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COVID-19

Discussion in 'Norwich City' started by Walsh.i.am, Mar 14, 2020.

  1. ncgandy

    ncgandy Well-Known Member

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    He should plead the second and stick a gun up his arse. That'll do it. If I take advice from anyone, it won't be either of the two worst possible leaders at the worst possible time. Just my opinion.
     
    #141
  2. DHCanary

    DHCanary Very Well-Known Member
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    The mortality rate from properly treated Coronavirus looks like being 1-2%, when treatment is not available, that figure becomes 5-10%. In Italy where the lockdown came too late, their health service was overwhelmed and the mortality rate spiked. For the UK, we'd be looking at several hundred thousand deaths had lockdown measures not been imposed. Office for National Statistics figures currently puts us at nearer 50k deaths so far. A paper published in Nature last week suggests 470,000 deaths in the UK from Coronavirus have been avoided thanks to the lockdown.

    So keeping the number of Coronavirus cases below the NHS capacity is essential to keeping mortality down. Even if the country has the same number of Coronavirus cases, spreading them out means fewer deaths.

    And that's assuming the standard of care remains the same. Lockdown is not the cure, flattening the curve also buys time to develop one. The Coronavirus is very new, and initially how to treat patients was essentially being worked out on the fly. We're beginning to know what works, and this is augmented by the progress made in drug trials. Hydroxychloroquine has very little going for it, but Remdesivir is looking promising. Vaccine research is ongoing. All of this means that we can reduce the number of people going into hospital, and decrease mortality rates.

    To return to the idea I've highlighted in bold, as yet I'm not sure that's supported by data. The Financial Times have done excellent work tracking "excess deaths" for all causes, compared to previous years. Since February, 63,700 excess deaths have been recorded, with about 50k stating Coronavirus on the death certificate according to the ONS. So about 13,000 people so far have been "killed by lockdown", Vs those extra 470,000 who would have been killed by Coronavirus without lockdown.

    If you look at data from April, Coronavirus killed more people than Dementia, Alzheimer's, Heart disease, lung disease, 8 forms of cancer, and flu, combined. Only Dementia deaths were up compared to the 5 year average for April.

    The longer term effects are hard to quantify, and the effects of people not having illnesses detected as quickly will take longer to play out. The effect of an economic slump is also harder to predict. But for the number to be so significant as to overcome that 470,000 lives saved so far by lockdown seems unlikely. That's more deaths than the combined military and civilian casualties the UK suffered in WW2.

    If anything, the deaths in the UK caused by lockdown look likely to be far higher than most countries because at no point has our lockdown been strict enough. A harder, longer initial lockdown would have helped bring numbers down faster, and meant we could reopen safely faster. This would have aided the economic recovery too. The half-hearted lockdown we've experienced/experiencing has kept the number of cases higher than they could have been, whilst increasing the economic damage.
     
    #142
    Walsh.i.am likes this.
  3. goldeneadie

    goldeneadie Well-Known Member

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    Here in the Philippines the lockdown came into effect on 15th March and was total. Masks must be worn, no public transport at all, all shops, except for essentials, hotels, resorts, bars et c closed. Under 21's and over 59's confined to their residence, passes required for inter region travel etc, etc. So far in our region, population 800,000, there have been just 4 deaths. Some of the measures are still in force, though there has been some easing. Inter regional travel still restricted so no infection being brought across the borders.
     
    #143
  4. chinacanary

    chinacanary Well-Known Member

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    Doesn't look to be Krul upload_2020-6-15_12-22-4.png
     
    #144
  5. carrowcanario

    carrowcanario Well-Known Member

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    What's Left To Play For In The Premier League?



    In summary everything
     
    #145
  6. Bure budgie

    Bure budgie Well-Known Member

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    That's good news.
    Hope it's not Pukki either
     
    #146
  7. robbieBB

    robbieBB Well-Known Member

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    @DHCanary
    Your reply much appreciated, as always. A few observations:

    Nobody knows the true case mortality rate because nobody knows how many people have been infected. In the few examples where the number of infected people in a population is known (e.g. the Diamond Princess, Iceland, Vo, Italy), the case mortality rate is below 1%. We are now starting to get results from surveys in several countries, all of which indicate a mortality rate between 0.1 and 0.6 (rates at the higher end of that range are from specific cities, not countries, in particular New York and London).

    The ludicrousness of the figures we keep being bombarded with is illustrated by the fact that the UK mortality rate among "confirmed cases" is about 14% (today's figures). If the current number of deaths (41,698) were to represent just 0.6% of cases, it would mean that the number of people infected is actually near 7 million, which is entirely plausible. At that mortality rate, to reach 520,000 deaths (50,000 + 470,000), the number of infected people would have to exceed the current population of the country by some 18 million!

    The truth is that figure of 470,000 deaths "prevented" is simply speculation, based on an exercise in mathematical modelling which has been subject to widespread criticism.

    13,000 people (so far) "killed by lockdown" is a pretty terrible inditement of lockdown IMO.

    It's not true that "the Italian health service was overwhelmed"; a minority of Italian hospitals in the worst affected areas were overwhelmed.

    Without exception, the trials involving hydroxychloroquine have focussed on its use in treating severely ill patients. Its proponents on the other hand are talking about its use in early intervention with the object of preventing those contracting the disease progressing to a severe stage. That's the background to Trump announcing that he is taking it. The persistent misrepresentation of the case for hydroxychloroquine is indicative of the way in which all rational thought apparently ceases at the mere mention of Donald Trump.

    The focus on lockdown has meant that genuine alternatives have been ignored. One such would have been to focus on protecting the most vulnerable while letting the majority of people get on with their lives. A big proportion of Covid-19 deaths have been among residents of care homes. They could and should have been ring-fenced from the start. People vulnerable because of pre-existing diseases could have been safe-guarding, just as they are now, without shutting down the country's economy. I actually think this was the kind of strategy our government intended to implement until they lost their nerve faced by scare-mongering mathematical modellers and the stampede into lockdown in other countries.
     
    #147
  8. DHCanary

    DHCanary Very Well-Known Member
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    To deal with the bold first, I completely agree that estimating mortality is tricky, quite literally a science of its own, and asymptomatic cases greatly complicate it. That said, to take that 0.6% mortality and extrapolate to huge case loads doesn't work, because of the demands on healthcare. As you say, the entire of Italy's healthcare system wasn't overwhelmed, but certain areas were, and that's where the mortality spiked, If the Coronavirus spreads unchecked, then we get into the territory of a completely overwhelmed NHS, and huge increases in mortality. And it's in that context that the figure of 470,000 saved by lockdown is believable.

    On hydroxychloroquine, it has been studied as a preventative measure, for example this well-designed study in the New England journal of medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2016638

    Alternatively, I'd point you to the excellent commentary by Derek Lowe on the subject: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/04/hydroxychloroquine-for-avoiding-infection

    Essentially, there was no evidence that hydroxychloroquine helped prevent infection, all it achieved was an increase in side effects. It's pretty much been studied for all kinds of role in Coronavirus prevention/treatment now, and it's remarkable how many of the "positive" studies have been criticised for flawed study design or data analysis, or have been fully retracted when even greater flaws were found. There's little, if any, high quality scientific work showing benefits from hydroxychloroquine.
     
    #148
  9. robbieBB

    robbieBB Well-Known Member

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    The question is though, whether in order to avoid having hospitals overwhelmed, it is necessary to lock down to the extent that we have. Hospitalisation rates increase dramatically with age. A US study by the CDC, for example, showed that the rate of hospitalisation for people age 65 and over with Covid-19 averages around 15 per 100,000, compared to an average of 2.5 per 100,000 for those below age 65. Yet, despite age being universally acknowledged to be the main predictor for hospitalisation, lockdown has been applied indiscriminately across all age groups. Why, when the group most at risk are pensioners, have the great majority of the working population of the country bar those providing "essential" services been prevented from earning a living, at huge current and future cost to themselves and the rest of us?

    Re. HCQ, that NEJM study is also flawed, as the authors themselves acknowledge. As Derek Lowe points out in his nicely balanced review, its reliance on self-diagnosis using the US equivalent of our official list of symptoms of infection rather than on actual tests, means, among other things, that asymptomatic cases of infection would have been missed. Also, the question of the utility of HCQ as a prophylactic targeting transmission is quite different from the question of its utility in treating those already infected, with the aim of reducing the likelihood of severe disease.
     
    #149
  10. ncgandy

    ncgandy Well-Known Member

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    I loved this forum when it was about football.
     
    #150

  11. canary-dave

    canary-dave Well-Known Member

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    <laugh>
     
    #151
  12. robbieBB

    robbieBB Well-Known Member

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    Just pretend that Covid-19 is a Bundesliga team like BVB 09 or Schalke 04 <cheers>
     
    #152
  13. ncgandy

    ncgandy Well-Known Member

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    I'll believe that when Trump tells me it's so. <ok>
     
    #153
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  14. robbieBB

    robbieBB Well-Known Member

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    I can personally assure you Gandy, that there is absolutely no truth in the rumour going around this morning that Trump is a Villa supporter. Twitter have denied that the Trump tweet they deleted just before the controversial non-goal at Villa Park last night read "Up the Villa!", while adding that they would indeed have deleted any such post on grounds of offensive language. Meanwhile a White House spokesperson has refuted the allegation rumoured to appear in John Bolton's controversial new book, that the President sports a claret and blue golf bag and can regularly be seen wearing a claret and blue scarf on Saturdays during the English football season, despite temperatures at his weekend retreat in Florida being over 100 Farhenheit. This was in response to a series of frantic enquiries from the BBC who claim that a US investment company in which Trump holds shares are part-owners of the company which invented the Hawk-Eye technology. Most decisive of all though is that, when asked point blank whether he supported Aston Villa, the President replied "Lovely cars but I buy American".
     
    #154
    Last edited: Jun 18, 2020
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  15. Farked19

    Farked19 Well-Known Member

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    I think that post for me sums up the failings of the government. I distinctly recall my mate phoning me and asking whether I thought it a good idea to go to the pub to watch the Liverpool v Madrid game. I told him that I wasn't comfortable with it and had been on the verge of calling him to ask the same question. So the two of us came to exactly the same conclusion not to risk it at the same time as they were allowing both Cheltenham and the travel of 4000 Spanish supporters ( who were banned from matches in their own country) to freely travel to the UK and, presumably, to use public transport. A massive failing that has undoubtedly cost many, many lives.
     
    #155
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  16. robbieBB

    robbieBB Well-Known Member

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    A recent study into how the infection arrived and spread in the UK concluded that the Liverpool v Madrid game had a negligible effect (you can read the BBC's summary here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-52993734):

    "The study also says the controversial football match between Liverpool and Atletico Madrid, on 11 March, probably had very little impact on bringing the virus into the country.

    An estimated 3,000 fans flew in from Spain to watch the game, but there were 20,000 people flying in from Spain every single day in mid-March.

    "[It] shows that individual events such as football matches likely made a negligible contribution to the number of imports at that time," the study says."
     
    #156
  17. Walsh.i.am

    Walsh.i.am Well-Known Member
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    #157
  18. zogean_king

    zogean_king Well-Known Member

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    #158
  19. Bure budgie

    Bure budgie Well-Known Member

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    Recieved an e-mail yesterday from TUI cancelling our holiday to Menorca.
    Just had a phone call confirming this and offered a full refund,no iou's or vouchers,just money in the bank.No hassle.Thanks TUI
     
    #159
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  20. DHCanary

    DHCanary Very Well-Known Member
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