Sunday 24 October 2021

Weekly deaths England & Wales to October 2021

Here's the chart based on ONS data.

In April and May, we were undershooting the 2015-19 average, it's crept up since then and we are now about 1,000 deaths/week above that average, which is roughly equal to the official number of daily Covid deaths. Will 'they' panic and impose another lockdown? The SNP are probably gagging for it, but I'm not sure anybody would comply.

37 comments:

Piotr Wasik said...

for a long time (2 months?) number of cases (*) was stable on average, no need for lockdown yet - it seems it would not take a lot to topple it downwards: masks indoors, ventilation, 3rd jab for everyone, vaxx children in earnest? I don't know why 'they' panic, I panic because I don't want to catch it (long covid, brain eating, zombifying monsters) - and NHS seems to be overwhelmed. a guy I worked with got a GP appointment in 20 days. I really want out of it. I accepted already that we will not have literally 0 covid, but we may have very little covid if we keep using 'some' restrictions plus vaxx people regularly. Vaccines work, but it seems they rapidly deteriorate after 6 months or so, "natural" immunity from infection no better. I read expected time of re-infection for an unvaxxed person is 16 months. Ouch. How many times can we expect to catch it and still be healthy and fit?

(*) cases as reported, I gave up on guessing how many cases we have for real. the reported ones are from people who bother to send their samples, self selection bias. comparing against previous months or other countries seems impossible.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, cases have risen, but happily deaths are down at 1 death per 400 cases.

As to long-term immunity, we will see. And I'm not keen on getting jabbed again, I had Covid in 2020 and had both jabs this year, that's enough for me.

Bayard said...

I can't quite see how you get from 11500 deaths in week 53 2020 to 17500 in week 1 2021, as they must be the same week, there being only 52 weeks in a year, unless the government have buggered about with the calendar to make the statistics look better or worse, however they are spinning them.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, deaths in "week 53" are crassly under-reported because everybody is on holiday; also it's usually a shorter counting period (365 ÷ 7 doth not = 53). They get reported in Week 1 of the next year instead.

So the numbers for those weeks that straddle the year end can be taken with a pinch of Vitamin D.

Piotr Wasik said...

I agree the general trend since early summer is up (undisputable really: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/), but the growth does not seem to be decisive and warranting another lockdown yet.

Now the reported cases have been going down again for the last 3 days; 7 day rolling average used to be ~47k just few days ago, now it is back at 45k (from https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ - 315698/7 = 45,100). It reversed for the 3rd time since mid-July, must be minor changes in people's behaviour doing it. This is why I wrote it would not take much now to suppress it to really low level and keep it there with some restrictions and safety measures. It would be the best way to avoid another lockdown.


Mark Wadsworth said...

PW: "This is why I wrote it would not take much now to suppress it to really low level"

Agreed, but everybody has a different view on what an acceptably "low level" is.

Bayard said...

Mark, I've worked out where week 53 comes in. Week 1 is the first week of the year with four or more days in it, the preceding week is week 52. However, a year being a day longer than 52 weeks, unless it's a leap year, every sixth year gets an extra week in it.

Piotr Wasik said...

MW, we do not have to agree on acceptably low level if we agree that *mild* restriction can be kept indefinitely; if we find out that for example reintroduction of mask mandate in public transport decisively sets the trend downwards, the longer we keep the mandate, the lower the level of covid is, following exponential decay, settling on some residual level due to inflow from abroad and other factors. all other things being equal, if at some point the mandate is lifted, we are back to where we are now, no reason to believe covid stays low then.

for me it would be higher quality of daily life than what we have had for the last year and a half.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, again, "mild" levels is subjective. I'd probably agree on face masks on public transport... but does that make sense if you don't need to wear one in the pub or at work?

Piotr Wasik said...

MW - "but does that make sense if you don't need to wear one in the pub or at work?" - maybe, we would have to try. it is difficult to drink or smoke in a mask, so pubs will be mostly maskless or no pubs at all, but we go to pub less often than to work (I think?) anyway. And at work, it is mostly the same people we meet, a lot of people would choose to mostly work from home.

My point is not so much: "let's agree on acceptable level of covid" because broadly speaking this thing is either exponentially growing (Reproduction Rate > 1) or exponentially falling (R < 1), but instead agree on enough restrictions to keep R < 1 and keep the restrictions indefinitely. Let's see, maybe the restrictions do not have to be very strict to keep R < 1.

Because what's the alternative? Any joy of freedom from restrictions will be short lasting with R > 1, we will be back at avalanche of infections as soon as people feel more secure and start mixing again, and the immunity from the first round of jabs and infections will decay. Sure, if we let the covid run freely, at some point it will stabilise (everything else being unchanged) - per week, number of people becoming immune because just recovered from infection or just received booster will be the same as number of people losing enough immunity to become susceptible again. I have a hunch now that this stable state of rolling and recurring infections is achievable with unacceptably high level of infections (for whom unacceptable? for me for starters :) )

When it started, I was hoping it would be few months and we will be back to normal. Elimination sort of, I had this illusion that the first lockdown would sort it out, and then - lockdown lifted, and lo and behold, we are back to square one (now I am surprised that I did not think it would happen, because fundamentally - what changed?). Then I was hiding at home waiting for miracle vaccines to sort it out. They are good, but not miraculous. Sitting for few hours next to a person breathing out covid? I don't think vaccine would save me. Now I see this thing will stay with us for a long time, no sign of evolving towards less dangerous variants either, so this is how I imagine "learning to live with the virus".

By the way, do you know microcovid.org? They do nice modelling of situational risk, everything behind their calculations is explained, no black boxing. They have various pre-defined scenarios; I like that for "one-night stand" you can still choose the number of participants :)

Piotr Wasik said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Piotr Wasik said...

...as you are a maths geek, here's the direct link to their methodology: https://www.microcovid.org/paper/all

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, your comments are too good for the comments section, I have sent you an invitation to do full posts.

Piotr Wasik said...

MW, thanks a lot!

actually I realised my last comment can be summed up as: when we choose restrictions level, we don't choose target infection level, but target reproduction rate, and it is much less controversial target.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, the new buzzword is "epidemic equilibrium" where cases and deaths are 'acceptably' low and R hovers around 1.

Bayard said...

PW, it looks like COVID-19 isn't going away and is going to hang around, just like that other coronavirus, the common cold, mutating in exactly the same way. So we are just going to have to get used to it and start thinking of ways of coping with it, raher than switching the economy on and off like a lightbulb in the hope that that is going to make any difference. Of course, the best way to deal with it is to look for a cure (how's that going by the way? - lots of effort has gone into producing expensive but almost completely useless vaccines, but we never hear of anyone working on a cure) and, for us, resource the NHS properly. Of course the latter will never happen under a Tory government, because it's the last great chunk of public property the Looters ("Tory" comes from an Irish word meaning "looter") can sell and pocket the money.

Piotr Wasik said...

B, I agree that covid is staying here for long, and we need to start thinking of ways of coping with it. That would be my plan for coping with it, to keep some restrictions indefinitely, because covid will be here indefinitely. The world has changed, if we ignore it and let R be above 1, the number of cases and long health consequences will derail the economy anyway. We learned to live with HIV by avoiding it, condoms are default, why not masks then? South Africa's HIV burden is much higher than ours, and unrestricted covid has even bigger potential to disrupt the social and economic life than HIV - people can catch it as easily as cold, and develop chronic illness in significant number of cases. If 16 months between reinfections really holds, it translates to our 60 million cases per 16 months in the UK. Unlikely, I know, people would self restrict their behaviour if number of cases shoots up.

*Maybe* in the future covid will be milder, but I am commenting on what it is like *now*.

I disagree however that the vaccines are almost useless, they are very effective against severe case of acute phase of infection (I don't know about chronic phase), and reasonably effective at reducing the chance of infection in the first place (microcovid.org has risk reduction multipliers as 0.5 for AZ and 0.17 for Pfizer/BNT of the original risk), compare that to a quality N95 mask (0.125 of the original risk) - not bad at all, especially if you combine mask with vaccine. I read there are some post-exposure drug trials running as well, but I don't know the details.

I think the opposite to useless is true, thanks to vaccines we are in fragile equilibrum / weak growth since mid July now, the upward trend is weak and not decisive, and we could suppress the cases (R < 1) rather easily now - if there was political will. Suppressing it would help economy a lot, this yo-yo is a disaster.

And I agree Tories are eyeing NHS privatisation and landing lucrative positions in private health providers. Is this why they mismanage, underfund and stretch it? to make people angry and think - "if it was private, it would be run better?" Step 2 would be to secure public "health benefits" for the private patients if NHS was privatised, so the providers can adjust the prices up to match the negotiated and lobbied for benefit.

Piotr Wasik said...

B, also - note covid is particularly dangerous to people with underlying health issues and covid itself can cause long term health issues. If we run this recursively, we will have a problem. If we let covid roll at high numbers through the years, reinfections will be a norm. Some of the recovered patients, initially healthy, but with acquired health issues at previous infection, will be hit even harder at next infections. How many times can a person expect to be hit on average before being out of the game (not necessarily dead, but disabled for good)? This problem will be happening in minority of patients each time (assuming typical reinfection is milder because of some immunity retained), but still absolute numbers will be large.

Matt said...

Masks are a shite solution because the government didn't define what sort of masks were effective.

So you can use a home made mask with porous material that lets the virus through in both directions. You can also use a vented (or valved) FFP2/3 mask which does a great job of stopping you breathing in the virus but a crap job of keeping it from reaching others.

Like airport security after 9/11 it's all a bit of theatre to make the plebs life more miserable so they will accept more intrusion in their lives in the future.

Piotr Wasik said...

M, I don't trust government :) I have these for regular use https://www.hivepharmacy.com/product-page/ffp3-grade-face-mask and full face mask with 3M branded 6035 filters - for special occassions, if I want to scare children :)

Piotr Wasik said...

...ah, and I put surgical mask on the full face mask outlet valve, to protect others. you are right, the 6035 filters are only filtering air I breathe in, the outlet is unfiltered.

Bayard said...

"if we ignore it and let R be above 1, the number of cases and long health consequences will derail the economy anyway"

Quite the reverse, actually, as it will remove many of the economically inactive, the old and the ill, whilst not affecting the economically active to a point where it will damage the economy.

Matt, masks are not there to stop viruses being breathed in or breathed out, they are there to stop water droplets being expelled when we speak, cough or sneeze, so a piece of cloth is just as effective as a FFP2/3 mask. The virus does not become airborne on its own. It's just the same as that other coronavirus, the common cold. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch them in your handkerchief".

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, I greatly admire the way you negotiate between two opposing points of view, disagreeing with both and being somehow infuriatingly reasonable and reasonably right.

Matt said...

@ Bayard

I said porous material not cloth. Exhibit A - https://twitter.com/early_boiii/status/1312337555455537152

Point was, a mask could be anything - it didn't have to catch virus, water droplets or crap spouted from people's mouth.

Bayard said...

Webbing is a type of cloth. Extreme examples from the edges of the bell curve do not prove a point. A vanishingly small number of people thought that a net in front of your face, or indeed, a standard mask with a hole cut in it to help you to breathe, believe that it is going to make the difference, either as wearer or shopkeeper or any other person responsible for enforcing mask wearing, so, not, a mask couldn't be anything, it had to be a proper mask. Just because some people are not doing something correctly is not a reason to not do that thing at all.

Bayard said...

Mark, thanks, that's how I aim to roll.

Piotr Wasik said...

B - "Quite the reverse, actually, as it will remove many of the economically inactive, the old and the ill, whilst not affecting the economically active to a point where it will damage the economy." How do you know it will not affect the economically active to a point where it will damage the economy? I can't prove it, but I find more plausible that we will run out of "intended victims", i.e. the oldies and those sick pre March 2020 pretty fast, while hitting young and economically active with long covid at a steady pace at the same time and those will outnumber the first group. The longer we let the pandemic run at high infection rate, the worse the outcome - or in other words, as number of covid hits depends on the number of daily infections times number of days passing, keeping the infections low will let us stay afloat for longer.

It is a seductive heuristics that if we only have stomach to do something morally reprehensible (like throwing the oldies and sick under the bus), we will finish this shitshow with pandemic, but it is simply not true. The thing is that I see no definitive way out at all. Letting majority catch covid and vaxxing them gives the same positive outcome: a short lived immunity (6 months OK? becoming weak after 1 year? and we are back to square one). So whatever positive we can achieve by running high number of infections, we can achieve the same thing with vaxxing, but neither is a definitive way out. Where the 2 approaches differ, is the negative outcome of course.

M, B - yeah, the communication from the govt has been (deliberately?) very weak. Whenever a mask mandate was introduced, they should have specified something like N95 or better. Masks have been widely used in the industry, agriculture and healthcare, so the relevant certifications already exist. The ones I use I suspect correspond to 1/8 risk reduction (N99) and 1/20 risk reduction (the scary full face one), as stated at microcovid.org.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, immunity doesn't wear off that quickly.

Anti-bodies wane fairly quickly but there are such things a memory T and B cells (says Dr John Campbell) which last decades if not the rest of your life.

What matters is how fast it mutates. You would still be immune to the strain of common cold you had years ago, but the not against the next new strain doing the rounds.

Piotr Wasik said...

MW, right, so re-infections in Israel are mostly due to delta being different than the original variant the vaccine was based on?

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, yes. I watch Dr John Campbell on YouTube for covid based info, I just repeat the bits I can remember and understand.

He's a bit pro-lockdown etc for my tastes, but he's still the most reliable single source. He's also pro-ivermectin, pro-aspiration and pro-Vitamin D.

Lola said...

Matt

"Like airport security after 9/11 it's all a bit of theatre to make the plebs life more miserable so they will accept more intrusion in their lives in the future."

Quite.

This whole covid thing is political - IMHO. The state markets itself on keeping us 'safe'. A condition that it cannot precisely define. Whereas, from my perspective (and historical evidence) the Big State is the greatest thereat to 'safety'.

So we can argue the toss about masks until we are blue in the face (!!) or vaccinations until our ears bleed and we'll be no wiser. On top of which these covid strains mutate, so just when will be 'safe'.

I am a super sceptic.

Lola said...

Apropos masks etc (from a comment on Tim Worstall's blog:-

"I heard the interesting comparison that earlier generations were asked to sacrifice their lives to protect our freedoms whilst we are now being told to sacrifice our freedoms to (supposedly) save lives."

Bayard said...

"How do you know it will not affect the economically active to a point where it will damage the economy? I can't prove it, but I find more plausible that we will run out of "intended victims", i.e. the oldies and those sick pre March 2020 pretty fast, while hitting young and economically active with long covid at a steady pace at the same time and those will outnumber the first group."

Because that's how it has played out so far. The vast majority of deaths haven't been among the elderly because they were first in some sort of queue and now it's the turn of younger people, the vast majority of deaths have been the elderly because they are vulnerable and the young are less so. All age ranges were infected and, by and large, only the sick and elderly died. As for "long COVID", do you have any figures for the percentage of the population that this is affecting badly enough to stop them working?

Piotr Wasik said...

B, "As for "long COVID", do you have any figures for the percentage of the population that this is affecting badly enough to stop them working?" - nope, but I just googled and found "1700 respondents (45.2%) required a reduced work schedule compared to pre-illness, and an additional 839 (22.3%) were not working at the time of survey due to illness. Cognitive dysfunction or memory issues were common across all age groups (~88%). " in this Lancet article: https://www.thelancet.com/action/showPdf?pii=S2589-5370%2821%2900299-6

And how many infections end up with long covid? I saw numbers between 2% to 15%, depends where you look. Interestingly, there is not much difference between age groups, in this quote "King's College London suggested 1-2% of people in their 20s who had the virus would develop long Covid, compared with 5% of people in their 60s." from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57833394

The way I approach the covid problem is that I am trying to grasp broadly correct picture rather than to dwell too much on numbers accuracy, they are bound to change. And professional modellers got their predictions wrong. How will long covid develop in 10 years after infection? Nobody knows for sure, but IMHO it is prudent to avoid it, not treat it interchangeably with vaccination for example.


L, I want my freedom to roam around in low covid environment, this is why I support restrictions :) Like we self-restricted ourselves to use condoms and in exchange we got relatively worry free life (from HIV).

I saw this comparison as well, but I am finding it very strange. "The older generations" during WW2 were asked (or were drafted) to sacrifice their (temporary) safety, and risk lives to repel Germans and gain freedom from the threat, but also safety from being murdered or enslaved.

And here we are facing an infectious disease, not humans that can be intimidated by our bravery. How would it work? If I am brave and expose myself to a disease and possibly infect few others? Will someone regain more freedom or safety because of my "bravery"?

Piotr Wasik said...

... and B, I forgot to stress another issue - I don't have any data on it at all, it is probably too early - but I am conjecturing that subsequent encounters with (slightly mutated) covid for long covid sufferers may be very bad. Just a guess, these people look really sick (and some research on immune system impairment is available already) - and we know that covid is much more dangerous to peeople that are already sick. That's why I am guessing we may get into rinse and repeat cycle, with more and more people getting disabled or dying.

Bayard said...

"Whenever a mask mandate was introduced, they should have specified something like N95 or better"

Well, no, see above, "masks are not there to stop viruses being breathed in or breathed out, they are there to stop water droplets being expelled when we speak, cough or sneeze, so a piece of cloth is just as effective as a FFP2/3 mask. The virus does not become airborne on its own. It's just the same as that other coronavirus, the common cold. "Coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch them in your handkerchief".
It's a reasonable precaution, everyone having to wear N95 masks isn't. It's a symptom of our selfish age that people can only conceive of doing things that protect themselves, not others. That's why getting everyone to wear a mask has needed government mandation and getting every man to wear condoms didn't.

Lola said...

PW. Fair point. But. Mandating all sorts of restrictions and vaccinations is not acceptable in a free society. The more nannying people are subject to the less responsible people become. Better to have an informed citizen making his own decisions. It's Man Versus the Welfare State.