COVID the real numbers? Not all doom and gloom.

lucylocket61 said:

Are you sure of this date? Before the huge number of deaths and lockdown?

That shows how out of touch the government were. Perhaps not the point you intended to make.

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I give up!!!! This was quoted from a government website https://www.gov.uk/guidance/high-consequence-infectious-diseases-hcid#status-of-covid-19 and it has not been updated since. By this stage in March there was a lot of data from Italy and China but you are correct to state that we hadn't reached our peak death rate (April 8th) in the UK and we were terrified that our beloved NHS (now the National Covid Service) would collapse.
Clearly it is a disease of very high consequence if you died from it yet 99.9% of us didn't.
So as a type 1 diabetic I take the general population mortality of 0.1 and multiply by 2.86 and come out at 0.286% whereas my 80+ father in law (non obese but type 2 diabetic) comes out much higher at 9.6%.
I would take those odds and I'd suggest he continues to shield if he's happy to.

bulkbiker said:

Because if we have more and more "infected" and the "pandemic" is so dreadful we should be seeing more and more people being hospitalised and dying. It really is that simple.

Remember that all these positive test results are from people who have been out and about in their community before getting tested, allegedly spreading COVID like some latter day black death (or at least that is what some would have us believe).
That is not what is happening.

The accuracy of the test of course might be the other issue.

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Totally agree with you. In March/April/May we had a pandemic where thousands of people were dying. Over past 2 months or so testing has increased significantly and we no longer have large numbers of deaths.

In the past 2 months or so society in general has headed back to some sort of normality, pubs open, shops open, and there have been huge gatherings of people to protest, BLM. crowds gathering on beaches on sunny days. Did we see a huge spike in number of deaths NO.

Even in Glasgow where i live, there has been a huge spike in positive tests and as result, local restrictions are in place. Has there been a huge spike, 135 positive cases from a population of 800 000, so about 0.02% of population

What we now have is a "casedemic" as described well by this video.

bulkbiker said:

But if fewer people are being admitted to hospital then treatment and management protocols are irrelevant?

It's not that suddenly everyone is being given HCQ it's simply that drastically fewer people need it for the simple reason that they aren't ill..

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Of course fewer people are being admitted, there are fewer vulnerable people being infected, because they are being better protected from infection.

in addition, now those who test positive are are being told to seek medical advice promptly (if needed) -instead of the public message that was put out at the beginning, where ppl were being told to wait until they were emergencies (to avoid overburdening the NHS) - precisely in order to prevent their illness excalating to the point of needing admission.

Most of the new infections are from lower risk groups and lower risk age bands.

ed. For clarity.

Our friend Ivor Cummins (Fat Emperor ) just posted this useful summary of where we are. Includes a pdf summary if you prefer your analysis that way.
https://www.patreon.com/posts/vlog-...Q.UEhbrHNsKtARgQ2RO4zKPhwMOUtoocAvAyZi8E15dWY

Sorry. Since I posted this I've found its got a link that's only for his Patreon suporters...and the pdf is too large. However it s worth checking him out on Youtube as he's consistently researched the issue and stuck his nose out to challenge the lockdown policy.

I have a personal story of how the test could be unreliable. My grandson, aged 25, lives in a large house shared with 7 others, all about the same age. They were all healthy and well with no symptoms. One of the housemates went to work and had his temperature taken as a matter of routine. It was found to be "slightly raised". He was sent home immediately and told to take a test. His test turned out to be positive so the whole household was told to quarantine for 2 weeks. They did this, and all of them remained well and healthy, if a bit frustrated. They all then went for a test and each of them was found to be clear, including the one who had been positive 2 weeks earlier. These housemates share the house, bathrooms, kitchen, communal areas and are in close contact with each other. One would think that everyone of them would have caught the virus from the one that was positive. None of them did.

It is possible that one of the other housemates had the virus earlier, without symptoms and they all caught it but only one showed symptoms (the one with the raised temp who tested positive) and that by the end of the 2 week quarantine they had all recovered, However, it is also possible that none of them had it, and the original positive test was a false positive. Unless they all take an antibody test, they will never know.

bulkbiker said:

Not sure it shows up unless you are a patreon of Ivor..
Doesn't work for me anyway.

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Whoops. Yes I am a patreon supporter of his and now I can't load the pdf since its too large. Anyway it is just a useful summary of what he's already said over several YouTubes.

Bluetit1802 said:

I have a personal story of how the test could be unreliable. My grandson, aged 25, lives in a large house shared with 7 others, all about the same age. They were all healthy and well with no symptoms. One of the housemates went to work and had his temperature taken as a matter of routine. It was found to be "slightly raised". He was sent home immediately and told to take a test. His test turned out to be positive so the whole household was told to quarantine for 2 weeks. They did this, and all of them remained well and healthy, if a bit frustrated. They all then went for a test and each of them was found to be clear, including the one who had been positive 2 weeks earlier. These housemates share the house, bathrooms, kitchen, communal areas and are in close contact with each other. One would think that everyone of them would have caught the virus from the one that was positive. None of them did.

It is possible that one of the other housemates had the virus earlier, without symptoms and they all caught it but only one showed symptoms (the one with the raised temp who tested positive) and that by the end of the 2 week quarantine they had all recovered, However, it is also possible that none of them had it, and the original positive test was a false positive. Unless they all take an antibody test, they will never know.

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Its possible that the majority had some prior immunity to a corona type virus. Good example of how mass testing will doubtless cause a lot of confusion and missed working or school days. Dreading kids pretend coughing to get a couple of weeks off!
At my workplace everyone gets a temp check but our threshold temp is 37.5 degrees and to my knowledge nobody has got near this so I wonder if the housemate's work temp level was too low given that with a proper fever you generally know it!
I'd suggest we put the testing effort into hospitals and care homes or any other places where older people tend to congregate!

JoKalsbeek said:

Am I reading it right? They're putting the percentage of deaths against the population. Not against infected population. Quite a few people didn't "survive" corona in that equation, they never had it to begin with. So isn't that a bit skewed then? (Though I am horrible with numbers and get kind of lost in articles like this... Do correct me if I'm wrong!).

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The estimates of how many people have been infected vary between 6% and 27% of England's population depending on where one takes the information from ( https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...-population-may-have-had-covid-study-suggests ) so claiming that 99.9% percent of the population has somehow 'survived' Covid-19 is a case of deliberate mis-direction that seems to be typical of the right wing press at the moment.

Of course balancing the argument, The Guardian is left wing but they are at least quoting the ONS whereas I cannot see any evidence of where the Daily Mail guy gets his data from. Note that Tim Harford describes himself as an economist so why he thinks he's better qualified than you or I to write articles about infectious disease is a mystery to me.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love it to be true but all I see in the figures is confirmation that social distancing, face masks and improved hygiene are working to reduce transmission both in terms of the frequency and the viral load. The latter now seems to be gaining importance as a factor in the severity of any subsequent illness.

bulkbiker said:

@lucylocket61
You might find this useful and informative. Re viral damage to the heart.. and no it's not only COVID.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1301207386515025921.html

from this twitter thread.

https://twitter.com/NakedCapsid/status/1301207386515025921

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Exactly my point. The virus - in this case covid-19, just like many other viruses, caused the fatal or long term heart condition. If they hadn't caught a virus, in this case covid-19, they would have been ok.

Catching the virus did the damage. Therefore they died or were harmed by covid-19.

Just as my mother died from heart failure caused by the late effects of polio. The late effects of polio was put as cause of death, not heart failure.

Bluetit1802 said:

I have a personal story of how the test could be unreliable. My grandson, aged 25, lives in a large house shared with 7 others, all about the same age. They were all healthy and well with no symptoms. One of the housemates went to work and had his temperature taken as a matter of routine. It was found to be "slightly raised". He was sent home immediately and told to take a test. His test turned out to be positive so the whole household was told to quarantine for 2 weeks. They did this, and all of them remained well and healthy, if a bit frustrated. They all then went for a test and each of them was found to be clear, including the one who had been positive 2 weeks earlier. These housemates share the house, bathrooms, kitchen, communal areas and are in close contact with each other. One would think that everyone of them would have caught the virus from the one that was positive. None of them did.

It is possible that one of the other housemates had the virus earlier, without symptoms and they all caught it but only one showed symptoms (the one with the raised temp who tested positive) and that by the end of the 2 week quarantine they had all recovered, However, it is also possible that none of them had it, and the original positive test was a false positive. Unless they all take an antibody test, they will never know.

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when I went for covid testing the info was very clear that unless you are tested within the first 3-5 days of onset of symptoms (if there are any symptoms), then the test is unreliable. That info should have been on the test documentation provided at the time. It is one of the reasons people are asked to go to testing centres rather than waiting for days for test kits to arrive through the post.

So your grandson’s housemate being re-tested after 2 weeks was a complete waste of time. Far better to wait a few more weeks and then get tested for antibodies - although, of course, young, fit, healthy people are very likely to fight off the disease with T cells rather than antibodies, so an antibody test could come back negative too, even though the person has had covid, fought it off, and now has an immune system with T cells giving a level of immunity.

bulkbiker said:

Not quite sure that introducing politics into the discussion is particularly helpful and the guy who wrote the article works for the BBC so who knows if left or right..

His point however is that the vast majority of the population have not died, which is where his 99.9% figure comes from, and is a perfectly accurate representation of reality.

If you look at various polls etc then people seem to think that the population has been decimated by COVID which is obviously not the case.

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To say that 99.9% of the population "have not died" may be accurate but to make the claim that "99.9 per cent of us have so far survived the virus." is a gross misrepresenation of the facts. How can you by definition, 'survive' something that you have not yet been exposed to? This is like claiming that you survived a plane crash when you were not on the flight.

Tim Harford is a freelancer and yes he works for the BBC sometimes, he also works for the Economist, The Financial Times and the International Finance Corporation. He's an economist first and foremost and is writing from that perspective.

From my perspective (and you don't have to agree), politics plays a very obvious part in the reporting of this issue. The right wing (capitalist) factions seem to want to get the economy moving again (at almost any cost). The left wing are being more cautious and urging restraint. This seems to be true from an international perspective also. (In the USA for example the Republicans generally want the economy opened up whereas the Democrats want more restrictions and are blaming Trump for not doing enough.)

I am not advocating any political view in preference to another, I am simply making an observation of editorial content and policy in several publications that I read.

I am not sure what polls you are referring to as I have not seen anything which portends to be a barometer of public opinion on Covid-19 death rates.

.....and those countries who put lives above economics in their priorities now find their economies haven't suffered as much as those who put money first.