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

Hamsters, got to be.

Nasty fucking hamsters. Denmark exceeded their March 2020 deaths peak a few days ago.

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Other weird outliers are Quebec, which are seeing x3 the deaths per million that we are seeing in the UK and various parts of Texas that have just exceeded the first wave in terms of hospitalisations.

So far, only the UK and possibly New York State seem to be behaving closely like SA did, but even we seem to be deviating from that now in terms of duration of peaks

Texas outside Austin is republican voting country, and on average their voters have lower vaccination rates.

Could that be it?

Some hope that deaths in South Africa might be peaking finally. Really still can't get my head around the "its mild" narrative.

Excess deaths still pretty high there and not showing signs of peaking yet, but as always, data from SA is a little bit shakey so its not sensible to draw too many conclusions.

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Wife just tested positive last night. She isn’t too bad, symptoms are cough, fatigue (lots of sleeping) and fever. I was the same last week, but without fever and negative test 🤷🏻‍♂️ Whole family is isolating for a week now, that’ll be fun. Anecdotally it seems to be rampant here (Sweden) with lots of people going down.

Possible as they all rdy killed of their mink population. Its one of those hairy things im sure

Wouldn't this depend on what variant and which wave places are seeing?
I would think this particularly true in places such as Canada with a variety of communities that are not homogenous, which may also be weighted by access to health care and vaccination rates.

There's actually a new sub variant of Omicron that is becoming dominant in Denmark too... hopefully turns out not to be the cause of their case rise...

what is up with some people?

If they didn’t experience it, then it didn’t happen.

Hope you guys get well soon. Yeah everyone is sick here right now. Id estimate more than half of my close circle have been in the last 2-3 weeks. Many of them confirmed covid but a few cant even get testing done since the increasing demand.

Stockholm Streets are empty again.

Thanks. The testing situation is pretty dire at the moment. Our symptoms are pretty mild, I’ve definitely had colds when I’ve felt much worse. But the fatigue was real, I got a fitness band for Xmas and noticed I slept 19, 15 and 13 hours over three nights. The rest of the time I was dozing in front of the TV. Can definitely see how vulnerable people wouldn’t come back from it.

Yeah fatigue is what hit me worst as well. First 3 weeks or so then slightly better and back on the bike for a ride (should not have). next 2-3 weeks extreme fatigue again.

Interesting snippets of info in the ONS data today. As we all know, cases peaked on 29th December but the ONS infectivity survey shows this is not the case. Infections, in all regions but London, were increasing until at least 12th Jan.

I'm not sure I understand the reasons why, but the bottom line is that Omicron was still on the increase in the community (ONS exclude institutional infections) for over two weeks after the dashboard reported a peak.

This basicaly means that we can't plan with case data anymore and have to rely on lagging indicators to make policy decisions. Perhaps not such a big impact with this variant, but I hope we aren't in the same position with unreliable test/case data if a more problematic variant appears.

You have to make a decision on something, there's no perfect answer.
What do you want to do here?
Wait until the hospital numbers and deaths are in? 2 weeks.
Or guesstimate what the hospital numbers will look like in 2 weeks? Case data.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/14january2022

https://twitter.com/PaulMainwood/status/1483776797112156164

My daughter has been off school with covid since Sunday. So far she’s barely even noticed that she has it - had a mild headache for half a day, certainly nothing we’d have even done a LFT for. The only reason we noticed it at all was because her brother’s classmates are dropping like flies with it, so we thought they should both test before going back to school after the weekend.

The boy’s clear so far (there’s probably a good chance he’s been asymptomatically infected before), and the missus and I are both recently boosted and testing negative as well.

First confirmed case we’ve had in the household, really thankful we’re getting off lightly with it so far.

I just don't understand that argument tbh. Sure, the trend is pointing in the same direction but case numbers say that Covid is declining faster than it actually is.

Is case data affected by the changes to testing and presumably therefore reporting of positive cases?

There are lots of reasons right?
Testing, who gets tested, when etc and so on.

this guy is cleverer than me:
https://twitter.com/VictimOfMaths/status/1483798451532017665

but yet:
the ratio of cases to prevalence appears to be a good measure for seeing what is going on, appears to be the take home here.

I mean, you have to think about the ons (The estimated number of people living in private households tested with nose and throat swabs(not in hospitals, care homes and/or other communal establishments) vs cases from UKHSA (all positive tests and cases reported (LFT and PCR) to SGSS).

ONS are testing ~140,000 households monthly.

Assuming that's a 7 day operation (no reason to think otherwise, we've had our tests done on all different days, including Sundays) that's ~4500 households per day. And the results are generally within 3-5 days (only rarely will they be faster than that).

Assuming an average of just over 2 people per household to give 10,000 people tested per day that means you're testing 1 in ~6700 people per day in the country, irrespective of whether they think they have an infection or not, with a 3-5 day turnaround. That's going to give you a pretty good clue about prevalence as long as the households provide suitable coverage over the UK (which I'm sure they are).

Of course, there might be some bias in the type of people that will make themselves available for a monthly ONS test. I'm sure they're able to understand this and factor it in though.

Some hope that deaths in South Africa might be peaking finally. Really still can't get my head around the "its mild" narrative.

WHO disagree with that.

What's the point being argued here?
Because I'm trying to understand what's being asked/stated.
I've said "hey, it's interesting how that even though we might think we can't use case data, it actually matches what's going on with the ONS prevalence estimates".