‘Epidemic’ doubling every 7 days.....

Week Ending 20/09/2020 - 25,753 total weekly cases (Increase of 20.6% from previous week)
Week Ending 27/09/2020 - 40,712 total weekly cases (Increase of 96.2% from previous week)

Is that a 60% increase by my fag packet maths?
 
Week Ending 20/09/2020 - 25,753 total weekly cases (Increase of 20.6% from previous week)
Week Ending 27/09/2020 - 40,712 total weekly cases (Increase of 96.2% from previous week)

Is that a 60% increase by my fag packet maths?

Roughly a 60% increase in confirmed cases, proven by a test.

But as the hot spot areas have been overwhelmed and ran out of tests, you can probably assume that it's near the "doubling every week" that they've been saying.

Will all become apparent soon enough in the death statistics, as they reflect the number of cases quite accurately. Although we've got much better at treatment this time, are better prepared and we already killed off a load of the vulnerable/ weak, so hopefully the numbers won't go anywhere near as high as last time.
 
the triage figures make for interesting reading


I think you can probably put that spike down to back to school colds. Our little one started childcare this month and within 3 days he had a cold which he then passed on to both of us, including a mild cough. We didn't do anything about it, but you can imagine how many parents will have panicked. My niece got sent home from school with a cold so my sister was obliged to get a test adding to the figure even though she knew it was a cold.
 
We should also factor in the number of "false positives" - I know of at least two people, that for work reasons have had to take a test before they can go offshore and have had a positive result. Sent home, symptomless and obviously not wanting to lose big work money, they have paid privately for a further test and it has come back negative. I wonder what percentage of these statistics are "false positives"?

For me, this is why we need to focus less on the positive case numbers and instead review the hospitalised, critically ill and deceased numbers.
 
So for the previous two weeks which have been validated:
9-15 Sep: 64 deaths
16-22 Sep: 125 deaths (pretty much double)
23 Sep-present: not validated

Those deaths from 16-22 Sep likely got infected late August/ early September, when we were on about 1500 cases per day, and had the capacity to test anyone that needed it. Now requirements have exceeded capacity and are now on 7k confirmed cases per day, so if that true figure without exceeding capacity could be more like 10k per day, we could end up with around 700 ish deaths per week, in a few weeks, based on that, which is about 100 deaths per day :(

That's all unless the new confirmed cases are a lot younger and less risk etc, but as we learned last time, we're awful at keeping this out of care homes and the like.
 
I think you can probably put that spike down to back to school colds. Our little one started childcare this month and within 3 days he had a cold which he then passed on to both of us, including a mild cough. We didn't do anything about it, but you can imagine how many parents will have panicked. My niece got sent home from school with a cold so my sister was obliged to get a test adding to the figure even though she knew it was a cold.

Yeah, that "spike" is probably actually masking the real number behind it. I think I saw someone on Twitter call it a paranoidomiter, basically coincides with kids back at school and likely loads of parents ringing up, which probably explains all the green 0-18yr olds. The red bands are currently near levels from two weeks ago though, which is promising.
 
I think the number of cases will start to drop off now. Not because the virus is less prevalent but because people are going to stop looking to get tested. The consequences of a positive result will now deter people..

Not right but what I think will happen.
 
We should also factor in the number of "false positives" - I know of at least two people, that for work reasons have had to take a test before they can go offshore and have had a positive result. Sent home, symptomless and obviously not wanting to lose big work money, they have paid privately for a further test and it has come back negative. I wonder what percentage of these statistics are "false positives"?

For me, this is why we need to focus less on the positive case numbers and instead review the hospitalised, critically ill and deceased numbers.
Like Belgium are beginning to do as the PCR test is been proven time and time again to be unreliable.
 
I don't believe only 7% of the population have had it - in all its form it must be higher.

The Virus has been in the UK since at least early February that's 230 days @ 30,000 average infections per day its 6.9m - about 11% of the UK population.

Remember a lot of infections are never picked up, because people have the virus without realising - all football related infections seem to be in this category. So I think the 30k a day is a conservative figure.
 
Some immunity must be starting to build up in the population when 11% plus have had it.

Without some form of immunity why bother with vaccines?

The earlier corona virus (Asian Bird flu) proved unstable and mutated, this virus is expected to be the same. As it mutates it is likely to become less dangerous to humans which could explain lower hospital admissions in recent weeks compared with earlier in the year when hospitals were quickly flooded in mid to late March and infections were believed to be not too similar from today.

We still have to on our guard and be careful, but slowly the battle is been won.
 
Good to keep your sense of humour
 

Attachments

  • 116B5586-0379-436D-939C-2AA516682D7D.jpeg
    116B5586-0379-436D-939C-2AA516682D7D.jpeg
    222.8 KB · Views: 29
We should also factor in the number of "false positives" - I know of at least two people, that for work reasons have had to take a test before they can go offshore and have had a positive result. Sent home, symptomless and obviously not wanting to lose big work money, they have paid privately for a further test and it has come back negative. I wonder what percentage of these statistics are "false positives"?

For me, this is why we need to focus less on the positive case numbers and instead review the hospitalised, critically ill and deceased numbers.
Why are more people not picking up on two government ministers (Hancock and Raab) confirming inadvertently that the PCR test accuracy is close to 0%?
No wonder there are so many cases.
 
So for the previous two weeks which have been validated:
9-15 Sep: 64 deaths
16-22 Sep: 125 deaths (pretty much double)
23 Sep-present: not validated

Those deaths from 16-22 Sep likely got infected late August/ early September, when we were on about 1500 cases per day, and had the capacity to test anyone that needed it. Now requirements have exceeded capacity and are now on 7k confirmed cases per day, so if that true figure without exceeding capacity could be more like 10k per day, we could end up with around 700 ish deaths per week, in a few weeks, based on that, which is about 100 deaths per day :(

That's all unless the new confirmed cases are a lot younger and less risk etc, but as we learned last time, we're awful at keeping this out of care homes and the like.

Couple of thoughts
We were out of lockdown from June and mingling in pubs and restaurants. The virus was in circulation and must have been spreading at a reasonable pace - no significant deaths to note at all In July and August.

September normally sees around 1200 excess deaths as colds/flu kick in. Do we know what number of excess deaths there have been this September? It doesn’t feel like a big number.
 
Some immunity must be starting to build up in the population when 11% plus have had it.

Without some form of immunity why bother with vaccines?

The earlier corona virus (Asian Bird flu) proved unstable and mutated, this virus is expected to be the same. As it mutates it is likely to become less dangerous to humans which could explain lower hospital admissions in recent weeks compared with earlier in the year when hospitals were quickly flooded in mid to late March and infections were believed to be not too similar from today.

We still have to on our guard and be careful, but slowly the battle is been won.

Im afraid you may be making some assumptions based on hope.
I wish you were correct but I’m afraid it’s not that straight forward.

The lower hospital admissions are likely to be caused by a number of factors, such as younger demographic being infected, higher levels of vitamin D in the population due to summer sunshine and outdoor living etc. ( There is now considerable evidence of a correlation between vitamin D deficiency and severity of infection).
Hospital admissions are raising, albeit slowly currently (thankfully), but the real test will be in a few weeks time when the infection has spread to the older age groups. We need to get it under control again and all do our bit.

The cases at the minute are nowhere near the levels that were being experienced in March. Although on paper they appear to be similar, they were only picking up a tiny fraction of the actual infections in March due to testing number limitations. Many smarter people than me believe the actual figures for daily infections back at the peak were in the region of between 100-200 thousand.

Regarding viral mutations, there is some data suggestIng the virus has indeed mutated. Thankfully it hasn’t mutated into a more deadly strain, but the dominant strain is now believed to be moe contagious -

https://www.news-medical.net/news/2...onavirus-more-contagious-but-less-potent.aspx

I obviously hope it does mutate into a less severe virus, but these are hopes rather than concrete expectations at the minute.

I believe the battle will be won eventually, through therapeutics and vaccine, but it’s going to be a tough winter and people need to be taking this as seriously as ever.

This guy is well worth a watch, as he looks at a lot of the studies and evidence and breaks it down into more easy to understand info for thickies like me. He’s pretty decent, keeps a fairly good eye on developments and isn’t trying to paint one side of an argument.
Lots of information here -


https://www.youtube.com/user/Campbellteaching
 
Couple of thoughts
We were out of lockdown from June and mingling in pubs and restaurants. The virus was in circulation and must have been spreading at a reasonable pace - no significant deaths to note at all In July and August.

September normally sees around 1200 excess deaths as colds/flu kick in. Do we know what number of excess deaths there have been this September? It doesn’t feel like a big number.

I think we got it down low, really low, but have just let it creep back when we could have really knocked it back further. Also, hospital admissions were very low and treatment had got better by then, so all the resources would be going into few patients, so survival rate will increase for certain.

But the people do need to work, and the economy does need to tick over, so I'm not against opening things, providing we're quick and ready to react when things increase. Again though, we've been too slow though, they just didn't learnt the first time. Every week of delay, takes three weeks to get back, it's like a basic children's slide graph, steep up, slow down. As soon as the spike was noticed they should have just shut the place down for two weeks, yes the sharp pain would hurt, but then it's far, far easier to recover from, overall it's far better. Either shut down or get extreme with temp testing at shops and forced tracking and tracing, hand gelling, forced masks etc. A lot of the public are too stupid to look after themselves, which is killing others that were not stupid.

There can't be excess deaths from previous years, that's just "normal" deaths, as they're used for the average we're comparing the current excess/ inexess to now (is the opposite of excess inexess??). Deaths from Flu will probably go down though, as social distancing and hand gelling will stop flu spread, as well as other viruses. Also covid's already killed off a lot of the weak, "there might not be as much kindling left to burn" as one report put it.
 
Back
Top