Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

84k population, that's cute.

All feels a little too easy.

What do you mean by this?

Erm, lads.

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Negative for me too. (HDU duty throughout Covid) (Roche through the NHS)
Also for Mrs. Lowbrows. (Sick as a dog early on-still not great) (Abbott through her work insurance).

I have a few theories as to why negative.
Still quite (?strangely) down about it.

I was quite hopeful that feeling very shit for 2-3 weeks in Feb had conferred (potential) immunity, so I was also disappointed when my finger-stick/6ml/Abbott test came back negative for antibodies.

Means I spent all that time wrapped in a duvet on the sofa shivering for nothing.

That’s a lot of flat whites.

Once we have 1m social distancing the De Beauvoir Deli will increase turnover 100%.

Sky graph goes to -24%, not -20.4% FAKE NEWS

I get it. We were down about it for a few days. Basically cos we don't want to go through being really ill for 2-3 months again. We have a toddler so resting up isn't so easy.

Go on, I'm intrigued, what are your theories?

Cumulatively we are at -24%. It's compound growth. The -20% is on top of February's -5%.

(0.95 * 0.8 = 0.76)

Nothing complicated- related to half-life/turnover of Igs.
It essentially may be too long since symptoms for the test to be relevant.
There's also false neg/ pos but I suspect rationally the above is more likely.

We've been beginning to try for a kid, and it is a bit of a hit as obviously hoping not to get sick during pregnancy.

Anyways- onwards.

shakes fist damn you maths

Does anyone know how "R" is measured?

It seems like an odd thing to present as a factual figure. It must be statisticaly derived from more directly measurable things?

Adviser sticks afinger in the air, makes a guess. Government then ignore any of the advice that number indicates ought to happen.

Analysing general testing and hospital admission data and also looking at specific studies like the ONS study that regularly tests members of ~10,000 households around the country.

It's mainly based on number of cases and duration of contagious period, both of which must be known reasonably well, or at least to some degree of uncertainty

If an individual, after getting infected, infects exactly R new individuals only after exactly a time τ (the serial interval) has passed, then the number of infectious individuals over time grows as

n(t) = n(0) R ^ (t/τ)

from Wikipedia. (obviously prevalence of anti-bodies and all that shite goes into a more complex model)

They won't give uncertainties or confidence intervals or whatever 'cause no one knows what they are. Complete speculation but I would guess that "0.7-0.9" actually means something like 0.8±0.1.

Same thing as that stupid alert level, they don't want to give out the proper maths because it's more likely to confuse than clarify

20 of our deaths were all in the same care home, the police have been asked to investigate. That's 4 community deaths.
We closed our borders, schools etc early. Anybody returning must self isolate(you can't leave your home or the hotel the make you stay in at your expense).
Compared to every where else we've got of very lightly.
When we'll be able to open our borders is anyone's guess.
Our lockdown was policed ish. We've done well, it just feels odd.

Judging from the numbers in the New Statesman article below Sweden still doing 'better' than the UK in terms of death. Damage to the economy not nearly as bad.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2020/06/how-sweden-s-herd-immunity-strategy-has-backfired

We seem to have had the worst of both worlds here.

Judging from the numbers in the New Statesman article below Sweden still doing 'better' than the UK in terms of death.

For a country of 10 million people with a low population density, and infection numbers still increasing, I'd say it's not looking too rosy at all for the Swedes. How are you defining 'better' in quotation marks?

You cant look at population density at a whole for a country. Its not relevant. Covid is what seems to be a cluster spread so if you have 2 million ppl (about 20% of population) living in stockholm where density is higher than in london for instance. Than it does not matter if we have a lots of land in the north where no one lives anyways..

Id say we are doing better as its no longer on everyones mind here. For good or bad its like we are passed corona in stockholm. Ppl are more or less doing what they always did, hard to see any differences in day to day life right now tbh.

Its impossible at this stage to interpet different strategies. Could sweden have had lower death with a different one, its likely. At what cost and how much lower, dunno. Could we have had anything close to norway or finlands numbers, personally i dont think so. I believe we had way more cases and a much more widespread decease at that point in time than those countries.

'better' as I'm uncomfortable with sport style league tables when discussing death. Not intended as an arch comment.

The "0.7-0.9" thing gets to me ...

Gov definition is "R values are shown as the range, and the most likely estimate is in the middle of this range."

So they aren't using the statistical defintion of range.... but use the same word for some kind of confidence interval (maybe), but without defining any specifics... so who is it for? Even if you don't understand x±y you can look it up, and that probably means it isn't really for you to utilise anyway

The only reason they would want to "avoid confusion" is if it not for the purpose of informing scientific methodology, but as political propaganda to spin whichever way they so wish... 😒

Because some (probably too many) will assume 0.8±0.1 means it could be as low as 0.1 and act like bigger twats than they already are.

The slides that the Government show have an annex which contains information about how they are gathered and has some details of confidence intervals.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/892096/2020-06-12_COVID-19_Press_Conference_Slides_with_Annex.pdf

linked from: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/slides-and-datasets-to-accompany-coronavirus-press-conferences#slides-and-datasets

(We're expecting a nurse to arrive in the next 30 minutes to do our first swabs as part of the ONS study that is used to estimate R. Don't know about the antibody test yet, they didn't mentioned blood samples on the phone.)

We are 4 tests in. Next week will be our first antibody test (swab only so far) and a swab rest. Moving forward it’ll be a monthly swab and antibody test.

Our GP will tell us if swabs show up positive but we don’t get told the result of the antibody test.

Bonus has been £50 of vouchers so far.