Covid-19 - four-month waves (part 3)

AS I said in March: "Looking at that, I won't be surprised if there's another peak in June 2022."

It seems that the various variants of the virus are mutating more slowly and/or resistance (from previous infections or jabs) is waning more slowly, because the peak of the current wave wasn't until late July. From Worldometers:
But better roughly right as precisely wrong as they say. The good news is that even at the peak, daily deaths were only a fraction of previous peaks, and barely up from the low in June. Unless 'they' just can't bothered collecting/faking* the numbers any more (* delete according to taste).

And I guess the next wave in four or five months' time will be barely noticeable and we can concentrate on worrying about something else, like World War Three, the cost of living crisis or Ukraine-related mass hunger.

Covid 19 - four month waves (part 2)

Original chart from Worldometers.info.

I overlapped a four-month zig zag, clearly it's not a perfect match, second half of 2021 was two lower peaks either side of where they 'should' have been (initial impact of the vaccinations 'flattening the curve'?).

Looking at that, I won't be surprised if there's another peak in June 2022. They'll blame it on the Ukraine war or the resulting commodity price hikes/shortages, but who's to say it's not somehow pre-programmed by the typical speed at which the virus has mutated enough to go round and infect everybody again?

Obviously I hope that there won't be any more peaks and it will all fizzle out, but we'll see.

Why are only satirists asking the obvious question?

From Newsthump:

Met Police Chief Cressida Dick... told reporters, “The Met Police do not like to admit defeat in solving crimes, but in this case, we’ve had too little to go on, so we have had no choice to look for outside help.

“There are so few clues that we just don’t know where to start. Whether it’s with the repeated public admissions of guilt from politicians and civil servants, the questioning of those who resigned over the breaches or to start by talking to the eye witnesses who just happen to be policemen who work for us. How is anyone supposed to solve a crime like this?"

From The Daily Mash:

The investigation into a number of thoroughly documented illegal gatherings that attendees are on record as attending is not expected to be challenging, especially once direct testimony is taken from the police officers who saw it all.

Nathan Muir of Hebden Bridge said: “Call me Columbo, but I’d begin there. Check the records, find out who was on duty, haul them to the interrogation room and get a full list of all parties they saw, heard or inadvertently attended. It doesn’t have to be Line of Duty. They’ll probably just tell you.

“They’ll definitely have noticed wheeled suitcases full of wine, because they’re sharp-eyed police, and there’ll definitely be full records of who was where when because it’s the seat of government."

Covid seems to go in four-month waves

We know that each country's Covid reporting is flawed - some over-report, some under-report, for whatever reason. It seems highly unlikely that similar and neighbouring countries (Austria v Switzerland; Czah Rep vs Slovakia etc) would show such large differences. Also, some countries - like NZ - have suppressed real numbers with extreme measures, but they are just delaying the problem.

But if you add up world totals, then all the under- and over-reporting should largely cancel out. Even if they don't, as long as the numbers are consistently over- or under-reported, the real trends are probably fairly reflected.

Worldometers.info prepare exactly such charts, it is pretty clear that:
1. The case numbers for the first 2020 wave were almost certainly under-reported (or were deaths over-reported? Or was the virus much more deadly at the start and then suddenly become milder?), but that's understandable
2. It has been going in four-month waves, it's not just winter peaks (although would be interesting to see Northern/Southern Hemisphere split). That's the interesting bit.
3. The number of deaths relative to cases is declining, but only slowly. That might simply be the effect of the majority of people in wealthier countries having had their jabs.

When being wrong has never made you look so stupid.

From The Evening Standard:

Half of over-50s have had Covid booster jab... At least 6.1 million booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine have been delivered across the UK.

Half? Really? Clearly, there are about 30 million over-50s in the UK, so that's nowhere near half.

Some outlets read and understood the NHS press release, for example the North West Mail:

NHS delivers Covid booster to half of eligible people aged 50 and over

The key word here is "eligible" i.e. over-50s with underlying health issues, who care for elderly parents, NHS workers and so on.

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.

"Is 'the worst cold ever' going around?"

From the BBC:

It may not be Covid, but it is linked to what's happened in the past 18 months.

"We've actually been seeing a rise in the number of coughs and colds and viral infections," says Dr Philippa Kaye, a GP based in London.

She says the numbers have been as high as you'd see in a normal winter and the main reason is because of the easing of coronavirus restrictions.

"We are mixing in a way that we haven't been mixing over the past 18 months. During those first lockdowns, we saw numbers of other [non-Covid] infections fall. We think that that was primarily due to the restrictions on meeting up."

As per usual, I have succumbed to this and have felt like crap for the past fortnight, hence very sporadic posting (and I haven't managed to finish a song for a fortnight either), I don't have the energy for that. It's not the worst cold I've ever had, but it just drags on and on and on.

Luckily, the rest of my household seems to be immune, that's a small blessing. Maybe it's because they got out more during the lockdown periods and so their resistance to colds and 'flu didn't wane as much as mine did.

The apparent decline in vaccine effectiveness might be just a statistical thing.

The anti-vaxxers are bound to jump on stories like this (headline about declining vaccine effectiveness chosen at random - but no blog post is complete without a hyperlink).

But how bad is it really? Let's crack open a spreadsheet...

Simplified assumptions

1. In the unvaccinated population, ten per cent of the population will catch XYZ disease each month (about twice as much as for Covid-19).
2. You either recover and are immune for several years, or you die.
3. The vaccine is "60% effective", i.e. in the vaccinated population, only four per cent will catch it each month.

So the sensible decision for any individual ex ante is to get vaccinated.

(It appears that in real life, the Covid-19 vaccines are only about "60% effective" against infection, but about "75% effective" against having a severe case and about "90% effective" against dying, but that then makes comparisons more complicated, so let's just use the simplified assumptions and look at total cases.)

Worked example, first 24 months of the epidemic

Country A and Country B both have a population of one million.
Country A doesn't do vaccinations; Country B (miraculously) vaccinates its whole population on Day One.
So in month 1, there are 100,000 cases in Country A and 40,000 cases in Country B.
That's a clear win for Country B.

As time goes on, it becomes less clear who's winning...

By month 15, there will be about 23,000 cases in each country, there being ever fewer people in Country A who haven't had it and aren't immune.
After that, there will be more cases in Country B, there being still plenty of people who haven't caught it yet.
By month 24, there will have been 920,000 cases in Country A (nearly everybody has had it) and in Country B there will have been 625,000 cases.
So if we calculate vaccine effectiveness after 24 months, looking at total figures, the vaccine was only 32% effective.

After five or ten years, even in Country B, total cases are heading towards 100%, it's just that Country A gets there a lot quicker. If we calculate again after five or ten years, it would look as if the vaccine had little effect whatsoever apart from 'flattening the curve' (itself A Very Good Thing).

But it was still a good decision (for you as an individual) to get the vaccine ex ante, even if ex post it doesn't seem to have made that much of a difference (on the level of the whole population). Even if the worst happens, you have at least gained another few months or years of healthy life.

NHS reverts to type

I have often sung the praises of the UK's vaccination programme - the wife and I got both our jabs without a hitch - but now they are winding it all down (instead of doing a final push to the finish line of around 90% double-jabbed, there is a hard core of refuseniks of say 10%) and the NHS don't seem to care any more.

The Lad went along with some mates to get his first jab at one of the drop-in sessions at Arsenal's football ground (or something like that) and dutifully kept the card they gave him with the date and batch number. He got the email (or text message or whatever they send you) with the date and time for his second jab, which should have been the week before last. He turned up on time, rolled up his sleeve and had his card ready for cross-referencing.

"Sorry, sir" said the admin person opposite the nurse, "It appears you haven't had your first jab yet, so we can't give you your second jab. Please ask your GP to update your records so that we can see it on our system. Then book another appointment."

In a sane world, they could have just pretended to give him a first jab (the doses are identical AFAIAA). If in doubt, just jab people! There might be a few nutcases who end up being vaccinated half a dozen times, but so what?. He has just set off for his fourth attempt at persuading the GP surgery to update his records, having been fobbed off with the usual excuses the previous three times.

I'm keeping my fingers crossed for him, but it wouldn't surprise me if they think up yet another excuse for not doing what they are paid to do. I do wonder why they are happy to waste so much of our time and theirs to get out of doing something that would be quicker than endlessly fobbing us off. Or maybe they'll say they'll do it and then simply not do it. Or maybe they'll do it and it still won't show up on the system.

Ah well.

Update. He just came back. The GP surgery took his card last week so that they could 'update the system' but they admitted they'd lost it ("We got a lot of those cards last week.") and gave him a bit of paper with the same info on it instead.

Re plummeting vaccination rates - maybe it does make sense

I had been puzzled/disappointed by the rapid decline in daily vaccinations, from peak 600,000 down to less than 200,000 now.

Actually it does sort of make sense - if you overlay the charts for first and second jabs, offset by three months you get a good match.

In other words, at the end of March/early April they had run out over-50s to vaccinate, so they then shifted focus to second jabs, so we'd expect the number of second jabs (by definition, for the over-50s) to decline at the end June/early July. It's a shame they are not pressing on with younger age groups, but hey, they are less affected so less likely to bother getting a jab:

Vaccine hesitancy etc.

'They' did a great job getting the vaccinations up and running in this country. When I say 'they', it is a heck of a lot of people. Think of the supply chain, from the people making the glass vials, the scientists brewing up and testing the stuff, the packaging, the lorry drivers, people running spreadsheets of what batches go where, renting (or requisitioning) suitable buildings and car parks, the nurses on rota, the car park attendants etc.

On the subject of batches, my first one was one of these. I actually vaguely remembered the batch number on the back of the card they gave me and recognised it straight away (funny how your memory works).

But they are now winding things up. The centre where Her Indoors and I got our jabs shut at the end of last week, and nationally, numbers are tailing off, from a peak average of 600,000 per day down to less than 200,000 now:

All of which puzzles me a bit, if they really want to open up on 19 July, they should be exhorting people to get their jabs ASAP. If they did a massive push and powered on at 600,000 jabs a day, we'd be up to 90% of adults double-jabbed within a month, which is probably as high as they are ever going to get. But they genuinely are leaving it up to people to decide for themselves and letting the whole thing grind to a halt.

With the benefit of hindsight, 'they' didn't actually put much pressure on people to get jabbed, it just sort of happened. If Covid-19 had happened under New Labour, they would have been prime time TV adverts, hoardings, leaflets etc. When they were in charge, each advertising break on telly used to have at least one item of government propaganda (eat your five a day, renew your tax credits, shop an illegal immigrant, give up smoking, whatever). It also wouldn't have been called Covid-19, obviously.

Final thoughts... in the UK (assuming Birmingham to be fairly representative of the UK), 'white' people and those in wealthier areas have a far higher uptake than non-white people (am I allowed to say that?) in poorer areas. Which makes no sense to me at all, the vaccines are 'free', for God's sake, and people in poorer areas are more likely to catch it and/or become seriously ill.

Conversely, in the USA, the split seems to be between Republican voters (low uptake) and Democrat voters (high uptake). Unlike the UK, that does make a bit more sense; Republican voters don't trust 'the government' and live in more rural areas; Democrat voters like bigger governments and tend to live in cities, where the infection risk is much higher because you are surrounded by people.

To sum up, there's nowt queer as folk.

Place your bets now.

From the BBC:

The UK has benefited from both fast [vaccine] rollout and good uptake. Currently, a third of the adult population is fully vaccinated, with another third having had one dose. Among those at most risk - the over-50s and younger adults with health conditions, where 99% of Covid deaths have occurred - uptake for the first dose has been 95%.

Which is all good stuff. I'm not sure why they think it's better to give people in their 40s and younger a first jab rather than giving the over-50s their second jab, but hey. Sometimes the government does the right thing.

On the topic of death stats, I assumed that excess deaths in 2020 would be offset by lower than average deaths in the next couple of years i.e. the people who died from it would have died from something else in the next couple of years anyway.

It looks like this effect is starting to kick in - the black line for 2021 is dipping below the dotted line for 2015-19 average - but who knows? Most predictions about all this have been very wrong (including, I hasten to add, most of my own), so that's the question - how much lower will 2021 deaths be compared to the 2015-19 average? Just a bit? A lot?

Here's a chart to summarise data from the ONS: What's odd is that the January 2021 peak is a noticeably lower than the April 2020 peak. Worldometers shows it the other way round:

"US backs waiver on vaccine patents to boost supply"

From the BBC:

The US has thrown its support behind a move at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily lift patent protections for coronavirus vaccines.

Advocates of the move say it would increase global vaccine production, but drugs manufacturers argue it will not have the desired effect. Critics say it strips financial rewards from cutting-edge drug developers.

Hang on, didn't President Trump pay you $10 billion to develop the vaccines? At whose risk and expense was that? You are also earning $20 or $30 a pop for the hundreds of millions of doses that the self-same US government is buying from you. And the further hundreds of millions which you hope "rich countries" will buy off you at full price and distribute to the developing world (see below).

The head of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, Thomas Cueni, told the BBC's Today programme that technology transfer should not be enforced.

"I'm deeply concerned if you hand this over and allow companies to try to get it done the right way, safe and high quality, you could compromise the quality and safety of vaccines which we see now and it would be disruptive."

Well, he would say that wouldn't he? Does he mean that they are nobly saving lives in the developing world by preventing them from making their own vaccines? He's earned a "that's racist" as well.

"And it is also right now the disappointing unwillingness of rich countries to early share doses with the poor countries."

I'd shut up right now if I were him.

... pharmaceutical companies have called the decision by the US to back the sharing of secret recipes for vaccinations short-sighted, claiming it is understanding the production process that is the real challenge, particularly when it comes to the new breed of mRNA vaccines - such as Pfizer and Moderna - as well as the availability of raw materials. It is, they say, akin to handing out a recipe without sharing the method or the ingredients...

If it's the know-how that matters, why are they objecting to waiving the patent protection?

Seems fair enough to me.

From the BBC:

Australian citizens returning home from India could face up to five years in jail and fines after the government made the journey temporarily illegal.

The health ministry said the ruling had been made "based on the proportion of people in quarantine who have acquired a Covid-19 infection in India". Earlier this week, Australia banned all flights from India.

...in an emergency situation, the government can make something a criminal offence overnight. At the height of the pandemic last year, the government beefed up its Biosecurity Act to give the health minister near unconditional powers bypassing parliament.

That's why citizens now trying to flee a danger zone can face jail for trying to come home. A legal challenge to this two-week ban will take time and be costly - public outrage and pressure may be the only effective remedy.

As at a year ago, when there was no real expectation of developing vaccines, any government had to choose some balance between the following strategies:

1. Continue as normal, accept that the number of deaths in the next year might double (your chance of dying if you catch covid-19 is approximately equal to the chance of you dying in the next 12 months anyway, and we can assume that within a year, most people would have caught it), ameliorate this as much as possible by temporarily increasing NHS capacity, and hope to achieve 'herd immunity' within a year or so.

2. Shut down the borders and/or have strict quarantine rules for arrivals, and wait for it to all blow over.

3. Impose a lockdown of whatever severity is needed to minimise transmissions and wait for it to all blow over.

If you shut down the borders, then hopefully the internal lockdowns wouldn't need so strict, but Australia ended up having to do both, which has so far superficially worked. Absent a vaccine, this would never have worked long term, it is merely a delaying tactic.

(The UK's response was pretty dumb. Having chickened out of strategy 1 - politically it is OK to do something dumb of every other government is being just as dumb - we left the borders largely open and had to impose correspondingly stricter lockdowns. In terms of deaths-per-million, strain on NHS and economic damage, this was a worse strategy than Australia.)

The Australian government has now decided to close its borders even more tightly, which is fair enough, this is for the benefit of their own citizens and their 'reward' for observing domestic lockdown measures and not going abroad. Flying abroad is tantamount to ignoring the domestic lockdown measures and as a quid pro quo, you can't come back in (to protect those who observed them).

So the bleating about "citizens now trying to flee a danger zone" falls on deaf ears with me, I'm afraid. They went to India voluntarily, so clearly didn't perceive it to be a "danger zone" and if there were no ban on coming back, I'm sure that just as many would be going there today.

Is this racist because it is largely Australian citizens of Indian heritage who are affected? I don't think so. Hopefully, the Australian government would have done the same if a 'white' country had the same high incidence of new variants and infections. (There again, knowing the Australian government, they might not have been quite so draconian with returnees from such a 'white' country).

"How does the risk of serious side-effects from the AstraZenecca vaccine compare with other risks?"

Good infographic from the BBC.

For a 25-year old, reducing a 23-in-a-million risk to a 11-in-a-million risk doesn't seem worth the hassle and giving that injection is probably a wasted expense/effort.

Dr John Campbell on YouTube reckons that most of the deaths linked to the jab (primarily in younger adults, especially women) are because it is sometimes inadvertently injected into a blood vessel, not into the muscle. Apparently they don't do the decent thing and pull the syringe back to check.

More vaccine fun.

From the BBC:

Hungary has already bought and distributed considerable quantities of Sputnik V. France and Germany, among many others, are at least prepared to consider it, if and when the European Medicines Agency gives its approval. Hungary has used its right as an independent member state* to grant emergency authorisation.

Veteran French diplomat Pierre Vimont, who's now a senior fellow at Carnegie Europe, says it's perfectly rational for member states to think about buying Sputnik. "Even when you're facing an adversary," he told the BBC, "you have to think of your own interests."

Mr Vimont, as you'd expect of a man who's held some of his country's most important diplomatic postings, suggests that the European Union's attitude should be one of cautious pragmatism. That means acknowledging the excellence of Russian science but waiting for EMA authorisation as well.

He makes the point that countries using the jab on the basis of their own approval could face political difficulties with their own voters if things go wrong.

I always assumed this to be the case. If the pol's want to push through something unpopular (or risky), they get the EU to mandate it and then the pol's concerned can deny responsibility and point the finger at the EU. "We were only obeying orders".

* I'm not sure what "independent Member State" means in this context.

Seems plausible

The BBC's headline is: Covid: UK vaccine rollout 'breaking link' between infections and death.

Seems plausible to me. I took the stat's on new daily cases and new daily deaths from Worldometers.info, overlapped them and shifted deaths back by about two weeks to get the best match. The brown line for 'deaths' is clearly dropping much faster than the blue line for 'cases':
The alternative explanation is that all the really susceptible people have already succumbed, anybody who's survived this far is resistant or immune.

Obviously, neither case numbers nor death numbers are accurate in absolute terms, but as long as the stat's are compiled consistently, the trend is reliable.

Interestingly, assuming the stat's to be reliable, the death rate appears to be about 2.5% (much higher than often assumed) i.e. if there are 1,000 new cases today, there will be 25 new deaths today in two weeks (or whatever the lag is between diagnosis and death).

"Dozens of MPs criticise 'divisive' Covid passports"

I must admit, I am heartily indifferent to the whole furore. On the one hand, they won't achieve much, on the other hand, it's a free world and you can't stop people doing stuff.

Demanding a Covid passport as proof of a jab or test to access jobs or services is "dangerous, discriminatory and counterproductive", opponents say.

Baroness Chakrabarti warned the passports risked creating a "checkpoint Britain" as more than 70 MPs railed against their use in England. Labour's Jeremy Corbyn and senior Tory Iain Duncan Smith are among a broad coalition who pledged their opposition.

1. Every country can make up its own rules on who's allowed in, quarantine requirements and so on. Like certain countries demanding you had a Yellow Fever vaccination prior to travel. If the UK wants to do the same as other countries, is that such a bad thing? Possibly, I don't know. But we have to accept that the world is the way it is, in which case it makes sense to have a standardised, internationally accepted 'passport' (in whatever form).

2. But the cat is out of the bag and some people will have them. I never had an objection to individual employers, cinemas or restaurants banning smoking on their premises. Their gaff, their rules, I can always go somewhere else. I still object strongly to the government-imposed general smoking ban, but I guess that ship has sailed. By the same token, if individual private employers or businesses think it is in their interests to demand to see a Covid passport (and I don't see why it would be, but hey), who's to stop them?

3. The whole idea is slightly ludicrous, because...

a) it will be several months until ever adult (i.e. the under-50s) have had the opportunity to receive both jabs (plus two week wait after the second jab for luck), and which pub is going to turn away all the under-50s until this autumn (or whenever)? Which employer is going to put a blanket ban on employees under-50 coming to work, or recruiting them in the first place?

b) what about children? I'm not aware that there are any plans to vaccinate all children as well. Even if they do them once they've finished vaccinating all adults, that won't be over until a year from now. So Mum and Dad can go into the restaurant or cinema and the kids have to stay outside?

c) and there are enough adults who simply can't be vaccinated (pregnant women, people with certain conditions or allergies).

4. Then add on the possibilities for fraud (anything electronic can be hacked) and mistakes (where a valid passport is not recognised) and the cost of employing bouncers outside your place of business.

5. The vaccines are, thankfully, voluntary. If Covid-19 were as dangerous as Ebola fever, there might be an argument for making them compulsory and imposing sanctions on those who don't comply, but Covid-19 just isn't serious enough. And voluntary must mean voluntary. So monopoly providers of certain services (mainly the government, in this context) should clearly not be allowed to discriminate again the non-vaccinated. But like I said, if a competing private business decides that it's in its own interests to demand to see a Covid passport, fair enough.

5. Overall result = a mountain of chaos that collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. The arguments FOR and the arguments AGAINST are both pretty feeble, if you ask me. Which you didn't, but I'm telling you anyway just to get it off my chest.

Just had my first Covid-19 jab...

... and now plan to wallow in self-pity for the rest of the weekend.

1. The whole thing was very well organised, from booking system to the centre itself.

2. Staff (mix of NHS and volunteers) were very friendly, or at least courteous and efficient.

3. Oxford Astra-Zenecca.

4. Second dose due in ten weeks.

"More than 73 percent of Americans who die of COVID-19 are overweight or obese, CDC data reveal"

Says the headline in The Daily Mail.

That's hardly surprising is it? More than 73 per cent of Americans are overweight or obese, full stop.