the official R figure quoted on the dashboard and a verbal shorthand when talking about relaxing and trying to say we need to stop the virus growing exponentially when we relax.


There is an actual R rate today ( ie there are say 500k with covid19 and each one infects say 0.9 over the next 4 days)

No one can measure that, but the number of positive pcr tests gives as you suggest ( with some qualifications) a view on what it was 4-5 days ago.  Hospital admissions gives a view on what it was 10 days a ago and is perhaps more accurate than the former.

 

What I am trying to say, is the sending the schools back will increase Actual R and the first time that we will know whether that change has been ok or not ok is by changes in cases exactly as you suggest.  I don’t think the government mean any different to you - they aren’t going to wait for changes in the official R on the dashboard.

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2 minutes ago, StanSP said:

This is a fair starting point, but when it comes to taking in to account what they've fvcked up and what they've got right, some people will see that the former outweighs the latter. And that's their prerogative :) 

I'm sure most people would admit they've got more wrong than right during the pandemic.

They might also not solely judge them on the pandemic when it comes to elections.

I suspect the handling of the economy post-pandemic - ie how much money people have in their pockets at election time - will also be one of the key factors.

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1 minute ago, Chrysalis said:

I dont know, maybe they thought somehow the hospitals would manage to allocate staff, or they had plans to get staff from elsewhere but it never materialised.

Which ever way you look at it it's poor planning 

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29 minutes ago, Stivo said:

I think that there is a confusion between the official R figure quoted on the dashboard and a verbal shorthand when talking about relaxing and trying to say we need to stop the virus growing exponentially when we relax.


There is an actual R rate today ( ie there are say 500k with covid19 and each one infects say 0.9 over the next 4 days)

No one can measure that, but the number of positive pcr tests gives as you suggest ( with some qualifications) a view on what it was 4-5 days ago.  Hospital admissions gives a view on what it was 10 days a ago and is perhaps more accurate than the former.

 

What I am trying to say, is the sending the schools back will increase Actual R and the first time that we will know whether that change has been ok or not ok is by changes in cases exactly as you suggest.  I don’t think the government mean any different to you - they aren’t going to wait for changes in the official R on the dashboard.

I think you're right.  I am certainly confused.  

 

There appear to be two measures of how the number of infections is spreading.  One is the R rate, which has just crept below 1 for the first time since July, and the other is the actual number of cases which has been dropping at about 25% per week since 5th January, more than 6 weeks ago.  Surely one of them must be wrong, and I can't see that it is the actual numbers.  I'm genuinely puzzled.

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29 minutes ago, dsr-burnley said:

I think you're right.  I am certainly confused.  

 

There appear to be two measures of how the number of infections is spreading.  One is the R rate, which has just crept below 1 for the first time since July, and the other is the actual number of cases which has been dropping at about 25% per week since 5th January, more than 6 weeks ago.  Surely one of them must be wrong, and I can't see that it is the actual numbers.  I'm genuinely confused.

I don’t think it’s you who are confused.  I think that you are totally correct in questioning it.

 

It seems that the official R rate on the dashboard is calculated on data that means that it lags by several weeks.  It’s also an average over that period.  Some of the data that feed into such as the ONS stats on the number of people with covid19 is also data that itself lags.  The official R rate has been falling over the last 6 weeks but as you say has only just gone under 1.

As you say that makes it not very useful for decision making.  
 

I have simply concluded that the dashboard R figure is pretty useless except perhaps as a historical record of what happened.

 

Clearly from the case rates and hospital admissions the actual Daily R rate has been under 1 for the past 6 weeks.

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Over 15 million vaccines now completed. 

I just hope this has an impact on the lockdown/ restrictions going forward. Will be interesting on the 22nd to see what is said. 

 

I'm at the point now where I just want to know I can see friends and family at some point. Not due to variants we need to stay in lockdown. 

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