Sourced Coronavirus Information & Links

[Zetetic]

I think it's not quite fair to say that I was opposed to early suppression - it's that I didn't think China was a useful model for us (and I still don't).

[Sheffield Wednesday]

OK, what do we do then? Let's say you've had five days to consider...What's your suggestion?

[Zetetic]

Copy France for a start, in particular removing what economic disincentives we can for unnecessary work. As you say, speedily.

We need to accelerate and improve planning on how we're going to draft ACPs and students etc into HCA-type work without burning them out, without turning them into super-vectors and so on. We don't seem to be getting ahead of this, as far as I can see.

Right now, that's the best I've got.  I can't yet see a good path.

(And it's easy to forget everything else. TB outbreaks are still happening. The aftermath of the floods are still with us.)

[Zetetic]

We also need a clearer view across the four nations on community testing and contact tracing - for a whole bunch of reasons - very quickly. We shouldn't have stopped, but I think we're stopping because of capacity, so...

(What number of contacts should we be expecting? I bet the actual numbers being traced are lower than you might imagine. ECDC was guessing 90 per confirmed case in previous estimates. Hmm...)

[Johnny Yesno]

Copy France for a start, in particular removing what economic disincentives we can for unnecessary work. As you say, speedily.

We need to accelerate and improve planning on how we're going to draft ACPs and students etc into HCA-type work without burning them out, without turning them into super-vectors and so on. We don't seem to be getting ahead of this, as far as I can see.

Right now, that's the best I've got.  I can't yet see a good path.

(And it's easy to forget everything else. TB outbreaks are still happening. The aftermath of the floods are still with us.)

Yes, and don't leave it to the markets to solve the problem. It is utterly ludicrous that the government are tweeting out a phone number to see if anyone can help with the ventilator shortage.

[TrenterPercenter]

We also need a clearer view across the four nations on community testing and contact tracing - for a whole bunch of reasons - very quickly. We shouldn't have stopped, but I think we're stopping because of capacity, so...

(What number of contacts should we be expecting? I bet the actual numbers being traced are lower than you might imagine. ECDC was guessing 90 per confirmed case in previous estimates. Hmm...)

Absolutely mobile rolling test centres in the community.


Has anyone noticed that we haven't had new death reports from Italy for 2 days now?

[Dewt]

There's no-one left. Italy is over.

[selectivememory]

Has anyone noticed that we haven't had new death reports from Italy for 2 days now?

There have been: about 350 yesterday, and another 345 today just announced.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

[Inspector Norse]

It is utterly ludicrous that the government are tweeting out a phone number to see if anyone can help with the ventilator shortage.

It's working well, though. Already they have had offers from two stoned teenagers, a local radio host pretending to be an old man, and a man from the Federal Reserve Bank who needs them to store €6m in their account.

[Inspector Norse]

In the end they offered the contract to something called Seaborne Ventilators, though.

[Sheffield Wednesday]

Cheers, Z, and all for replies and thoughts. Fairly involved day at my end and planning to switch off tonight but I'll be considering the implications of adaptive suppression for a little while.

[Zetetic]

Absolutely mobile rolling test centres in the community.

This doesn't really fit in the "sourced" thread, but I think we might see some substantial divergence amongst the four nations in the next few weeks on community testing.

I note that South Korea's testing numbers aren't ridiculously high from a lab capacity view, looking at some UK nations at least. Managing demand and doing something useful at a social-level with the results, however...

[Zetetic]

Does anyone know how South Korea is inviting or advertising their various testing centres?

[Viero_Berlotti]

Not sure if this site has been linked to yet:

https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

[Zetetic]

It's not actually very useful though, is it?

(Contrast with https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1239998499758002182 ?)

[Head Gardener]

A supermarket in Denmark have come up with a great idea to stop folk bulk buying hand sanitizer by charging 5 Euro for one bottle and  135 Euro for 2 bottles. 

[pancreas]

Review of the Imperial paper:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b68a4e4a2772c2a206180a1/t/5e70eb32b16229792eb14836/1584458547530/ReviewOfFergusson.pdf

[pancreas]

And another article, sent round by one of our public health professor colleagues:

https://www.actasanitaria.com/fighting-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic-first-do-not-harm/

[Zetetic]

Review of the Imperial paper

Quite a narrow review? It does seem to mostly be arguing that they've underestimate the viability of suppression (i.e. that they've neglected contact tracing).

But the penultimate paragraph is worth quoting:



The model they use ... is .. not well suited for incorporating real world conditions at fine or large scale. 
These  include 
(1) significant  interactive  local dynamics  and  travel  restrictions  that  cannot  be  seen  from aggregate  quantities  or  averages  across  geographic  locations,
(2) non-normal  distributions  of  the  number  of  infections  per person (superspreader events) as well as the infection period, and
(3) dynamic or stochastic values of parameters that arise from  variations  in  sampling  of  distributions  as  well  as  the impact of changing social response efforts.

Despite including details  of  the  contagion  and  response  options,  their  model  is several degrees of abstraction away from what is warranted by the situation.



Some of that stuff is why I think it's not a good guide as to whether the "we'll just switch critical care demand off and on as we like" plan is at all credible.

[Sheffield Wednesday]

Thanks, panc. Some clear, purposeful statements in both which opened my eyes to a different level of understanding.

[Zetetic]

https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid-19-response

[bgmnts]

SAGE is an incredibly shit piece of bespoke software.

Doesn't bode well.

[pancreas]

So this is my Oxford professor friend who has managed to get her batshit theory into the news.

https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b

If she's right ... I mean ... she's not gonna be right.

[Dewt]

Most people can't see behind the FT paypal Mr. Monopoly Man Fat Cat Wall Street Packard Bell's Canon

[pancreas]

Most people can't see behind the FT paypal Mr. Monopoly Man Fat Cat Wall Street Packard Bell's Canon

The university has a subscription, you big smelly willy.

   The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.

If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.

"We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now," she said.

The modelling by Oxford's Evolutionary Ecology of Infectious Disease group indicates that Covid-19 reached the UK by mid-January at the latest. Like many emerging infections, it spread invisibly for more than a month before the first transmissions within the UK were officially recorded at the end of February.

The research presents a very different view of the epidemic to the modelling at Imperial College London, which has strongly influenced government policy. "I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model," said Prof Gupta. 

However, she was reluctant to criticise the government for shutting down the country to suppress viral spread, because the accuracy of the Oxford model has not yet been confirmed and, even if it is correct, social distancing will reduce the number of people becoming seriously ill and relieve severe pressure on the NHS during the peak of the epidemic.

The Oxford study is based on a what is known as a "susceptibility-infected-recovered model" of Covid-19, built up from case and death reports from the UK and Italy. The researchers made what they regard as the most plausible assumptions about the behaviour of the virus.

The modelling brings back into focus "herd immunity", the idea that the virus will stop spreading when enough people have become resistant to it because they have already been infected. The government abandoned its unofficial herd immunity strategy — allowing controlled spread of infection — after its scientific advisers said this would swamp the National Health Service with critically ill patients. 

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But the Oxford results would mean the country had already acquired substantial herd immunity through the unrecognised spread of Covid-19 over more than two months. If the findings are confirmed by testing, then the current restrictions could be removed much sooner than ministers have indicated.

Although some experts have shed doubt on the strength and length of the human immune response to the virus, Prof Gupta said the emerging evidence made her confident that humanity would build up herd immunity against Covid-19.

To provide the necessary evidence, the Oxford group is working with colleagues at the Universities of Cambridge and Kent to start antibody testing on the general population as soon as possible, using specialised "neutralisation assays which provide reliable readout of protective immunity," Prof Gupta said. They hope to start testing later this week and obtain preliminary results within a few days.

[Dewt]

You live on Wall Street in Canary Wharf you do.

[Zetetic]

What an astonishingly pointless piece of work, given that mass serological testing is what everyone's aiming at whenever they can already.

tldr - If you decide that the proportion of people getting severely ill is very, very low then lots of people have probably already had it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Model%20%2813%29.pdf?dl=0

[DistressedArea]

Review of the Imperial paper:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b68a4e4a2772c2a206180a1/t/5e70eb32b16229792eb14836/1584458547530/ReviewOfFergusson.pdf

Taleb. Binned.

[pancreas]

What an astonishingly pointless piece of work, given that mass serological testing is what everyone's aiming at whenever they can already.

tldr - If you decide that the proportion of people getting severely ill is very, very low then lots of people have probably already had it.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Model%20%2813%29.pdf?dl=0

My main concern with it is that it can't be extremely infectious at the same time that you believe loads (but not all) people have had it. Because if say half the population has had it, then within two days, absolutely everyone will have had it, and we wouldn't be seeing the exponential growth.

[massive bereavement]

My main concern with it is that it can't be extremely infectious at the same time that you believe loads (but not all) people have had it. Because if say half the population has had it, then within two days, absolutely everyone will have had it, and we wouldn't be seeing the exponential growth.

If the tabloids/msm pick up on this article then its' only going to encourage people to ignore instructions to stay at home and shut businesses. She may turn out to be right, but there's the possibility that publishing that piece could literally be responsible for additional deaths and longer term breathing difficulties.