Stop Posting the Conspiracy Rubbish

Statto1 said:
Tell that to the 60k extra dead people or the family of the extra 60k dead people we have, or to those that have had to care for them, or treat them. Some of those are doing that unpaid too, or on minimum wage, or on a nurses salary, which is low.
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60 or 50? Or 70 or 40? Your numbers change every day and I still haven't figured out your agenda. 😏

Also. You don't seem to be bothered about the hundreds of thousands of people, in this country alone, who's mental health has been affected adversely by lockdowns, restrictions on visiting family, grieving processes etc but oh as soon mental health breakdown is mentioned as possibly symptom of covid-19 (you know along with covid toes, a rash, a headache, a runny nose, a runny bum, aches, pains, etc) you are all over it.

You are pro lockdown, that's fine, with your job security and tight family circle. Spare a minute of thought for the single mother of 2 young kids who lives on the 10th floor of a set of flats who was recently made redundant because her old job was deemed non essential.

So is it everybody's mental health this government and the NHS should be fixing or just those with a positive test and everybody else can join the waiting list, which is getting longer every day.


Edit edit edit also your point 2 above is an outright lie. The NHS was absolutely nowhere near from been overwhelmed. Did you know some nurses and other medical workers were actually told to take holidays as there was no work for them to do due to shutdown of different NHS services?
 
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RandySavage said:
60 or 50? Or 70 or 40? Your numbers change every day and I still haven't figured out your agenda. 😏

Also. You don't seem to be bothered about the hundreds of thousands of people, in this country alone, who's mental health has been affected adversely by lockdowns, restrictions on visiting family, grieving processes etc but oh as soon mental health breakdown is mentioned as possibly symptom of covid-19 (you know along with covid toes, a rash, a headache, a runny nose, a runny bum, aches, pains, etc) you are all over it.

You are pro lockdown, that's fine, with your job security and tight family circle. Spare a minute of thought for the single mother of 2 young kids who lives on the 10th floor of a set of flats who was recently made redundant because her old job was deemed non essential.

So is it everybody's mental health this government and the NHS should be fixing or just those with a positive test and everybody else can join the waiting list, which is getting longer every day.

Edit edit edit also your point 2 above is an outright lie. The NHS was absolutely nowhere near from been overwhelmed. Did you know some nurses and other medical workers were actually told to take holidays as there was no work for them to do due to shutdown of different NHS services?
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Have I even mentioned 40 or 70k excess deaths up to now, within the last month? Nope, so why do you lie?

Also, regarding the number, it depends what excess death figure is used. This depends on whether you look at the start of the pandemic or for the entire year, which I've clearly shown on a graph that you've seen countless times. I'll post again though, source is 100% ONS data, up to blue vertical line.
1605181299627.png

We actually had a -5k head start and we're on about +58k as of 30th October, and it's been going up since then. So anywhere from 58k to 63k is reasonable it the minute, I would say. Do you disagree with that?

I do care about the mental health of those affected by lockdowns, please find one post where I've indicated otherwise? Not sure what you mean about tight family circle? Where have I said don't support those less well off? You're just making things up.

I realise there are people who will struggle, I've never said there wouldn't be, and I know plenty that are. My point is, the job situation is likely unavoidable, so if it is unavoidable then support them better. I've been saying support low earners and jobless better for a decade. My entire point is lock down earlier, track and trace better and follow the rules better and the problem would be a lot less, the lockdown wouldn't need to be anywhere near as long or as harsh. Unemployment looks to be up about 0.8% to 4.8%, which is still nowhere near recession levels, and still quite low in the grand scheme of things.

The waiting lists for everything will be longer if the hospitals are rammed with Covid.

We weren't nearly overwhelmed? Are you on crack? We had to increase the number or critical care/ ICU beds to deal with it, which took up resources and staff from other areas of hospitals, effectively making other beds redundant. In April 95% of people in ICU beds were on ventilators, and it was like 20% in July. Cases were doubling every 7 days, had we left that go on another week or month or whatever, then the nightmare could have been multiple times worse.
We were sending known cases to care homes because we couldn't handle them!
 
Statto1 - I get your points and understand where you are coming from, what makes me think alternatively is that the measures to prevent Covid deaths are not without consequences, i.e. a simple one is that for every 1% rise in unemployment will equate to around 30 to 40,000 extra deaths - this is just one scenario that will play out in addition to cancers not caught earlier (and therefore more unnecessary deaths) because of what is going on, there are lots of other things to consider too. Truth is the Government (and they were asked) have not consider this and for me that is... well I have no words.

Could we be in a position (long term) where non-Covid deaths outweigh Covid deaths?
 
the_smog_chorus said:
Statto1 - I get your points and understand where you are coming from, what makes me think alternatively is that the measures to prevent Covid deaths are not without consequences, i.e. a simple one is that for every 1% rise in unemployment will equate to around 30 to 40,000 extra deaths - this is just one scenario that will play out in addition to cancers not caught earlier (and therefore more unnecessary deaths) because of what is going on, there are lots of other things to consider too. Truth is the Government (and they were asked) have not consider this and for me that is... well I have no words.

Could we be in a position (long term) where non-Covid deaths outweigh Covid deaths?
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I totally get that, and I know and agree, there are massive, massive, massive implications. I've never for one second said otherwise. I'm just saying the lockdown and those implications are probably the "least worst" we can hope for, it's horrendous, it really is.

My main gripe is the lockdowns are far too slow, too soft, our track and trace has been $hite. I think that's why a lot are miffed at the lockdown, although it's not the lockdowns fault, the fault is the delay. Every week up was three weeks down on the cases and deaths in the first wave.

But I'm also saying:
Not locking down wouldn't have saved all those 0.8% lost jobs, as the wider market has massively reduced (we have zero control over this).
Not locking down would have easily multiplied those covid death numbers.
Multiplied covid numbers screws over healthcare.
If covid screws us, the NHS, or even just takes up all of the ICU, then treatment in most other departments will get worse, it's inversely proportional.

There is no scenario where covid increases and service to other NHS aspects stays the same or gets better, it's just not possible, not with our current funding to the NHS, along with staff and resources. We can't just magic another 10,000 ICU beds, which can move around the country instantly, along with the staff and experience to man them. The same way we can't just leave those that can't breathe to die. NHS cuts haven't helped but the NHS are playing the $hit hand they've been dealt, like they always do.

I'm just saying don't fight the lockdown, or like it seems to be on here, people trying and find statistics to back up claims that lock downs do not reduce cases and deaths, or there hasn't been cases and deaths, as it's bull$hit conspiracy theory. All it does is undermine the fight and make the lockdowns longer, it's like a dirty protest.

Would much rather some people were just honest and said "I think jobs for young people are worth more than the lives of old people", at least they would be being honest. But there are some that just don't understand, or don't want to understand as it doesn't fit their personal circumstances/ beliefs.

Brexit probably poses a bigger threat to unemployment though, especially long term, and some of the increase we've had in unemployment may actually also be due to that.
 
RandySavage said:
Define overwhelmed?
Haven't seen any news reports telling folk to avoid going to hospital for life saving treatments.
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I know someone who works at North Tees as well. They were very busy during the 1st wave and are very busy this time ............... in the Covid wards.

They've had full wards that are empty waiting for this next wave allegedly.
 
GazC_MFC said:
You can’t debunk deaths, pcr positives and the ifr rate like is happening here on this thread unless you think there’s a conspiracy

532 deaths. Even at 0.4% that would mean 133k cases 3 weeks ago using ‘the 3 week lag’ maths (it’s not exact science like that by for illustrative purposes)

At around 20-25k cases reported and if you take the figure 20% showing symptoms it shows tests are not that far off, but you could argue it strengthens the argument around false negatives outweigh false negatives. Personally I think it’s people not getting a test when showing symptoms.

people are getting the disease. High numbers are dying, high numbers will continue to die.
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Sorry, I’ve only just come back to this thread, but I can’t not make a small point about this post in particular as it demonstrates why I find it really hard to have a discussion about this and why I have a problem with a lot of legitimate discussion points being filed as conspiracy theory.
And I mean no disrespect to you Gaz, but it’s just so hard to get anywhere because of misunderstandings like yours in this particular case. (And yeah, I’m just as guilty of misunderstanding plenty of the data we are given too.)


Firstly, using an infection fatality rate of 0.4% and applying it to 532 cases simply does not work and is a massive simplification of things that renders any case estimate based on it as completely irrelevant.
This is because different IFR apply to different age groups.
For example, using an Imperial College study (which I’m using purely for illustrative purposes as it was one of the first I found when doing a google search) they estimate :

30-34 yr old IFR approx 0.06%

60-64 yr old IFR approx 0.89%-0.94%

85-89 yr old IFR approx 8.28%-8.86%

90 yr old + IFR approx 16.19%-17.37%

So if the majority of those 532 deaths are occurring in the older age groups, (which we know they massively are) then the IFR of that particular group of 532 will be way, waaaaaay higher than 0.4%.

You need to look at the proportion of each age group that makes up the 532 deaths, and work it out from there, applying the IFR based on that, to get anywhere near the cases.
You also need to look at the deaths figure for a set day, rather than the days reported (532 covers deaths across a range of dates, probably even covering a month or more)

I haven’t time to find the exact make up of the 532 deaths currently but a quick look at today’s hospital data, for example, shows that of 317 reported deaths (which covered actual dates of death ranging from 10th Oct-11th Nov) only 17 were under the age of 59, 131 were aged between 60-79 and 169 were 80+.
I’m guessing that sort of ratio is probably fairly representative of each day, or at least in similar range. So using an IFR of 0.4% is so far out it’s just unreal.

Let’s just, purely for illustrative purposes, say that all of the deaths occurred in 75-79 yr olds. Using the Imperial College study IFR of 3.39-3.61 - Even at the lower IFR that still equates to 15,693 cases...
See what I mean? It’s just not as simple as saying ‘let’s use an average IFR, even one on the higher side, and apply that to the number of reported deaths in the headline and work out the rough cases to see whether there are loads of false negatives/false positives’.

We all know that the overwhelming majority of deaths occur in the older age groups - this is not disputed. What’s the average age of death for covid at the minute?something like 82? (I’ve not checked)
We know that the IFR in the older age groups is also much much higher. This is not disputed.

So to use 0.4% as your IFR to illustrate that their are way more cases than ‘officially’ is just way, way out and way too simplistic.


Secondly, you said
‘ and if you take the figure 20% showing symptoms’.

This implies you are saying 80% are asymptomatic. Where does this come from? Even SAGE estimate asymptomatic cases to be in the region of something like 28%(so in your example, 20% symptomatic should actually be 72%) .Huge difference.

Anyway, that’s why I give up on this discussion and this isn’t a criticism of you GazC_MFC, and I hope you don’t take it that way and realise that is not what I’m trying to achieve by this post.
It’s just more generally there is a big misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the data we are fed, amongst us all, that it’s not possible to have a proper discussion about things by messages on a forum.

I can’t help feel that there is no desire to clarify the public misunderstanding of what the data is actually saying and I find that a little odd. For example, how many people out there are still thinking a daily report of 20 k new cases means that there are just 20k new cases that day, and that they all definitely had covid and were infectious at the moment. Or that 532 deaths reported means that 532 people died the day before? Or don’t understand the difference between CFR and IFR. It’s probably a much higher proportion than it needs to be.

IFR study-
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-10-29-COVID19-Report-34.pdf


Review of asymptomatic covid cases in the community -

https://assets.publishing.service.g...RS-CoV-2_infections_in_community_settings.pdf
 
Alvez_48 said:

The data reveals the truth
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We're not Sweden, our general public does not have the Swedish mentality (unfortunately) and even Sweden don't believe in what they did for the first wave, hence why they're "asking" parts of the country to take measures and have partial lockdowns now. Measures they admit themselves, are likely not strong enough.

“We are facing a situation that could turn black as night,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said at a press conference in Stockholm. “We risk ending up in the situation we had last spring.”

I hope their track and trace system works.

Sweden: 606 deaths per million, current cases per day about 4.5k and going up (some days near 5k)
Ireland: 396 deaths per million, current cases per day 400, and going down (peaked at 1200 on the 21th October (the day it locked down))

Modelling: Comparing worst case (do nothing at all) to locking down, and then claiming the model is broke after the lock down works and you don't even go down the path of the model, is laughable. He's trying to fool you, and he's succeeding.

Then Ireland (again, different country), it seems they moved up levels 2,3,4 etc as cases increased (which he doesn't mention, of course) and it peaked about when the lock down came in, and then rapidly declined, as you would expect (as that's what lock downs do). They actually did very well to slow and stop a rapid increase, fair play to them.
If the measures and lockdown didn't stop it, what did?

Why was he staggering the impact line 2-3 weeks to the right of the 20th, when measures had been in place for a month and were getting stronger and stronger to combat the rise in cases, before they even locked down. Oh yeah, that's why, because he's trying to steer you down the rabbit hole.
 
Statto1 said:
Yeah, that's along the lines of what I've been saying, the main two gripes I have are.
1) Either the IFR is low and we have masses of cases or the IFR is high and we have less cases, they're inversely proportional, it can't be both ways (unless it's a conspiracy).
2) We can't have herd immunity unless we've had a boat load of cases (or some other inherent immunity), and if that's the case, then PCR has to be under reporting (or they're saying it's a conspiracy).

Be careful with the 532 though, as that might be from the "high day" of the week (although last week the high day was Wednesday), and we don't need to use the extremes of the figures to prove our (the worlds) point. If you use the 7 day average on that day it gives us a good idea where that graph is going, and it's still going up for the deaths, and cases have been running level for about 2 weeks by the looks of it. So we're likely somewhere near peak deaths per day, but it's likely to run fairly level until about 2-3 weeks after that case graph starts declining. That case graph will probably decline in the next week or so after the various tier 3 and national lockdowns take further effect, and then deaths trail that by 2-3 weeks like you say. So we're probably going to be near this 360 average for about 3-4 weeks, assuming things go as expected. Hopefully the lock down is enough to get R below 1, or we're stuck at this until Christmas.

As for the IFR/ cases, 360 is the current 7 day average deaths (likely less than the true figure though)
At 1% IFR that's 36,000 cases per day
At 0.7% IFR that's 51,000 cases per day
At 0.5% IFR that's 72,000 cases per day
At 0.33% IFR that's 108,000 cases per day
At 0.2% IFR that's 180,000 cases per day

Excess was about 60k v covid 40k when I last compared the two, so can probably add another half to any of those IFR's, for the collateral damage it causes or missed covid deaths. So if people think it's 0.5% IFR for covid, then 0.75% will probably die in total for every covid case, whether that's through covid or delayed treatment/ no treatment for other life threatening ailments.
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Some fair points but as I said in reply to Gaz just now, you can’t just use an average IFR to roughly work out cases, without looking at the age demographic of the (360) cases, give; that age is the biggest factor in IFR.
 
FabioPorkpie said:
Sorry, I’ve only just come back to this thread, but I can’t not make a small point about this post in particular as it demonstrates why I find it really hard to have a discussion about this and why I have a problem with a lot of legitimate discussion points being filed as conspiracy theory.
And I mean no disrespect to you Gaz, but it’s just so hard to get anywhere because of misunderstandings like yours in this particular case. (And yeah, I’m just as guilty of misunderstanding plenty of the data we are given too.)


Firstly, using an infection fatality rate of 0.4% and applying it to 532 cases simply does not work and is a massive simplification of things that renders any case estimate based on it as completely irrelevant.
This is because different IFR apply to different age groups.
For example, using an Imperial College study (which I’m using purely for illustrative purposes as it was one of the first I found when doing a google search) they estimate :

30-34 yr old IFR approx 0.06%

60-64 yr old IFR approx 0.89%-0.94%

85-89 yr old IFR approx 8.28%-8.86%

90 yr old + IFR approx 16.19%-17.37%

So if the majority of those 532 deaths are occurring in the older age groups, (which we know they massively are) then the IFR of that particular group of 532 will be way, waaaaaay higher than 0.4%.

You need to look at the proportion of each age group that makes up the 532 deaths, and work it out from there, applying the IFR based on that, to get anywhere near the cases.
You also need to look at the deaths figure for a set day, rather than the days reported (532 covers deaths across a range of dates, probably even covering a month or more)

I haven’t time to find the exact make up of the 532 deaths currently but a quick look at today’s hospital data, for example, shows that of 317 reported deaths (which covered actual dates of death ranging from 10th Oct-11th Nov) only 17 were under the age of 59, 131 were aged between 60-79 and 169 were 80+.
I’m guessing that sort of ratio is probably fairly representative of each day, or at least in similar range. So using an IFR of 0.4% is so far out it’s just unreal.

Let’s just, purely for illustrative purposes, say that all of the deaths occurred in 75-79 yr olds. Using the Imperial College study IFR of 3.39-3.61 - Even at the lower IFR that still equates to 15,693 cases...
See what I mean? It’s just not as simple as saying ‘let’s use an average IFR, even one on the higher side, and apply that to the number of reported deaths in the headline and work out the rough cases to see whether there are loads of false negatives/false positives’.

We all know that the overwhelming majority of deaths occur in the older age groups - this is not disputed. What’s the average age of death for covid at the minute?something like 82? (I’ve not checked)
We know that the IFR in the older age groups is also much much higher. This is not disputed.

So to use 0.4% as your IFR to illustrate that their are way more cases than ‘officially’ is just way, way out and way too simplistic.


Secondly, you said
‘ and if you take the figure 20% showing symptoms’.

This implies you are saying 80% are asymptomatic. Where does this come from? Even SAGE estimate asymptomatic cases to be in the region of something like 28%(so in your example, 20% symptomatic should actually be 72%) .Huge difference.

Anyway, that’s why I give up on this discussion and this isn’t a criticism of you GazC_MFC, and I hope you don’t take it that way and realise that is not what I’m trying to achieve by this post.
It’s just more generally there is a big misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the data we are fed, amongst us all, that it’s not possible to have a proper discussion about things by messages on a forum.

I can’t help feel that there is no desire to clarify the public misunderstanding of what the data is actually saying and I find that a little odd. For example, how many people out there are still thinking a daily report of 20 k new cases means that there are just 20k new cases that day, and that they all definitely had covid and were infectious at the moment. Or that 532 deaths reported means that 532 people died the day before? Or don’t understand the difference between CFR and IFR. It’s probably a much higher proportion than it needs to be.

IFR study-
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/mrc-gida/2020-10-29-COVID19-Report-34.pdf


Review of asymptomatic covid cases in the community -

https://assets.publishing.service.g...RS-CoV-2_infections_in_community_settings.pdf
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I said it wasn’t an exact science and I said let’s use it at illustrative purpose

im not sure what point you are making, so help me understand. Are you saying more people are being infected vs deaths or less people

to reach and average of 400 deaths how many cases would need to live. Test data shows rises in all age groups, so using a overall ifr takes into account all ages. Using individual ifr is fine, but you are highlighting individual risk ranges based on age.

300 400 or 500 deaths = many people infected

or if less people infected and cases are wrong then you have to saying that only old people are really getting it.

what your standpoint on how many people have to be infected to reach 100’s of deaths a day?
 
FabioPorkpie said:
Some fair points but as I said in reply to Gaz just now, you can’t just use an average IFR to roughly work out cases, without looking at the age demographic of the (360) cases, give; that age is the biggest factor in IFR.
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Yeah, totally agree with that. But people have been banding around this 0.2% IFR average so he was probably using the 0.4% average as a very basic example to combat that, even though the average we were saying from the other report was about 1.16%, probably to do with us having a lot of old people.

The people posting about 0.2% IFR (or quoting videos claiming that) are not saying anything about the 3% for 70's, 8% for 80's, 16% for 90's etc.
Your report (after a very basic scan) says we're about 1.15% IFR average, assuming even distribution, assuming we're classed as a high income country?

That report looks good by the way, I'll have a read of that when I get chance.
 
Also Heneghan just posted this latest React study graph showing R rate.

20201112_153721.png

But it's Heneghan so will probably be dismissed.
 
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