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.

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.

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:

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:

"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.

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).

Weekly deaths - England and Wales - that was the year that was

Data from the ONS.


See also @Dr_RohenKapur. Total deaths in 2020 were about the same as in the 1990s. Yearly deaths fell to a low in 2011, and since then they have crept up again (2020 deaths were about 5% higher than in the previous three years). Presumably due to Catastrophic Tory Underinvestment In The NHS or something.

E&W - weekly deaths up to Week 44

Data from the ONS:


What "second wave?", you might ask.

Week 46 will be a special week, as that week's deaths will include the bastard who terrorised West Yorkshire for half a decade and ruined countless lives. May he rot in Hell.

"Natural disasters are turning the world into an uninhabitable hell"

From The Daily Mail:

The number of natural disasters around the world has doubled since the turn of the century, with climate change to blame according to the United Nations.

Speaking on Monday, the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction said 1.23 million people have been killed in natural disasters since 2000.

Around the world, 7,348 disasters including earthquakes, tsunamis and droughts have cost nearly $3 trillion, nearly double the numbers for the previous 20-year period.

That sounds a bit worrying, but is it really?

Remember that most 'natural disasters' are failures of town planning. If you build in areas prone to earthquakes, floods, forest fires or tornadoes; on cliff edges or unstable ground; if inequality is so extreme that people are forced to live in shanty towns on steep slopes or flood plains or do subsistence farming on marginal land (yes, it always boils down to land inequality...), then it's only a matter of time.

Although they try to pin this all on 'climate change', they state that "Geo-physical events such as earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes have killed more people than any of the other natural hazards reviewed". If more than half died as a result of "geophysical events"*, that brings the total deaths which might or might not have been caused by 'climate change' (rather than failures of town planning or land inequality) down to about 600,000 in about 7,000 events classified as natural disasters over 20 years.

That averages out at 350 events a year (or two per country per year) with 85 people dying in each event = 30,000 deaths per year. There are over seven billion people, about 100 million of whom die each year on average. The extra 30,000 deaths a year (slightly less than the number of road deaths in the USA each year) are nowhere near turning the world into an "uninhabitable hell", are they? And $3 trillion is a lot of money, but that averages out at $150 billion a year. Global GDP is about $80,000 billion a year, so the cost of sorting this all out is about 0.2% of global GDP or about $20 per person per year. And half of that is due to earthquakes and volcanoes.

* I think that's what they meant. The two biggest disasters were caused by earthquakes, which have nothing to do with 'climate change'. About 450,000 people died in the Boxing Day Tsunami and the Haiti earthquake (Haiti is an uninhabitable hell anyway, I believe, that's a political thing), with plenty of other earthquakes and volcanic eruptions which you've forgotten about that would bring up the total deaths to more than half the headline 1.23 million.

Lies, damn lies and coronavirus statistics

The BBC has to big up lock down and diss the Brazilian President (a right wing-populist, apparently, politics is weird down there):

The number of people to have died from Covid-19 in Brazil has passed 150,000, the country's health ministry says.

Brazil has the second-highest coronavirus death toll in the world, after the US, and the third-highest number of cases after the US and India*. The country also passed five million total infections earlier this week.

President Jair Bolsonaro has been accused of downplaying the risks of the virus throughout the pandemic, ignoring expert advice** on restrictive measures.

Ahem.

Brazil has a population of 211 million. Pro rata, it's death rate was only slightly worse than the UK (705 per million against 629)

In Colombia, the next worst-hit country in the region, 27,495 people have died and there have been 894,300 confirmed cases.

To be fair, Colombia's death rate was indeed lower (542 per million) but not that much better than Brazil's. Also, the countries on or near the equator appear to have fared slightly better (more sunshine).

However the daily number of new cases in Brazil has been slowly falling since it plateaued in the summer, when there were about 1,000 new deaths per day for two months.

Geography lesson - Brazil is in the southern hemisphere. There were chalking up about 1,000 deaths per day from late May to late August (i.e. their winter). Daily deaths have been falling slowly but steadily for the past six weeks. Whether that is because or herd immunity or because sunshine kills the virus, I don't know, but good news is good news whatever the cause.

* The comparison with India is meaningless and misleading in the extreme. They have a population of 1.4 billion and a surprisingly low official death rate of only 78 per million. Their daily deaths crept up steadily (not logarithmically, Neil Ferguson please take note) to 1,200 a day at the peak in mid-September and now appear to be falling again (thankfully).

** Maybe he listened to those experts who said that lock downs were fairly pointless? Or maybe he just accepted that lock down measures would be unenforceable in an inherently unstable country?

UK travel restrictions: Why isn't the UK on its own quarantine list?

From the BBC:

How is the quarantine list decided?

The Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) - set up by the government to monitor coronavirus - works with the chief medical officers of each UK nation and advises on which destinations should be on the list. The decision is often made when 20 or more people out of every 100,000 in a country, or island, are infected over seven days, but other factors are also considered..

From the BBC:

On Friday [1 October], the country recorded 6,968 new cases, slightly down from more than 7,000 a day earlier in the week... An estimate from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), released on Friday, suggests that roughly one in 500 people in England had coronavirus in the week ending 24 September, only slightly down on the previous week.

7,000 new cases a day x 7 = 49,000 cases per week.
(Sure, there are some false positives, but there will be a lot of people who have mild or no symptoms and don't get tested, so let's accept 7,000).
49,000 ÷ population 70 million x 100,000 = 70.
Which is over three times the official limit.

Check: one in 500 people are infected. Out of 100,000 people, 100,000 ÷ 500 are infected = 200 are infected. Assuming each person is infectious for two weeks, it requires 200 ÷ 2 = 100 new infections per week to maintain the one-in-500 ratio. That's a bit more than the first answer 70, but they are in the same ballpark.

Is there really a dramatic rise in Covid-19 cases?

There's a handy 'dashboard' at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/.

The chart for 'Cases' shows an apparently dramatic increase, from about 800 new cases per day in July to nearly 4,000 now (late September).

To interpret this properly, you have to also look at the chart for 'Testing'. The number of tests carried out has increased from about 100,000 to over 200,000. So the percentage of positive tests has increased from 0.8% to 1.8%. I am perfectly aware that there are a lot of false positives, so let's round that 1.8% down to 1% for sake of argument.

These tests have two quite distinct purposes:

1. Back in March/April, they would only do tests on people who were displaying symptoms, who had been admitted as patients, or who had good reason to assume they might have contracted it. About half of tests came back positive. That was important to know, so that they knew how to treat patients or who should self-isolate.

2. Nowadays, lots of people are being tested, whether they have any symptoms or not. As far as I can see, the people being tested are a fairly random cross section of the general population. So the relevance of these tests is telling us what percentage of the general population have contracted the virus. We know that the tests throw up a lot of false positives, but that doesn't matter if you are interested in the general trend rather than trying to pin down an exact but entirely unascertainable number. And that trend appears to be going ever so slightly upwards.

But what do we really care about here? We care about large numbers of preventable deaths and the NHS being "swamped". Neither of those things are happening, daily deaths have been in the 10 to 20 range for three months; daily admissions to the NHS are just over one hundred; and the total number of patients in hospitals is just over 1,000 (none of the Nightingale hospitals were ever used AFAIAA). The NHS has over one million staff, just quite how many does it take to look after one covid-19 patient?

If 1% of the general population has covid-19 at any point in time, that means 700,000 people have it. Of those, only 100 will be hospitalised and 10 or 20 will die every day. Assuming the illness comes and goes in two weeks (and you're either recovered or dead), that's a death rate of about 0.3%, which is so close to zero as to be meaningless.

Assuming two weeks to be a fair guess, that means about 50,000 new infections per day in the UK. Multiply that by nine months and that means about one-fifth of us have had it (and most won't even have realised). I'm not sure what the cut-off point for 'herd immunity' is, but it's only a matter of time, isn't it, vaccine or not?

Covid-19 deaths per million population (Europe)

Stat's from Worldometers, chart created using mapchart.net:

Make of it what you will. There seems to be a gradient between north-east (we can put Sweden to one side, they only did the mildest of lock downs) and south-west (reasons?).

What baffles me is the range - 7 deaths per million in Slovakia up to 857 deaths per million in Belgium? I accept that some countries fared better than others, but a ratio of hundred-to-one? Are these numbers even credible?

Click to enlarge:

Don't panic

Good article at the BBC explaining why recent rise in Covid-19 cases might not be as worrying as it first seems.

For once, they are not doom mongering. Although they don't mention that the daily deaths figure has been around 10 a day for the past month, that's less than one percent of all death. In April, there were 1,000 Covd-19 related deaths a day, which doubled the number of daily deaths. That was panic territory; ten a day isn't.

"Covid-19 cases compared by continent" - all very mysterious

From the BBC:



The vertical scale is not adjusted for relative populations - Asia is about 60% of the world's population and Africa about 20%. So the number of cases per million is tiny compared to Europe, North America or South America, which are about 6% of world population each. Why?

So not only is there a huge differences in the number of cases per million population, the number of cases peaked in April in Europe; in April and again in August in North America; in August in Africa and South America; and is still climbing in Asia. Why?
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You can sort of explain the two distinct peaks in the USA. You have to refer to worldometers.info; for (part of) the explanation. The graphs for 'urban' states like New York or New Jersey look similar to Europe - huge peak in April, now tailing off - and the graphs for 'rural' states like Nebraska or South Dakota peaked in August, having started from a very low base.

So the April peak was the 'urban' states and the August peak was the 'rural' states. The USA might as well be two separate countries (something that no presidential candidate seems to grasp). Bayard's theory was that population density is the main driver of how rapidly the disease spreads, but that doesn't apply to Asia at all. Why does this generalisation apply to the USA but not to Asia?
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The other thing to note is the disease seems to be becoming rapidly less virulent, so the countries or continents which somehow managed to stave off and delay the first wave did exactly the right thing. In most European countries, there are about ten deaths per day now, as opposed to nearly a thousand per day back in April. Again, why? And why are we still supposed to be panicking? From Worldometers.info:

Coronavirus - daily new cases v daily new deaths

From worldometers.info:



There are lots of ways you can interpret that. I'm quite sure that some countries under-report and others over-report, but let's assume it cancels out and charts are a good guide to actual trends. There's a pessimistic and and optimistic way of interpreting anything, even something as grim as this.

1. Is the number of new cases really rising, as you would expect if R is greater than 1, or is the number of infections fairly stable, and the apparent increase is because they are testing more people?

2. Is this the start of the 'second wave' of deaths, or just the inevitable result of lockdowns being eased?

My slightly rosier view is to observe that the number of deaths in any week, while fairly stable, is falling as a fraction of new cases reported three weeks previously*. This might be because the virus is becoming less virulent, which is what such viruses tend to do (some faster than others); or it might be because hospitals are getting better at treating people; or it might be a bit of both. Whichever way, that's got to be A Good Thing.

* Assuming three weeks to be a typical lag between diagnosis and death. For example:

New cases March 28 - 51,000; deaths April 18 - 7,000; death rate = 13.7%

New cases June 20 - 180,000; deaths July 27 - 5,600; death rate = 3.1%

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - up to week 29

Data from the ONS.



I assume/hope that this will be pretty much the picture for the rest of the year i.e. a slight undershoot.

Weekly deaths - all causes - E&W - up to week 27

Data from the ONS:



Looks like we're pretty much back to normal.
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In related news, from the BBC:

Back in March we knew so little about this virus. We assumed that it was a respiratory illness, only to find out that it affects almost every organ in the body. We assumed that we would rely on invasive ventilation and ICU only to find out that early CPAP (non-invasive ventilation with oxygen) on the medical wards was more effective.

This doesn't surprise me. Several doctors started pointing out months ago that invasive ventilation made things worse. See also the pioneering work done by this chap in March and April of this year. He might have made a lucky - or desperate - guess, but so what? He did it for real.

And, by half-arsing the whole thing and dragging their heels, with the benefit of hindsight, the NHS have saved a fortune on really expensive ICU ventilators and can use the much cheaper - and better - sleep apnoea masks instead.