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On the way down?

The home for all non-political Coronavirus (Covid-19) discussions on The Lemon Fool
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This is the home for all non-political Coronavirus (Covid-19) discussions on The Lemon Fool
MrFoolish
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On the way down?

#430221

Postby MrFoolish » July 25th, 2021, 10:18 am

Looking at the chart of UK covid cases, the numbers seem to be on the way down.

Any predictions on what happens next... will this trend continue through increased vaccinations and herd immunity, or will the unlocking feed through for the numbers to start going up again?

I'm not sure myself. But I'll stick my neck out and say I think hospital admissions will remain manageable. The death rate certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything dramatic.

scrumpyjack
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Re: On the way down?

#430226

Postby scrumpyjack » July 25th, 2021, 10:37 am

Snorvey wrote:It will be interesting to see where we are when the clocks go back compared to the rest of the world.

Could it be that Boris and the boffins called it right?


Looks like Boris did, but I'm not sure about the Boffins. Prof Ferguson was forecasting the daily infection rate going up to 100,000 to 200,000.

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Re: On the way down?

#430239

Postby redsturgeon » July 25th, 2021, 11:51 am

MrFoolish wrote:Looking at the chart of UK covid cases, the numbers seem to be on the way down.

Any predictions on what happens next... will this trend continue through increased vaccinations and herd immunity, or will the unlocking feed through for the numbers to start going up again?

I'm not sure myself. But I'll stick my neck out and say I think hospital admissions will remain manageable. The death rate certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything dramatic.


The current thinking is that is is too early to tell if the reopening has fed through to more cases yet.

Other thoughts are that the Euros had fed through to the earlier peak which then subsided and the reopening may start to appear soon in the numbers.

One final point is that the official numbers rely on people going for the NHS PCR tests but there is anecdotal evidence that many are not doing that. Whether the numbers who don't get confirmation via the official test has changed significantly is hard to tell though.

John

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Re: On the way down?

#430241

Postby pje16 » July 25th, 2021, 11:59 am

MrFoolish wrote:Looking at the chart of UK covid cases, the numbers seem to be on the way down.

Any predictions on what happens next... will this trend continue through increased vaccinations and herd immunity, or will the unlocking feed through for the numbers to start going up again?

I'm not sure myself. But I'll stick my neck out and say I think hospital admissions will remain manageable. The death rate certainly doesn't seem to be doing anything dramatic.

not wanting to be negative
but let's wait until midweek as it takes a few days for it to spread
Hope I'm wrong :D

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Re: On the way down?

#430242

Postby Itsallaguess » July 25th, 2021, 12:01 pm

redsturgeon wrote:
One final point is that the official numbers rely on people going for the NHS PCR tests but there is anecdotal evidence that many are not doing that.

Whether the numbers who don't get confirmation via the official test has changed significantly is hard to tell though.


We're clearly not there yet, but at some point in the future we're going to have to ask ourselves if case-numbers are actually all that important now, so long as subsequent impact on the NHS is well within operational envelopes....

The current plateau in cases has shown us that *some level* of vaccine-led pushback *does* exist. All we have to do now is find out how far away it is when we also incorporate the July 19th openings as well.

Hopefully not too far away...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

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Re: On the way down?

#430244

Postby daveh » July 25th, 2021, 12:02 pm

As I said on another thread case rates in Scotland started falling from the 5th July with a 7day rolling average of about 3300 cases per day and when I looked on Friday that was down to about 1800 cases per day.

So England (and the therefore the UK) could / should follow the same trend, just delayed. Supporting this Schools broke up earlier in Scotland, and we went out of the football earlier so that may have put an earlier brake on covid in Scotland. Similarly that should now be happening in England. On the opposite side England has opened up much more than Scotland, with no mask mandate and large indoor venues such as nightclubs open, so that may accelerate cases. I guess we will know in a few weeks.

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Re: On the way down?

#430245

Postby vagrantbrain » July 25th, 2021, 12:08 pm

Wouldn't be the first time the numbers have gone in the opposite direction from what the experts predicted!

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Re: On the way down?

#430250

Postby Julian » July 25th, 2021, 12:35 pm

scrumpyjack wrote:
Snorvey wrote:It will be interesting to see where we are when the clocks go back compared to the rest of the world.

Could it be that Boris and the boffins called it right?


Looks like Boris did, but I'm not sure about the Boffins. Prof Ferguson was forecasting the daily infection rate going up to 100,000 to 200,000.

That's a bit unfair I think. I saw a number of interviews with Ferguson on TV where yes, he mentioned 100,000 or even 200,000 as a potential worst-case outcome if the peak at 50,000 that many (including Sajid Javid) were talking about turned out to be too low but, at least in the interviews I saw, he also said that he was cautiously optimistic about the path forward. I got the definite impression from seeing full interviews that he supported the unlocking at this time. I remember it distinctly because I found it quite interesting that this expert in particular, one who certain anti-lockdown elements have been demonising for most of the pandemic ("Professor Lockdown" etc), seemed to me to be generally positive about this latest strategy turn.

Simply quoting a possible worst-case number that presumably came out of his models with some sort of probability associated with it and giving no other context is quite misleading although admittedly Ferguson himself was perhaps naïve to quote such numbers in an interview without qualifying that they were at the extremes of the outcomes his modelling was predicting and as such had lower probabilities associated with them than predictions more central in his confidence ranges. At least in the interviews I saw he did indeed fail to qualify his 100,000 or even 200,000 figures in such a way.

- Julian

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Re: On the way down?

#430251

Postby zico » July 25th, 2021, 12:39 pm

vagrantbrain wrote:Wouldn't be the first time the numbers have gone in the opposite direction from what the experts predicted!


I think it would be. On what previous occasion did the numbers go in the opposite direction?
(Predictions have often been overestimates or underestimates - is that what you mean?)

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Re: On the way down?

#430253

Postby scrumpyjack » July 25th, 2021, 12:56 pm

Julian wrote:
Simply quoting a possible worst-case number that presumably came out of his models with some sort of probability associated with it and giving no other context is quite misleading although admittedly Ferguson himself was perhaps naïve to quote such numbers in an interview without qualifying that they were at the extremes of the outcomes his modelling was predicting and as such had lower probabilities associated with them than predictions more central in his confidence ranges. At least in the interviews I saw he did indeed fail to qualify his 100,000 or even 200,000 figures in such a way.

- Julian


I didn't see any interviews but just read reports in the newspapers, who like the BBC are often not very good at objective reporting but prefer either to sensationalise or to present things in a way that supports their own agenda.

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Re: On the way down?

#430257

Postby 1nvest » July 25th, 2021, 12:58 pm

My two sub-30'ers (and back-homers due to Covid) were nightclubbing last night (Sat pm/Sun am). Apparently absolutely crowded and the usual drunkenness etc. One is half jabbed the other unjabbed so the next week or so should be revealing as that is repeated across 50,000 nightclubs around the UK with 100+ average occupants perhaps (5 million attending what is paramount to Covid Parties (similar to the pox-parties of old)).

My suspicion is that that age group and below are likely to have already contracted Covid at some point during the last 18 months. We have several High Schools around here and I've often seen kids not looking completely well, coughing/sneezing etc. as they infested local stores before/after school over recent months, and sub-30'ers more often haven't adhered to lockdowns, still ganged in parks/in-houses ...etc.

Combined with the 'oldies', 30's and above now largely having been vaccinated I suspect there's a reasonable chance of hospitalisations continuing to remain stressed but manageable - at least up to when the flu season starts.

Whilst many might contract it again, I'm guessing that reiterations are even less inclined to require hospitalisation. So maybe increased observations of contractions, flat/declining hospitalisations and deaths.

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Re: On the way down?

#430260

Postby zico » July 25th, 2021, 1:09 pm

Itsallaguess wrote:
redsturgeon wrote:
One final point is that the official numbers rely on people going for the NHS PCR tests but there is anecdotal evidence that many are not doing that.

Whether the numbers who don't get confirmation via the official test has changed significantly is hard to tell though.



We're clearly not there yet, but at some point in the future we're going to have to ask ourselves if case-numbers are actually all that important now, so long as subsequent impact on the NHS is well within operational envelopes....


Case-numbers are still important because of the scope we now have for developing a vaccine-resistant variant, because most households have a mix of unvaccinated and vaccinated people. If it's really is government policy of focusing on NHS non-Covid cases and backlogs, then surely the fewer Covid long-stay hospitalisation cases, the better. 7-day average of Covid hospitalisations is 784 per day. It would be good to know what level of Covid hospitalisations is considered within the operational envelope - we know from Jan-Feb that the NHS can "cope" with 3,000 per day, but only by creating a huge backlog for non-Covid health issues. On the positive side, average duration of Covid hospital stays are shorter now than back in January, because cases are less severe and have better outcomes (on average).

Itsallaguess wrote:The current plateau in cases has shown us that *some level* of vaccine-led pushback *does* exist. All we have to do now is find out how far away it is when we also incorporate the July 19th openings as well.

Hopefully not too far away...



I really hope this is a genuine plateau, but I'm very sceptical. We've had a week of "pingdemic" coverage about how being pinged is just a pointless waste of time, and also there was an expected increase in infections from loosening restrictions, in particular young people going to night clubs. For the "night-club" infections to show up, clubbers need to have the NHS app activated and to take Covid tests - I'm not too sure a large proportion of clubbers are going to bother doing that. If there is a "hidden" wave of increased infections amongst young adults, it'll take a couple of weeks to seep through to the older generations.

(Incidentally, the infection stats exclude people who previously tested positive (no matter how long ago that was). These currently would only account for an extra 1% of infections, but this percentage can obviously only increase.

My prediction, for what it's worth, is that hospitalisation will increase from the current 784 to a peak of around 2,000-2,500 by late-August, but with daily deaths under 200. I'd very much like to be proven to be far too pessimistic about this.

It's just such a shame our country isn't seeing a virus-vaccine race between the Kent variant (plus maybe 20% of Delta variant) and the vaccination roll-out, which is a race the vaccination programme would have easily won, and we'd all have been back to normal so much sooner.

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Re: On the way down?

#430267

Postby zico » July 25th, 2021, 1:41 pm

Just comparing daily tests with daily infections between mid-June and mid-July.
7-day average of daily infections has gone up over 4-fold (from 10k to 45k).
7-day average of daily tests has gone up only 15% (from 900k to 1,040k) and daily tests have reduced slightly over the last few days.
(Peak daily tests were actually in mid-March).

Obviously wouldn't expect a strong correlation between the two (because there's lots of routine daily testing happening) but it's still a bit surprising the number of daily tests is actually decreasing.

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Re: On the way down?

#430270

Postby redsturgeon » July 25th, 2021, 1:47 pm

zico wrote:Just comparing daily tests with daily infections between mid-June and mid-July.
7-day average of daily infections has gone up over 4-fold (from 10k to 45k).
7-day average of daily tests has gone up only 15% (from 900k to 1,040k) and daily tests have reduced slightly over the last few days.
(Peak daily tests were actually in mid-March).

Obviously wouldn't expect a strong correlation between the two (because there's lots of routine daily testing happening) but it's still a bit surprising the number of daily tests is actually decreasing.


Not surprising to me (anecdotally).

John

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Re: On the way down?

#430271

Postby Nimrod103 » July 25th, 2021, 1:50 pm

zico wrote: but it's still a bit surprising the number of daily tests is actually decreasing.


Possible explanations:
1) incidence of symptoms declining (confirmed I believe by the Covid Symptom tracker app)
2) Attitude changes in the population - the disease I think is looking less serious to the population as a whole, as more people become vaccinated. So people are prepared to just sit out a minor sickness, rather than running out to get tested.

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Re: On the way down?

#430273

Postby Nimrod103 » July 25th, 2021, 1:54 pm

zico wrote:(Incidentally, the infection stats exclude people who previously tested positive (no matter how long ago that was). These currently would only account for an extra 1% of infections, but this percentage can obviously only increase.



I think there is a good reason for this. AIUI reinfected people will not be hospitalized or die. Leaving them out of the stats gives a better indication of how many people will need to be hospitalized, and how many serious cases there will be.

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Re: On the way down?

#430277

Postby vagrantbrain » July 25th, 2021, 2:04 pm

zico wrote:
vagrantbrain wrote:Wouldn't be the first time the numbers have gone in the opposite direction from what the experts predicted!


I think it would be. On what previous occasion did the numbers go in the opposite direction?
(Predictions have often been overestimates or underestimates - is that what you mean?)


Not quite, some examples in the paper below of estimates in the US where cases and deaths went in the complete opposite direction to what was being forecast.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/

Most extreme is the FEMA prediction for New York after reopening last summer: 70% increase in deaths and a 700% increase in cases - reality was a 60% decrease in deaths and a 15% reduction in cases.

I remember reading plenty of articles last year where various people were predicting cases rising to the hundreds of thousands per day in the UK during the first lockdown while cases on the covid dashboard were actually trending down.

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Re: On the way down?

#430288

Postby Julian » July 25th, 2021, 3:09 pm

scrumpyjack wrote:
Julian wrote:
Simply quoting a possible worst-case number that presumably came out of his models with some sort of probability associated with it and giving no other context is quite misleading although admittedly Ferguson himself was perhaps naïve to quote such numbers in an interview without qualifying that they were at the extremes of the outcomes his modelling was predicting and as such had lower probabilities associated with them than predictions more central in his confidence ranges. At least in the interviews I saw he did indeed fail to qualify his 100,000 or even 200,000 figures in such a way.

- Julian


I didn't see any interviews but just read reports in the newspapers, who like the BBC are often not very good at objective reporting but prefer either to sensationalise or to present things in a way that supports their own agenda.

Absolutely. One of the things that’s really bugged me about this pandemic has been how apparent it has become that much of the mainstream media really does not do nuance or reasonable context. This is one example. Another was the unlock roadmap where I watched Boris’s press conference in full when he announced the stages. He was very careful to clarify that the dates were all “not before” dates and to explain the process of making a final review of the data a week before each not-before date and declaring a go/no-go for the next step at that point yet the following morning a number of the tabloids reported the dates on their front pages with no such caveats and, although the BBC TV news did sometimes clarify the not-before nature of the various target dates, they sometimes didn’t. All very frustrating.

- Julian

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Re: On the way down?

#430289

Postby Itsallaguess » July 25th, 2021, 3:36 pm

zico wrote:
I really hope this is a genuine plateau, but I'm very sceptical.


I sometimes think the symptoms of the scepdemic might be harder to recover from for some than the symptoms of the pandemic itself...

Cheers,

Itsallaguess

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Re: On the way down?

#430292

Postby zico » July 25th, 2021, 4:08 pm

vagrantbrain wrote:
Not quite, some examples in the paper below of estimates in the US where cases and deaths went in the complete opposite direction to what was being forecast.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447267/

Most extreme is the FEMA prediction for New York after reopening last summer: 70% increase in deaths and a 700% increase in cases - reality was a 60% decrease in deaths and a 15% reduction in cases.

I remember reading plenty of articles last year where various people were predicting cases rising to the hundreds of thousands per day in the UK during the first lockdown while cases on the covid dashboard were actually trending down.


I read your link - that's not a paper, that's a rant. I mean, just read this bit from your link. Starvation and malaria rife in the US because of lockdown? That's Piers Corbyn/David Icke territory. (Although to be fair, maybe we are being ruled by giant alien lizards, I mean let's keep an open mind!)

The general population was locked and placed in horror-alert to save health systems from collapsing..... The prospects of starvation and of lack of control of other infectious diseases (such as tuberculosis, malaria, and childhood communicable diseases where vaccination is hindered by COVID-19 measures) are dire


So no examples in the UK? As for your UK anecdotal, no intelligent expert or analyst ever said that imposing lockdown would make cases increase. I'm sure there were lots of articles in the Spectator and Telegraph about how imposing lockdown would somehow make everything worse, and the only cure was to head for the 20% herd immunity threshold without delay.

The nearest thing to a discredited UK prediction I remember was last Autumn when the wrong slides were used in a Downing Street presentation, and the predicted infection rate was rubbished, although the predicted hospitalisation rate proved to be accurate.


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