Yesterday I heard a great conspiracy theory that it is a deliberate ploy to get rid of all us 'everything is your fault' oldies! Meantime, in Thurso Co-Op, panic buying has evidently been rife as not a loo roll in sight! Wonderful, ain't it- no shortage of loo rolls except that which people have created themselves. That's what you get when you tell people 'no need to panic'!
I wasn't going to say on here in case it got out but I know you won't tell anybody Goodfellers. So, I did happen to notice that there were still boxes of tissues and some kitchen rolls available. That is about the extent of my powers of lateral thinking and besides, I was too intent on stocking up on my favourite brand of filter coffee and will be seriously put out if that is panic bought by anyone else!
Thanks for posting this. The agreement between those graphs is impressive. The total number of UK cases increased by about 30% today, in agreement with the predictions. The number of cases in Scotland increased by almost 70% today, which I would guess is much higher than the percentage we’ll see for the next week or so - I hope!
The government(s) must take firmer action now, surely!
The death rate from the Coronavirus is much higher than for seasonal flu, and this country is in the very early stages of the Corona pandemic. If everyone in the UK catches it and the death rate is 6% as suggested by the simple-minded measure on the Worldometers site, then it will kill four million people in the UK alone!
That’s a worst case scenario (I hope!).
If the UK rate of increase stays at today’s 33% per day, we will have more cases than China by the end of the month, and everyone in the UK will have it by late April, if I’ve done my sums right.
Edited, as I definitely didn’t get my sums right for April!
Last edited by aqua; 12-Mar-20 at 19:47.
A little black humour is called for, I think.
The Be Good Tanyas' fantastic version of the Townes van Zandt classic "Waiting Around To Die".
Aqua...now how do you know if ‘any’ Country in the World is accurately reporting their cases of the illness.
And the average rate of Death so far is approx 3%.
It’s just too early to tell. We are at the beginning.
Listen to Prezzzzz Trump/ he is my Hero!
Like say Iran? seems to have an unusually high number of death to infection rate suggests infection may be wider spread than they let on?
For the truly paranoid nothing will suffice.
For his part Trump at least tried to calm the markets, shame their healthcare system is a mess $3000 for a test, who was going to get that done?
So much interesting information in this interview
Interview regarding World Health Organization (WHO) mission to China, led by the agency’s assistant director general and veteran epidemiologist
Bruce Aylward
I think the key learning from China is speed — it’s all about the speed. The faster you can find the cases, isolate the cases, and track their close contacts, the more successful you’re going to be. Another big takeaway is that even when you have substantial transmission with a lot of clusters — because people are looking at the situation in some countries now and going, “Oh, gosh, what can be done?” — what China demonstrates is if you settle down, roll up your sleeves, and begin that systematic work of case finding and contact tracing, you definitely can change the shape of the outbreak, take the heat out of it, and prevent a lot of people from getting sick and a lot of the most vulnerable from dying.
...
More of a surprise, and this is something we still don’t understand, is how little virus there was in the much broader community. Everywhere we went, we tried to find and understand how many tests had been done, how many people were tested, and who were they.
In Guangdong province, for example, there were 320,000 tests done in people coming to fever clinics, outpatient clinics. And at the peak of the outbreak, 0.47 percent of those tests were positive. People keep saying [the cases are the] tip of the iceberg. But we couldn’t find that. We found there’s a lot of people who are cases, a lot of close contacts — but not a lot of asymptomatic circulation of this virus in the bigger population. And that’s different from flu. In flu, you’ll find this virus right through the child population, right through blood samples of 20 to 40 percent of the population.
Julia Belluz
If you didn’t find the “iceberg” of mild cases in China, what does it say about how deadly the virus is — the case fatality rate?
Bruce Aylward
It says you’re probably not way off. The average case fatality rate is 3.8 percent in China, but a lot of that is driven by the early epidemic in Wuhan where numbers were higher. If you look outside of Hubei province [where Wuhan is], the case fatality rate is just under 1 percent now. I would not quote that as the number. That’s the mortality in China — and they find cases fast, get them isolated, in treatment, and supported early. Second thing they do is ventilate dozens in the average hospital; they use extracorporeal membrane oxygenation [removing blood from a person’s body and oxygenating their red blood cells] when ventilation doesn’t work. This is sophisticated health care. They have a survival rate for this disease I would not extrapolate to the rest of the world. What you’ve seen in Italy and Iran is that a lot of people are dying.
i don’t know if any country in the world has an accurate measure of their number of cases. I can only work with the data that’s available to the public. My guess is that South Korea has the most accurate figures because they’ve done far more tests than anyone else and will have picked up very mild cases. Similarly, USA numbers will be vastly underestimated because they’ve done very few tests.
The simple-minded death rate of 6% came from Worldometers and is defined to be the number of deaths divided by the number of recoveries+deaths thus far. It’s probably a significant overestimate of the true figure at this stage of the outbreak, although it’s heading upwards due to the (nominal?) high death rate in Italy.
Trump is out of his depth as usual.
Last edited by aqua; 13-Mar-20 at 21:35. Reason: Stupid mistake corrected
Thanks for posting the Bruce Aylward interview Neil. I didn’t do my homework on the level of testing in China, but I had picked up that the level of healthcare in China is very high. The death rate in Italy is very worrying because their healthcare system seems to have a good reputation. All data points towards the need for early diagnosis and rapid response, both in terms of isolation and medical intervention.
[QUOTE=aqua;1190900]i don’t know if any country in the world has an accurate measure of their number of cases. I can only work with the data that’s available to the public.
********My guess is that South Korea has the most accurate figures because they’ve done far more tests than anyone else and will have picked up very mild cases. Similarly, USA numbers will be vastly underestimated because they’ve done very few tests.
**********The simple-minded death rate of 6% came from Worldometers and is defined to be the number of deaths divided by the number of recoveries thus far. It’s probably a significant overestimate of the true figure at this stage of the outbreak, although it’s heading upwards due to the (nominal?) high death rate in Italy.
Trump is out of his depth as usual.[/QUOT
The highlighted areas are dangerous statements....Guess/Simple minded and your comment on Trump.
You have absolutely No Idea of what you speak....The prob is that some people mite believe u!
This is not personal....Just watch what U post.
Tomorrow folks, you will witness one of the biggest local acts of stupidity in this saga. According to Worldometers, Italy has the highest concentration, as a country, of cases, with 250 per million people. Shetland meanwhile has 6 cases out of 21000, beating Italy with 285 cases per million. Right about now, a cruise ship is docking in Shetland, having come from Iceland, where they have 117 cases out of 364,260 of a population. A concentration even higher than Shetland.
Tomorrow morning, that cruise ship docks in Orkney. Present count of cases here is zero. The ship will disgorge all its passengers to congregate (a lot more than 500) and pass on their lurgies.
Many folk have protested to the council through Radio Orkney, the Orcadian and social media, to no avail. Money for the harbours department is apparently more important than the health of elderly Orcadians.
Once it's here, it's just a short hop across 'e watter to you folks. So when you get it, you can blame Orkney Islands Council.
Disgorging hundreds of cruise ship passengers in a virus free area is surely insane.
Later today, Italy will overtake China to become the country with the highest number of recorded active cases. I expect a huge number of new UK cases be announced today. Meanwhile, Beijing sounds good:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla...-fife-51857424
To me, that seems a more accurate way that the governments favoured one, which is number of deaths / number of cases. That conveniently assumes that everyone who actively has it at the time of the calculation, will recover, and will not die. Which is a bit naive. Rather bluntly, it does seem that you are confirmed dead quicker than you are confirmed recovered. But as time progresses, then that will start to settle out.
and seems to have bottomed out at 6% (the orange line) and is starting a slight swing back up at 7% at the moment. That graph shows well the effect that time has in averaging out the values. The same calculation for Italy at the moment gives 45%. But that is relatively new data, and too will settle out as people are declared "recovered" and averaging takes effect.
Agreed on all counts. If the published data is accurate, I first thought that the two methods would put upper and lower limits on the mortality rate, but the upper limits will be unreliable if a significant fraction of the seriously ill eventually die after a long period of illness. I have no idea how (un)likely this is.
I’ve been looking at those plots too, and I’m sure you’re right about having to wait to get an accurate mortality rate. Look at the plot for Italy, it was all over the place for a while, whereas the rate is now smooth but rising!
Last edited by aqua; 13-Mar-20 at 15:58.
Seems that Orkney Islands Council are hell bent on bringing it to Orkney early.
https://www.orcadian.co.uk/cruise-sh...ublic-concern/
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