Science, Statistics and Studies [SARS-CoV-2]

Looking purely at that paper’s methodology - by meta-analysing each hospital’s odds ratio for a time effect, they all end up equally weighted. Surely higher volume centres should count for more. They also report a significant date of admission x mortality effect for Nottingham, but looking at the numbers they had a pretty consistent 25-30% mortality when there were 100-200 admissions, and then it jumps all over the place when the numbers are smaller.

It’s possible that temperature has an effect, but I’d be interested to see some analysis of air quality in these cities over the course of the pandemic as lockdowns take effect, and some kind of measure of “overwhelmedness” eg analysis of total daily hospital admissions vs normal number of beds & covid mortality.

I don’t think it’s totally implausible that treatment did massively improve. Difficult to overstate how quickly the understanding of the disease changed - even from March to April the way we were treating the patients changed significantly.

The Sarah Gilbert interview on 'The Life Scientific' (R4, Sounds) is really worth listening to for a balanced, informed discussion of the outlook for a successful vaccine.

Is anyone still watching the UK daily stats? I’m still giving them a basic check each day just through the Google reporting which seems relate back to the .gov data. Deaths seem to have settled around the just-under 1% mark and there are maybe signs that we’ve reached the peak of the current outbreak. Obviously this is full of holes and lacks any kind of regional or demographic breakdown, so it doesn’t really tell you much about your area or peer group without a bit more digging.

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It's definitely rising, I think you have to look at your area now more than the national picture.
There are delays with the data, obvs we've seen that.
I am concerned. I am concerned because the numbers are rising (and I know testing (fwiw) is increasing - so more cases will be found). I'm concerned because the number of deaths appears to be increasing slowly as well. Yes. I know people die. But.

One potential positive is that covid triages have been falling in the last few days. Previously this has indicated an upcoming reduction in admissions and deaths. Fingers crossed this is what it means this time.

If the recent spike has been in young people I'd like to understand how many younguns use 111 which is what I think the triage number is based on.

https://digital.nhs.uk/dashboards/progression#dashboard

The triage number is ~4000 but the cases are ~ 4000.

I forgot to ask in my earlier post. See how the deaths curve suddenly smooths out around the second week of August. There was a change in the way the deaths were reported: https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/public-health-england-death-data-revised/

Just posting that in case anyone else missed it.

[7000 cases becomes 20,000 cases over the weekend]

and there are maybe signs that we’ve reached the peak of the current outbreak.

Oh, did I really say that out loud? That was a silly thing to do.

Finally some light at the end of the tunnel.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048969720363592

Magnets!

Geomagnetic field Lithospheric magnetic field

We are saved.

Assuming about a 5 day incubation period, I guess we'll start seeing if Lockdown 2 has had any effect from tomorrow. Number of cases ought to start dropping noticeably.

Magic Greek potions in this one:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969720323767

Given how most ancient Greek myths end, I might just give those a miss!

Odd journal that one, there's a mix of what looks like good quality content and a few bits of what could be amazing snake oil. I don't have full access though (only to the abstracts) so the papers might well be showing that the alternative medicine techniques have little to no effect and are being published as a warning because huge parts of the world still rely on that type of medicine. In a paper, to be able to rubbish a claim you need evidence or good reasons. I guess those papers will provide that.

Odd journal that one, there's a mix of what looks like good quality content and a few bits of what could be amazing snake oil.

‘Direct Access’ journal, init.

Not all of the papers are and, as I understand it, it's the author who makes that choice. 99% of that journal's special Covid issue looks like good quality statistical data analysis to me.

This is pretty interesting, evidence from researchers at Cambridge that the virus probably didn't make the jump to humans in Wuhan but that it was brought there from another region in China... New to me, apolz if old news...

https://youtu.be/vwziZ5ayrFY

this is a good bit of science explanation

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

Quite a nice twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/Leo_ReapDO/status/1248322497663193092

Horrible flashbacks to immunology resit at universty

Except for that amazing animation of the Mø rolling.
Still one of my all time faves.

For those with Kiddos:
https://dontforgetthebubbles.com/evidence-summary-paediatric-covid-19-literature/

Initial paper from Italy regarding schools and transmission:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.16.20248134v2

Similar paper from USA:
https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2020/12/06/archdischild-2020-321018

This Nature article being reported in the Guardian today
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81419-w
correlating onset date of autumn surges in CV in Europe with latitude but not temp-humidity. The inference being that reduced levels on vitamin D may be a factor in CV incidence rate.

Where are the biggest cities in Europe? What latitude?

Key plot is this one https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81419-w/figures/3 Fig 3c. Given that the study is working with a derivative of national CV case data (specifically the date when there is a significant inflection in that national data) then the latitude data could have (should have) a range in latitudes as an effective error bar on the national latitude data. For example, the UK has a latitude rage of about 50.5 to 58.5 degrees. Looking at 3c it appears that the plot is some mean latitude for the UK (though I can't find and reference to this in the text on a quick read through).

tldr: Analysis and supporting plot looks sensible but the important figure could have contained more useful information about range of latitudes in each country

I should have read it properly ...

"The country population weighted centre (PWC) latitudes were obtained from the Baylor University population resource (http://cs.ecs.baylor.edu/~hamerly/software/europe_population_weighted_centers.txt)"

so yes, population distributions in each country have been taken into account

A nice summary of pathways etc.

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Another statistical comparison of seasonal 'flu and COVID-19:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/14/is-covid-more-deadly-and-contagious-than-seasonal-flu