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When will this shit end?


Chrisp1986

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On 4/1/2020 at 9:36 PM, DareToDibble said:

Unfortunately I'm not sure this is the case. He was shown to have lied and bumbled his was through things many times before the last GE and he still won.

 

On 4/1/2020 at 9:50 PM, priest17 said:

His approval rating has gone up throughout hasn't it?

Aye, but yesterday's front pages across the board did not paint a good picture. People are often able to bury their head in the sand about a lot of things, but this is different (I think). And while his approval rating has been increasing, I haven't seen it since before he reversed the "herd immunity" decision...

 

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On a slightly different note, I was thinking about the claims the Chinese have not been honest with their data. I read something yesterday (in the guardian, so make of it what you will) that said the claims are that when they test people who are asymptomatic and turn out to positive, they don't record those numbers. And I thought that seemed like quite a weird thing to be doing. But then I realised that in the UK and the US, we are not testing people who DO have symptoms. So our figures are far far lower than we are publishing. Even worse, DHSC reports hospitalised deaths, which means we might be underreporting our death rate (I know Scotland has admitted in the last few days that this is certainly the case here).

It just seems like a very delicate position to be throwing stones from I guess. 

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32 minutes ago, Sasperella said:

On a slightly different note, I was thinking about the claims the Chinese have not been honest with their data. I read something yesterday (in the guardian, so make of it what you will) that said the claims are that when they test people who are asymptomatic and turn out to positive, they don't record those numbers. And I thought that seemed like quite a weird thing to be doing. But then I realised that in the UK and the US, we are not testing people who DO have symptoms. So our figures are far far lower than we are publishing. Even worse, DHSC reports hospitalised deaths, which means we might be underreporting our death rate (I know Scotland has admitted in the last few days that this is certainly the case here).

It just seems like a very delicate position to be throwing stones from I guess. 

While I think there is a lot to be desired in our approach to testing so far, I don't think the two things are comparable are they? There is a difference between testing but choosing not to record the data and not testing at all so having no data to record (due apparently to a lack of resource).

Edited by Zoo Music Girl
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44 minutes ago, Sasperella said:

On a slightly different note, I was thinking about the claims the Chinese have not been honest with their data. I read something yesterday (in the guardian, so make of it what you will) that said the claims are that when they test people who are asymptomatic and turn out to positive, they don't record those numbers. And I thought that seemed like quite a weird thing to be doing. But then I realised that in the UK and the US, we are not testing people who DO have symptoms. So our figures are far far lower than we are publishing. Even worse, DHSC reports hospitalised deaths, which means we might be underreporting our death rate (I know Scotland has admitted in the last few days that this is certainly the case here).

It just seems like a very delicate position to be throwing stones from I guess. 

From Tuesday all deaths started to be reported, so any death from Corona virus in the hospital, at home or in a care home, this is to an extent why we’ve seen a bit of a jump. There is also a bit of a back log of reporting but ultimately they all get reported here. If anything I think our deaths are over reported, if somebody dies having tested positive for corona than that will be given as cause of death irrespective of what else they had. In normal circumstances the specific cause of death isn’t necessarily recorded for say flu, or pneumonia, it will often just get recorded as a respiratory infection

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15 minutes ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

From Tuesday all deaths started to be reported, so any death from Corona virus in the hospital, at home or in a care home, this is to an extent why we’ve seen a bit of a jump. There is also a bit of a back log of reporting but ultimately they all get reported here. If anything I think our deaths are over reported, if somebody dies having tested positive for corona than that will be given as cause of death irrespective of what else they had. In normal circumstances the specific cause of death isn’t necessarily recorded for say flu, or pneumonia, it will often just get recorded as a respiratory infection

this was about number of cases reported, not number of deaths. We have only been testing people requiring hospital treatment.

Edit...sorry, last bit of original message was about deaths...I'll shut up.

Edited by steviewevie
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35 minutes ago, Zoo Music Girl said:

While I think there is a lot to be desired in our approach to testing so far, I don't think the two things are comparable are they? There is a difference between testing but choosing not to record the data and not testing at all so having no data to record (due apparently to a lack of resource).

I guess not, I suppose I can see a thought process of countries that are widespread testing everyone and getting higher rates wondering why they should report when we're letting loads go by undetected. Not that I'm condoning it! And also quite why it's being framed as a competition between countries at all is anyones guess. Not that most people/countries are doing that, obviously. Or maybe they are..... urgh, too much thinking is taking me down the rabbit hole it seems. 

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3 hours ago, dentalplan said:

Reckon the weather in the UK this weekend is sure to test a share of the population’s willingness to stay home.

Yeah I have to say I felt a bit gutted when I saw the forecast. Reckon we're in for another Boris Bollocking on Monday.

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56 minutes ago, Sasperella said:

I guess not, I suppose I can see a thought process of countries that are widespread testing everyone and getting higher rates wondering why they should report when we're letting loads go by undetected. Not that I'm condoning it! And also quite why it's being framed as a competition between countries at all is anyones guess. Not that most people/countries are doing that, obviously. Or maybe they are..... urgh, too much thinking is taking me down the rabbit hole it seems. 

Germany are scaling down their testing due to lots of negatives

 

 

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I miss eggs :(

It has only been a month since I last saw an egg and I have to say that I've pined over dead pets less than this. 

If anyone in the midlands has a black market contact for eggs please let me know.  Sadly I will have to offer to barter for them as I foolishly put all my savings into buying beaver pelts, which have not been the hot trading item I had hoped.

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24 minutes ago, zahidf said:

Germany are scaling down their testing due to lots of negatives

 

 

isn't it important that country's start coordinating approaches ? so working together on mass production of testing ? so should germany start providing or helping countries who border it .... and they do the same ...?

Edited by crazyfool1
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1 minute ago, Spindles said:

I miss eggs :(

It has only been a month since I last saw an egg and I have to say that I've pined over dead pets less than this. 

If anyone in the midlands has a black market contact for eggs please let me know.  Sadly I will have to offer to barter for them as I foolishly put all my savings into buying beaver pelts, which have not been the hot trading item I had hoped.

@Quark has 200 milky bar eggs...

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5 minutes ago, Spindles said:

I miss eggs :(

It has only been a month since I last saw an egg and I have to say that I've pined over dead pets less than this. 

If anyone in the midlands has a black market contact for eggs please let me know.  Sadly I will have to offer to barter for them as I foolishly put all my savings into buying beaver pelts, which have not been the hot trading item I had hoped.

Farm shops have loads, as do small shops coop, costcutter, spa, even petrol station has them...

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13 minutes ago, Spindles said:

I miss eggs :(

It has only been a month since I last saw an egg and I have to say that I've pined over dead pets less than this. 

If anyone in the midlands has a black market contact for eggs please let me know.  Sadly I will have to offer to barter for them as I foolishly put all my savings into buying beaver pelts, which have not been the hot trading item I had hoped.

Got my first eggs in a month yesterday, I literally punched the air, I was having spicy poached eggs on toast everyday before this started. Don't get me wrong I love a bowl of bran flakes but it's gonna be nice slipping the odd egg here and there into my schedule this week.

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21 minutes ago, crazyfool1 said:

isn't it important that country's start coordinating approaches ? so working together on mass production of testing ? so should germany start providing or helping countries who border it .... and they do the same ...?

They are. UK samples are being sent to german labs

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400 new cases in Ireland yesterday so maybe it isn’t slowing down. Though the government say this is due to them clearing a backlog of testing which they issued an apology over last week so I guess we’ll see in a few more days. They are still talking about relaxing our lockdown a little in 2 weeks but I can’t see it happening. 

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3 hours ago, yehbutnobut said:

Have had a quick look, however all the numbers and graphs overwhelm my tiny mind. Can you give a very brief conclusion of the report?

Had a look through the report, brevity is not one of my strong suits! So, to save you reading any further, the long and short of it is that it builds on the Imperial report, but essentially reaches the same conclusion and justifies the approach taken so far. Basically, what the report shows is that using non-pharmaceutical interventions alone, repeated, stringent measures need to be introduced over a prolonged period to keep ICU admissions below capacity and avoid the consequent spike in mortality associated with a healthcare system that cannot cope. They model out to the end of 2021 with reintroduction of various levels of restrictions and conclude that repeated, stringent control measures are required to keep fatalities down (glimmers of hope will be offered at the end of the next part, if you want to skip to that!).

For anybody who is interested...with the caveat that I'm not an epidemiologist, nor a mathematician (though I work with both regularly):

Like the Imperial model before it, this report examines the effect of different public health interventions on the transmission of the virus, what impact this will have on hospitalisations and what proportion of those will require ICU admission. By extension, this is then used to predict the amount of people who will become infected and the amount of people who may die. 

The main differences here compared to the Imperial report (the one that resulted in a change of strategy earlier in March) are that in this model, age stratification is introduced and additional public health measures are also modelled (such as school closures, but care for schoolchildren by grandparents). They also looked at nationwide implementation of measures versus local controls. The age stratification is an interesting addition, as in the Imperial model, the case fatality rate (CRF) was estimated at 1%, which was not unreasonable, but the analysis here is somewhat more nuanced (with CFRs ranging from 0% for the 0-9 age group, right up to 7.68% for the over 80s, though these are adjusted CFRs  and I can't exactly figure out how they adjusted them!...they say they used hospitalisation/mortality rates from the Wuhan outbreak and adjusted using the Diamond Princess outbreak, but both are examples of spread among close contacts in confined spaces (lockdown in Wuhan was pretty severe), so I don't know how relevant a method for adjusting CRFs this is if community transmission is the principal way the virus is spreading (which is certainly the case here in Ireland)). The other key addition to the model is the inclusion of estimates of asymptomatic cases and pre-symptomatic (sub-clinical) cases, adjusted for how infectious they might be (and the numbers they use are close to those described in a paper that was published in Science a couple of weeks ago estimating how infections asymptomatic cases might be, so it seems reasonable). 

Key messages from the report are that individual measures (school shutdown, banning large gatherings, working from home, case isolation, shielding/cocooning high risk groups and so on) are ineffective on their own. Only in combination do they have the required impact on case numbers, ICU admission and ultimately on fatalities (and even in combination, "lockdown" at the current level is required to make them completely effective. They looked at different combinations of these, such as closing schools only,  but even as little a 1 contact per week between schoolchildren and grandparents wold negate the impact of the measure. There are a few odd weightings in some of their conclusions (for example, under a lockdown scenario, symptomatic individuals are assumed to be 65% as infectious as they would be under a free for all, but almost all of that infectiousness is weighted by home contact, which remains at 100% no matter what intervention strategy they model...this assumes that everybody in a household will become infected if there is a symptomatic case in the house, but that is at odds with all available data (it's entirely possible to be in contact with somebody who is infectious and not catch the disease if you take the correct precautions)..but the key part of this is that it doesn't contribute massively to the R0 of the virus as numbers of contacts are reduced significantly and that lockdowns reduce it to below 1, which is the target for "flattening the curve". However, "lockdown" can't go on indefinitely, so they look at what happens when restrictions are relaxed and when they are reintroduced. They, like the imperial report before them, use ICU admissions as triggers for the implementation of more stringent public health measures. In this scenario, there's not a huge difference between triggering "lockdown" at 1000 bed occupancy Vs 2000, both stay close to ICU capacity, whereas higher triggers (5000 beds) will quickly overwhelm capacity. But the conclusion from this part of the modelling is peaks and troughs of 2 month lockdowns with about 1 month in between them till the next one (all the way out to December 2021). With a 1000 bed trigger, this predicts just over 5k admissions in the peak weak of each surge, with 1.4k fatalities. The final conclusion drawn is stated as "we estimated that a scenario in which more intense lockdown measures were implemented for shorter periods may be able to keep projected case numbers at a level that would not overwhelm the health system"...

So, as per the Imperial report, pretty grim reading at first glance. But, some of the same glimmers of hope at that stage, still exist here. All of the models assume no pharmaceutical intervention and also do not model behavioural change. Both of which I really believe could have significant impact on how things play out. The CDC is currently revising its advice on mask wearing. Previous advice was that surgical masks were in short supply, offered little protection and should be left for frontline healthcare workers. I entirely agree that PPE for frontline healthcare staff is essential and the general public bulk buying any they can get their hands on is only going to make matters worse. However, the type of PPE under discussion here is different. A surgical mask (or any face covering) is used to protect the other person, not primarily the wearer (surgeons don't mainly wear them to stop themselves from picking up an infection from their patient, they wear them to protect you from picking up and infection from them when they open you up). The type of PPE required on the frontline to protect the wearer is different and not necessary for the general population when restrictions are lifted and we start to move about again. But in situations where people are in close contact (i.e. public transport), any kind of face covering reduces transmission rates and I'd like to see more discussion on this as part of an exit strategy. Hand hygiene too and individual protective measures are also not factored into the models (they measure populations not individuals, so we can all take personal responsibility to reduce our risk). As I pointed out last time wrt to the Imperial report, pharmaceutical intervention will shift the entire model substantially. APN01, an actual coronavirus therapeutic, has just entered Phase II trials having been deemed safe at Phase 1. It's based on the receptor the virus uses to get into our cells and we'll see how effective it is. More an more of this will happen, in addition to proper assessment of drugs that have demonstrated anecdotal success. I would be much more confident that treatment for at least some patients would be available in the short-term (with vaccination a longer term goal). And then there's the serology tests...these will give a much clear picture of how extensive infection rates are, what the actual asymptomatic case rate is and inform the models even more accurately (plus maybe allowing at least frontline staff to get back to work). The promise of tests within days has run into the problem of accuracy (often things look great in the lab, but not so great when you see how they perform in actual patients!), so we may have to wait a little bit on this, but it won't take for ever. They may even form part of aggressive testing and contact tracing between peaks that can also shift the model and spread the peaks. 

Anyway, a long post to basically say that the new model doesn't change things a whole lot! 

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