Coronavirus

[Numero Veinticinco]

1 minute ago, Mudface said:

They'll also bring back IE 6 and make it mandatory.

I said... 

[Mudface]

1 minute ago, Numero said:

I said... 

[Numero Veinticinco]

2 minutes ago, Mudface said:

I can still feel the tickle in my throat from shouting for that thing to just fuck off. ‘It looks like you’re writing a letter’, yes you utter bastard, leave me alone to write it. 

[Anubis]

1 hour ago, Numero said:

It would take serious coordination to pull off such a thing on a global scale. You’d also have to ask the question ‘why’. There’s being sceptical then there’s being highly illogical, Jim. 

[Mudface]

 

[Josef Svejk]

13 hours ago, BeefStroganoff said:

Something is going on and I guess we will see in a few years time. They are already working on digital health I.Ds that could in effect, stop freedom of movement. But we will see.

Brexit stopped freedom of movement.

 

Or is only Anglo-Saxon freedom of movement that concerns you?

[Strontium]

Deaths below average for the fourth consecutive week. 

 

The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 10 July 2020 (Week 28) was 8,690.

 

- This was 450 lower than week 27

- 560 fewer than the five-year average for Week 28

[Bjornebye]

6 minutes ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

Deaths below average for the fourth consecutive week. 

 

The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 10 July 2020 (Week 28) was 8,690.

 

- This was 450 lower than week 27

- 560 fewer than the five-year average for Week 28

Source? 

[Strontium]

29 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Source? 

 

Same source as every Tuesday - the ONS.

[Mudface]

28 minutes ago, Bjornebye said:

Source? 

It's the ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending10july2020

 

Sounds great, until you see the full year graph-

 

 

Maybe though we could kill off tens of thousands of people with something nasty every year, isolate hundreds of thousands of people so that they don't catch anything and lock people down so they don't travel and contribute to those pesky road deaths. It'd be worth it to get a little reduction later on the year.

[Strontium]

5 minutes ago, Mudface said:

Sounds great, until you see the full year graph

 

Pretty sure there's no full year graph in July. You'll have to wait until next January for that.

[Mudface]

1 minute ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

 

Pretty sure there's no full year graph in July. You'll have to wait until next January for that.

OK, year to date, Mr Pedant.

 

 

[Mudface]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jul/21/analysis-why-englands-covid-19-death-toll-is-wrong-but-not-by-much

 

Still, it managed to sow the seed in people's minds that the figures are overblown-

 

Analysis: why England's Covid-19 death toll is wrong, but not by much
PHE’s figures include the death of anyone who has ever tested positive, even if it was months ago1
Matt Hancock during a Downing Street coronavirus briefing last month. On Friday, the health secretary announced a review into how Public Health England draws up its death tolls.

Matt Hancock has announced an urgent review into how Public Health England (PHE) counts Covid-19 deaths after discovering what appeared to be a serious issue in how rates are calculated.

Following the health secretary’s move on Friday, Yoon K Loke and Carl Heneghan, of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, wrote in a blogpost: “It seems that PHE regularly looks for people on the NHS database who have ever tested positive, and simply checks to see if they are still alive or not. PHE does not appear to consider how long ago the Covid test result was, nor whether the person has been successfully treated in hospital and discharged to the community.”

A Department of Health and Social Care source summed this up as: “You could have been tested positive in February, have no symptoms, then be hit by a bus in July and you’d be recorded as a Covid death.”


When the Guardian put this to a source at PHE, they said that such a scenario would “technically” be counted as a coronavirus death, “though the numbers where that situation would apply are likely to be very small”. PHE says it calculates deaths in this way because, in most circumstances, it cannot dismiss the possibility that Covid-19 could have played a role in the death.

But does this mean PHE’s figures are much higher than the actual virus death rate? Not quite.

The controversy is confined to England (devolution means deaths are counted differently around the UK) and is best demonstrated by the different ways in which PHE and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) count Covid-19 deaths. The former reports deaths as they are reported to it; the the latter’s count takes longer but is more comprehensive.

At the beginning of the pandemic, the PHE figures only included deaths that occurred in hospitals, later expanding its count to include deaths in care settings. Critically, however, its figures only include deaths where the patient has first tested positive for coronavirus and early in the pandemic there was a lack of testing.

The ONS, by contrast, includes all deaths where Covid-19 appears on the death certificate.

Up to the end of June, the ONS figures were consistently higher than those released by PHE. That trend has reversed in recent weeks where the PHE figures have been higher than the ONS count except at the weekends, where reporting of deaths is lower but people are still just as likely to actually die on a Saturday or Sunday.

As things stand, the official PHE figures are still a significant undercount of the true death toll, which is more accurately reflected in the ONS data.

Figures published on 3 July – the last date on which the ONS registrations were published – show that 48,154 Covid-19 deaths had occurred in England, a figure which will increase as more deaths are registered.

The total announced by the government to the same date stood at 39,626.

However there appears to be a general agreement that, as time goes on, the PHE approach could become problematic. Indeed Dr Susan Hopkins, PHE’s incident director, was quoted in a tweet on Friday saying, “now is the right time to review how deaths are calculated”.

“There would not have been a big impact until recently, when there has been time for people who have tested positive to recover and then die of something unrelated,” said Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge.

Speaking at a meeting of the Independent Sage committee, Prof Christina Pagel, professor of operational research at UCL, said: “If someone [got Covid-19] in mid-March, recovered early April, the chances of them then dying from something completely different in the last couple of months is quite low. So I don’t think it has caused a massive distortion.”

Oxford’s Loke said that, at present, the overall death toll is unlikely to be affected since early in the outbreak the PHE approach underestimated deaths from Covid-19 due to a lack of testing. “The true Covid death toll probably is close to what PHE and ONS are reporting, but the time pattern with PHE is wrong,” he said.

[Anubis]

4 hours ago, Mudface said:

 

Really wish I’d seen the phrase ‘muzzle wearing lemmings’ before TK left.

[Rick Sanchez C-137]

5 hours ago, Mudface said:

 

 

wAKe uP SHEEPLE!

[Moctezuma]

I've got to say I feel pretty tired/worried about what this government would do in the event of a second spike*, I get the district impression that there will be no attempt at a nation wide/ even regional level lock down that would appropriately control the virus.

 

Instead the confused messaging will continue, which at this juncture is pretty obviously aimed to ensure that normal activity continues while providing sufficient legal and political cover for the government to blame the public/wriggle out of any future inquiry. We've already seen from the Italian example that local lock-downs just result in more people travelling out of area spreading the virus further. It's interesting how the virus is making mockery of the primacy of the individual, it doesn't care about your individual rights the key to overcoming as a society lies within the collective, but this is something that our managed democracy helmed as it is by kleptocrats raised on diet of; Friedman, Hayek, Rand, other simpletons are unable to channel effectively**. 

 

If the twerps would learn the lessons of the first wave it is that you have to act decisively and with the health consideration to the fore front as this reduces the economic impact over the longer term, but I note that the scientific advice is slowly being pushed even further to one side or made a opaque as possible.

 

The tube has been interesting, the Hammersmith and City line has been fairly quite in the mornings once they worked out they need to run more than one train every 20 minutes (though I know tfl struggled with staff at one point) and face coverings have been worn fairly extensively. On the Central line however hardly anyone seems to wear a mask or have it slung under their chin or nose like a fucking moron, smearing any viral particles they are coming into contact with all other their face. I've posited this difference down to the fact that the H&C line has more hospitals along its course which means their are more health care professionals using the service who know how to wear their masks effectively, which then creates a social precedent for others to attain.

 

While the virus has produced an extraordinary camaraderie and collaborative effort from the staff at work, it has also created some of the worst days of my working life. I'm just glad that so far my family has not been effected. I'm going to try get-up to see my parents for the first time since Christmas soon, the logistics involved in trying to make sure they are safe feels substantial and it's a calculated risk, but it will just be great to see them, to hug my Dad and celebrate Liverpool winning the league.

 

* to be fair to NHSE they have been pushing Nov 2020, June 2021 for a long time to us

**this will of course is inevitably mirrored in their response to the current and projected effects of climate change. I note in this crisis that the chancellor has reached for a simulacra disaster keynesian lever, but this is of course a product of necessity to save their precious rentier parasitic streams of cash and most importantly those of their backers as well.

[TheHowieLama]

10 minutes ago, Moctezuma said:

 

Instead the confused messaging will continue

The message is clearer now than it has ever been - it is here, deal with it.

[Moctezuma]

7 minutes ago, TheHowieLama said:

The message is clearer now than it has ever been - it is here, deal with it.

'As an individual, don't expect any help long term from us, oh and if your boss asks you to come into a dangerous work place then you better head in and make sure you wear a mask, but not always, but do wear one, also socially distance, but also get close together to get the economy moving make up your own mind about the distance, meet up with people indoors but also don't as it might increase the risk of infection but get down the pub but just don't speak to someone on another table'

 

Look you can see the benthic floor...

[Spy Bee]

3 hours ago, Strontium Dog™ said:

Deaths below average for the fourth consecutive week. 

 

The provisional number of deaths registered in England and Wales in the week ending 10 July 2020 (Week 28) was 8,690.

 

- This was 450 lower than week 27

- 560 fewer than the five-year average for Week 28

Expect this to continue for the rest of the year due to the "early harvest" feature.

[Mudface]

If Trump's recommending wearing a mask, I'm not going to.

[Numero Veinticinco]

Only reason Trump would recommend masks is if he’d just purchased shares in a mask manufacturing company. 

[Bruce Spanner]

40 minutes ago, Numero said:

Only reason Trump would recommend masks is if he’d just purchased shares in a mask manufacturing company. 

 

 

As always, he's ahead of the curve...

[Curly]

On 20/07/2020 at 17:06, TheHowieLama said:

England’s chief nurse has confirmed she was dropped from a daily Downing Street coronavirus briefing after refusing to back Dominic Cummings.

 

 

 

What’s the source for that mate? Pretty damning, but don’t want to be quoting a Facebook status

 

Edit - ignore me. Should have read on a bit

[lifetime fan]

1 minute ago, belarus said:

What’s the source for that mate? Pretty damning, but don’t want to be quoting a Facebook status

She admitted when being questioned by the select committee. 

[Curly]

13 minutes ago, lifetime fan said:

She admitted when being questioned by the select committee. 

Yeah, sorry mate. I replied before reading on like a silly cunt