Coronavirus

[Strontium]

It stands to reason flu deaths will be lower than average for the foreseeable, because covid has killed loads who would have died from flu.

[TheHowieLama]

And, they would have died anyway. So another win-win.

[Bjornebye]

"Yeah he died from Covid but he always wanted to go to Florida so an alligator would have chewed him to death eventually anyway" 

 

"Yeah Stig died from Covid but Bolo Yeung just moved in next door to him and he fucking hates Oasis" 

[Rico1304]

Are we in Logan’s Run? 

[Mudface]

30 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

It stands to reason flu deaths will be lower than average for the foreseeable, because covid has killed loads who would have died from flu.

They're on about cases, not just deaths. Besides which, there's this from New Zealand and Australia, both countries which have had remarkably few deaths from Covid.

 

Many countries in the southern half of the globe have instead experienced either record low levels of flu or none at all, public health specialists in Australia, New Zealand and South America have said, sparing potentially tens of thousands of lives and offering a glimmer of hope as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere.

General practitioners in New Zealand have not detected a single influenza case since they started screening patients in June, health data shows; last year about 57% of the samples they collected were positive.
The last flu cases detected by major hospitals in Auckland, the country’s largest city, were in April. “It’s amazing. There’s just nothing there at all. No influenza,” said Michael Baker, professor of public health at the University of Otago in Wellington.

New Zealand’s Covid-19 rates are among the lowest in the world, but even notwithstanding the pandemic, people in the country have experienced their healthiest cold months on record. “Our excess winter mortality peak has largely disappeared,” Baker said.

A tracking system that monitors a cohort of at least 30,000 people for influenza-like symptoms shows as few as 0.3% of New Zealanders reported coughs or fevers some weeks during their winter, a tenfold decrease on some previous years.

The trend holds true across the Tasman Sea in Australia, where Covid-19 restrictions have also deeply dented rates of flu and other respiratory illnesses. The country recorded more than 131,000 influenza cases in the peak months of July and August last year, according to government data. Over the same period this year, there were 315.

“Cases have fallen off a cliff since March,” said Prof Ian Barr, deputy director of the World Health Organization’s collaborating centre for reference and research on influenza, in Melbourne.

Fewer than 40 Australians have died from influenza this year, compared to more than 950 last year, “and there haven’t been any deaths for the past three to four months”, Barr added.

Even across South America and in South Africa, where lockdowns have been patchy or harder to enforce, and Covid-19 has spread widely and killed tens of thousands of people, flu rates have been well below historical rates or nonexistent – despite increased testing for it in the Americas, according to the Pan American Health Organisation.

This apparent contradiction – Sars-CoV-2 growing exponentially while influenza virtually disappears – illustrates a key difference between the two viruses. The seasonal flu is not just less deadly, but significantly less virulent, Baker said.

[Strontium]

39 minutes ago, Rico1304 said:

Are we in Logan’s Run? 

 

If only.

 

Were you offering your services?

[Rico1304]

19 minutes ago, Stront19m Dog™ said:

 

If only.

 

Were you offering your services?

Group discounts are an option. 

[Section_31]

I think Flu is far less contagious than Covid isn't it? Sure I read each person with flu usually passes it to one other person, but with Covid it's three. Existing social distancing measures should therefore have a sizable impact on the spread of flu you'd assume.

[Mudface]

26 minutes ago, Section_31 said:

I think Flu is far less contagious than Covid isn't it? Sure I read each person with flu usually passes it to one other person, but with Covid it's three. Existing social distancing measures should therefore have a sizable impact on the spread of flu you'd assume.

Yep, from the article- 

 

The seasonal flu is not just less deadly, but significantly less virulent, Baker said.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Bjornebye said:

"may" "think" 

 

Solid. 

[Spy Bee]

1 hour ago, Section_31 said:

I think Flu is far less contagious than Covid isn't it? Sure I read each person with flu usually passes it to one other person, but with Covid it's three. Existing social distancing measures should therefore have a sizable impact on the spread of flu you'd assume.

But more people are dying with flu than with Covid-19?

 

I know someone posted an article debunking that flu was killing ten times more people than Covid, but wasn't one of the facts that more people were dying while infected with flu?

 

 

[Spy Bee]

[Bjornebye]

 

 

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, Bjornebye said:

 

 

Fucking hell, I'm no longer allowed to ask a civilised question on here now?

[Sugar Ape]

22 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

But more people are dying with flu than with Covid-19?

 

I know someone posted an article debunking that flu was killing ten times more people than Covid, but wasn't one of the facts that more people were dying while infected with flu?

 

 

Most people who die with flu don’t have it as the underlying cause of death. Most people who die with Covid do have it as the underlying cause of death.
 

Looks to me like it’s only more when you include pneumonia. When you strip that out not a lot of people die of flu alone. 
 

The ‘and pneumonia’ bit makes any comparison pointless to be honest. 

 

https://fullfact.org/health/flu-covid-deaths/
 

Several newspapers, magazines and broadcasters—including the Sun, the Mirror, the Mail, the Week, the Spectator, the Times and talkRADIO—as well assome social media accounts, have claimed that influenza (flu), or “influenza and pneumonia” is now causing more deaths than Covid-19 in the UK.

This is a misunderstanding of figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which counts deaths in England and Wales. 
 

These figures show the number of deaths where influenza, pneumonia or Covid-19 are mentioned on the death certificate, not those where they were listed as the underlying cause of death. This makes it misleading to say that these are cases where people necessarily died “of” the disease, or were  “killed by” it, because in many cases influenza and pneumonia are only mentioned as factors in a death where the underlying cause was something else.

 

We don’t know exactly how many people are dying of flu at the moment—meaning that “flu” is the underlying cause—but it is almost certainly far fewer than these reports suggest.

 

With pneumonia included, the total number of people dying of pneumonia or flu is probably higher than the number dying of Covid-19 at the moment, but not by the margin that these headlines suggest.  

How deaths are categorised

Death certificates give doctors space to record several different diseases or conditions that contributed to someone’s death, but only one can be recorded as the underlying cause.  The underlying cause in this context means “the disease or injury which initiated the train of morbid events leading directly to death”. 

 

For example, someone might develop cancer, which leads to other conditions, from which they ultimately die. All of these conditions might be mentioned by a doctor on the person’s death certificate, but the cancer would be listed as the single underlying cause. It would be right to say that this person “died of” or “died from” cancer, and it would be misleading to say that they died of or from something else.

 

In its bulletin on the number of deathsbeing registered in England and Wales each week, the ONS reports the number of “deaths involving COVID-19”, which means the number of death certificates that mention Covid-19 somewhere, whether or not it was the underlying cause.

 

The ONS also reports in the bulletin the number of “deaths in England and Wales [that] mentioned ‘Influenza and Pneumonia’”. Again, they didn’t have to be the underlying cause of death. 

 

This matters, because when Covid-19 is mentioned on a death certificate, it is much more likely to be the underlying cause of someone’s death than when pneumonia or influenza is. 

 

Up to the end of June 2020 in England and Wales, Covid-19 was the underlying cause of death on about 93% of the death certificates that mentioned it. In 2015, 2016 and 2017, however, influenza or pneumonia were listed as the underlying cause of death on just 28% of the death certificates in England that mentioned either of them.

“Or”, or “and”, or “and/or”?

Another problem is that the reporting often summarised these deaths involving “influenza and pneumonia” as being deaths from “flu”, which is incorrect.  

 

The phrase “influenza and pneumonia” used by the ONS may have caused confusion here, because it sounds like it refers to death certificates that mention both, and so could be simplified to just “flu”. In fact, it refers to any mention that belongs in the “influenza and pneumonia” category.

 

This means that a death counted in the “Influenza and pneumonia” category could be someone who died after having pneumonia, or after having flu, or after having both.

 

Pneumonia is usually caused by a bacterial infection, but it can also be caused by a virus such as flu or the one that causes Covid-19. It’s worth noting that many people who die with Covid-19 have pneumonia as well, so the ONS explains that “deaths where both were mentioned have been counted only in the COVID-19 category”.

What does this mean for flu?

As we have seen, most of the people with influenza or pneumonia mentioned somewhere on their death certificate probably did not die with either as the underlying cause. And among those who did, the underlying cause was especially unlikely to be flu.

 

Flu is an important factor in many deaths. Estimates from the FluMOMO model suggest that there have been between 4,000 and 22,000 deaths associated with flu in England in each of the past winter flu seasons.

 

However, it is not often considered to be the underlying cause of death by doctors. 

If we look at the underlying cause of death data for 2019, we can see that 1,213 people died specifically from flu, which is just 4.6% of the 26,342 who died from either influenza or pneumonia.

 

In other words, on average, about 23 people died each week last year and had flu identified as the underlying cause of death (although this is likely an undercount and the disease may have been an important factor in many other deaths). 

Flu levels are unusually low right now, even for the summer. And the number of death certificates mentioning influenza or pneumonia is currently below the five-year average, as the ONS graph reveals. 

So what are the latest figures?

In the week ending 7 August, which is the latest reported by the ONS at the time of writing, 152 death certificates mentioned Covid-19.

 

If the proportion actually caused by Covid-19 is the same as it was in June (a more recent figure isn’t available), then about 93% of these deaths will have Covid-19 as their underlying cause, meaning about 141 of them. 

 

Over the same period there were 1,013deaths registered with influenza or pneumonia, but not Covid-19, mentioned on the death certificate. If 28% of these had influenza or pneumonia as their underlying cause, which was the rate from 2015 to 2017, then this will make a total of 284 deaths from either cause. 

 

If we’re looking just at flu and 4.6% of those people who died had flu as the underlying cause identified on the death certificate, that would make just 13 people "killed by flu” in the same week. Though, as mentioned, this is likely an undercount.

 

These numbers are rough estimates. But they show that while pneumonia is probably killing more people than Covid-19 at the moment, there isn’t evidence that flu itself is killing more people than Covid-19.

 

[Spy Bee]

1 minute ago, Sugar Ape said:

Most people who die with flu don’t have it as the underlying cause of death. Most people who die with Covid do have it as the underlying cause of death.

That's not my point. My point is, why have more people got flu (at the point of death) than Covid, when Covid is more contagious? It's just a bit of an anomaly.

[Sugar Ape]

8 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

That's not my point. My point is, why have more people got flu (at the point of death) than Covid, when Covid is more contagious? It's just a bit of an anomaly.

We don’t know for sure how many actually had flu though do we as the ‘and pneumonia’ bit could be skewing the figures? It’s certainly the pneumonia that’s killing more of them. 

[Bjornebye]

57 minutes ago, Spy Bee said:

Fucking hell, I'm no longer allowed to ask a civilised question on here now?

The writing in graph you posted was tiny, the gif has a magnifying glass in it. Nothing to do with the content you hysterical quim. 

[Barrington Womble]

4 hours ago, TheHowieLama said:

And, they would have died anyway. So another win-win.

Dignitas on the NHS. And people think the Tories are trying to run down the NHS. 

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

With the caveat that it's the Echo reporting it applied, but we're meant to be getting the same measures applied to us as the North East. 

[Tj hooker]

I know the Tories don't give a toss about the general population and never will do but this behaviour of them lately  is truly playing us for fools they think we are. 

The only conclusion I can come to is that they don't care and would actively seek to reduce the population in any way shape or form because there is no way the right wing media will ever call them out on it , it seems to me that they have truly put all their eggs in the vaccine route and if loads get infected/ die then so be it .

I've just watched the ITN news and they test there as soon as you land and get the results in 30 minutes so why are these charlatans not doing the same here its fucking scandalous unless there is an agenda we don't know about. 

[Sugar Ape]

https://www.channel4.com/news/revealed-local-authority-calls-on-care-home-providers-to-accept-covid-positive-hospital-patients

 

Channel 4 News has seen a leaked document which calls on care home providers in England to accept patients who are COVID-positive from hospitals.

 

The contract, from Trafford Council in Greater Manchester, outlines how eligible care homes will receive COVID-positive patients within just 2 hours of the patient being identified by the hospital as ready for discharge.

 

It also sets out terms for the “Rapid Discharge” of patients from hospital, and states that “some of these patients may have COVID-19, whether symptomatic or asymptomatic.”

 

A leading clinician warned it could become “commonplace” for hospital patients carrying COVID-19 to be discharged into care homes in England this winter, despite the controversy it caused in the early months of the pandemic.

 

Professor Adam Gordon told Channel 4 News that discharging patients from hospital to care homes was “accelerated and escalated” in the early months of the pandemic and that it could happen again in line with the latest UK Government guidance.

 

UK government guidance updated on September 16 reiterates that care homes in England should be prepared to accept COVID-19 positive patients from hospitals.

 

“As part of the national effort, the care sector also plays a vital role in accepting patients as they’re discharged from hospital, because recuperation is better in non-acute settings.

 

“Some of these patients may have COVID-19.”

 

The guidance also states that care homes will not be forced to admit COVID-19 positive patients.

 

In Scotland, patients should test negative twice before being discharged from hospital to a care home.

 

Earlier in the pandemic tests were not required before discharging patients from hospitals to care homes.

 

The latest data from the Office for National Statistics is that there were 15,501 COVID-19 related deaths in care homes in England and Wales up to 4 September.

 

A worker at a national care home provider (who asked not to be identified) told Channel 4 News there was “pressure” from local authorities to take patients, including those carrying the virus.

 

“They are aiming now for patients to be out of hospital into a care home within a few hours from the decision to discharge them. That process used to take about a week.

 

“We have contracts with local authorities for block beds and you have to have a very good reason to reject a referral.

 

Ethically and operationally it’s difficult to refuse a patient who’s arrived in an ambulance at the care home door as many could die from the back and forth.

 

“There is an expectation and pressure to accept all patients.”

 

The insider said current problems with testing in the UK meant care homes could not know whether the virus was circulating in the home after accepting COVID positive patients.

 

“When you’re bringing COVID positive patients into a care home many will die. We have strong procedures to prevent the spread, but this virus is extremely contagious.

 

“We are relying on the testing system to help keep our residents and staff safe.

 

“We have staff and vulnerable residents who are being put in danger. Care homes may not be safeguarded and no one in Government seems to care.”

 

Professor Adam Gordon, Vice President of the Geriatrics Society has been running a “red zone” COVID ward in a hospital during the pandemic and says infection control precautions taken in hospital present a challenge for care homes to replicate.

 

Professor Gordon said: “It can be very difficult to isolate people with COVID safely. And it’s a really quite significant burden to place on care homes to take that responsibility when they perhaps haven’t been able to see the patient and aren’t quite sure what their care needs will be at the point of discharge.”

 

“Care homes are not hospitals. They are designed to be homes, and, in many instances, care home staff are not healthcare professionals who in the past have had really in-depth training in infection control.

 

“If you were to be absolutely belt and braces about this, you might choose to isolate patients in an NHS setting until such time as they were confirmed to be COVID negative.”

 

Professor Gordon warned that under the current guidance it would not be unusual for COVID positive patients to be discharged from care homes into hospitals:

 

“The last time around we saw the hospital system under pressure and part of the response of that was to try to accelerate and escalate discharge into care homes.

 

“If we see similar pressures on the hospital sector this time around then it will be commonplace under the current guidance that people who are COVID positive will be discharged back into care homes.”

 

A spokesperson for Trafford Council said: “The discharge of patients from hospital is a carefully co-ordinated process in line with national government guidance.

 

“At all times, the health and wellbeing of the person being discharged is our primary concern and, if they are discharged to a care home, we make sure it is one that meets their health and social care needs.

 

“We appreciate that there is a quick turnaround but our contracts reflect the national requirements to ensure people are discharged safely and quickly. The alternative to doing this would be to leave the person in hospital. This would mean that the person’s recovery may take longer in an inappropriate setting, leaving them at higher risk of infection while also preventing seriously ill people being admitted to hospital to receive critical care when they need it.

 

“It is also in the contract that care homes have the right to refuse to accept a patient – and no patient is transferred to a care home without discussion and agreement of the care home.  It would be totally against our values simply to turn up at a care home without the care home’s prior agreement. It would also be against the interests of both the care home and the person.

 

“It is also important to note that we insisted from the start of the pandemic that any patients ready for discharge were tested for coronavirus beforehand to reduce the risk of infection within the community.

 

“The care homes in Trafford who provide the Rapid Discharge to Assess service have been extremely supportive throughout this pandemic and we are very proud to be working alongside them to ensure our residents are well looked after at all times.”

 

And the Department for Health and Social Care sent us a statement in response saying “our priority is to ensure that people are discharged safely from hospital to the most appropriate place, and that they continue to receive the care and support they need”.
 

And it goes on, “No care home will be forced to admit an existing or new resident to the care home if they do not feel they can provide the appropriate care.”

[easytoslip]

39 minutes ago, Nelly-Torres said:

With the caveat that it's the Echo reporting it applied, but we're meant to be getting the same measures applied to us as the North East. 

I'm due up a week tomorrow but now having doubts as I think in NE they've been told to use public transport only if necessary which will fuck things up for me getting about to see people though I've no problem with pubs closing at 9pm.

I used to get up every 6 weeks or so but not been up since February, pissing me off. 

[TheHowieLama]

3 hours ago, Spy Bee said:

That's not my point. My point is, why have more people got flu (at the point of death) than Covid, when Covid is more contagious? It's just a bit of an anomaly.

Because they aren't. And numerous posts have pointed that out to you.

Can your machine search Google - if so, try it.

[Nelly-Szoboszlai]

Well, this seems a sound strategy. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

 

It looks like they're clearing the decks for a second wave, that definitely won't be happening, or something or other... 

 

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-09-17/exclusive-care-homes-told-to-prepare-to-take-coronavirus-patients-within-days