Cyprus-Forum.com

[Londonrake]

A (loosely) related article from today's DT. Paywalled I'm afraid:


"Welsh coal towns' death rate double England's average as MP blames conspiracy theorists for flouting lockdown
Analysis: Latest figures show 409 cases per 100,000 population in Wales, compared to 262 in England, 273 in Scotland and 247 in N Ireland

As Britain eyes an end to lockdown, one area is creating a particular headache for public health officials, scientists and politicians: Wales, and especially the old mining communities.

The country has proportionally almost twice the number of cases as the rest of the UK while mortality rates in and around the Rhondda Valley have also been among the very highest in the country.

Across Wales, the latest figures show 409 cases per 100,000 population compared to 262 in England, 273 in Scotland and 247 in Northern Ireland.

As of Sunday, Wales had lost 1,267 people to Covid-19 out of a population of just over three million. A sixth of the dead have come from Rhondda Cynon Taf, the county borough that covers the Rhondda Valley.

The latest figures show that Rhondda Cynon Taf's positive test rate is 610 cases per 100,000 of the population. In total, 1,466 people have tested positive in a population of 240,000 and 224 people have died. It has the highest mortality rate in Wales at 93.28 deaths per 100,000, and one of the highest in the UK.

Chris Bryant, the Labour MP for the area, said: “Rhondda is the worst in the country. We are the worst, worst, worst.” Only Barrow-in-Furness, in Cumbria, another former mining community, but with a much smaller population has more proportionally more cases - 823.7 positive tests per 100,000.

While London and parts of the south east of England contemplate life out of lockdown, much of Wales remains in the grip of the virus, the all-important transmission rate thought to be only just below the magic R figure of one that arrests its exponential growth.

Many blame these communities' impoverished, ageing populations. A lot of the residents are former miners, with lung conditions from years spent down the pits, who are particularly vulnerable.

But Mr Bryant, one of Labour’s most senior MPs, has accused a significant number of his constituents of flouting the lockdown and spreading coronavirus because they falsely believe they have immunity after claiming to have caught it last year.

He believes their ‘dangerous’ claims are fuelling the spread of the virus.

In desperation, Mr Bryant, a former minister, posted a video on Facebook last week pleading with locals in the Rhondda to ignore a “a chunk of people talking b-----ks”. Mr Bryant said in the video: “The conspiracy theories doing the rounds are beginning to do my head in.

“I have been told by one chap he didn’t need to abide by the social-distancing rules because he knows for an absolute certain fact that he contracted coronavirus last summer and he knows lots of people who contracted coronavirus in November and December last year and therefore they are immune as well.”

Mr Bryant went on: “It is completely and utterly untrue and dangerous.” Beneath his Facebook posting, a number of local residents insist they are maintaining social-distancing rules but at the same time are also convinced they caught Covid-19 last year.

“Someone must know the truth of how long this was spreading before we were told,” posted one constituent, who claimed she had contracted the virus in October after “becoming quite ill”.

The Welsh Valleys are also a victim, said Mr Bryant, of being tight-knit communities, in which generations of families still live in homes together, leaving older people susceptible; obesity rates are high and so too smoking along with lung diseases contracted in the mines.

Many of its inhabitants work in the social care sector or as bus drivers and have brought the disease back home with them, said Mr Bryant. The tragedy that has hit this part of south Wales was predicted almost two months ago by Wales’s own First Minister.

“We have an older, sicker population,” said Mark Drakeford on March 30. “Our history of coalmining and heavy industry means we have people with breathing problems that the coronavirus is particularly likely to affect.”

Critics have questioned why - if it knew then - didn’t the Welsh Government put in place more testing and more shielding of the vulnerable population.

In April, thousands of letters telling people they were clinically extremely vulnerable and should shield themselves were delivered to the wrong addresses while a target of 5,000 tests a day was scrapped after Mr Drakeford admitted it “hadn’t turned out to be achievable.”

Locally, there are complaints that testing kits, lined up by the Welsh, were snaffled by Downing Street to use in England; such claims have fuelled a rise in Welsh nationalism.

One intensive care consultant at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital told BBC Wales: "In this area there's a lot of poverty, deprivation and chronic ill health - so those people if they do catch Covid are less likely to survive."

Public Health Wales cautioned against making domestic comparisons between Wales and the rest of the country. The spokesman said: “It’s very difficult to make effective comparisons between the data from different areas, as there are multiple factors involved, including demography, the overall health of the population and the prevalence of underlying health conditions, adherence to social-distancing measures and access to testing, as well as socio-economic factors.”

Paul Davies, leader of the Welsh Conservatives, accused the Labour-led administration in Cardiff of failures as stark as the ones being levelled at Boris Johnson’s Government.

“It’s absolutely astounding that the Welsh Government has sent shielding letters to the wrong people – not just once – but twice - and to be quite frank, the Labour Government’s explanation that it’s a processing error is simply not good enough,” he said.

“At the height of this pandemic, the administrative incompetence of those trusted to contact patients has resulted in some people across Wales being at an increased risk of contracting the virus.”

[Kikapu]

... that doesn't necessarily mean the virus has changed, since death-rate calculations depend on how many cases are confirmed by tests. The high global death rate could point to coronavirus testing limitations across the globe.

Yes, indeed. It all depends on what you put in the denominator. That's why the figures are skewed.

It all depends which course one prefers to follow, the IFR or the CFR.

To me the IFR is the unknown and unsubstantiated numbers based on testing small number of people. Much like taking poll samples to reach a conclusion as to which candidate has what percentage to win an election. Often such poll results are all over the place from several “reputable” pollsters. Trumps election victory most certainly taught those pollsters a lesson or two at the last election, no?

CFR deals in real numbers on those who are diagnosed with the disease and what percentage of those who died from it, which gives us an idea how deadly the virus is or not. It does not give us how contagious the virus is or not to the general population however, which is the use of IFR factor, which uses interpolation numbers on the small samples taken, just like Nielsen’s ratings on TV show viewers and elections by pollsters.

[erolz66]

... that doesn't necessarily mean the virus has changed, since death-rate calculations depend on how many cases are confirmed by tests. The high global death rate could point to coronavirus testing limitations across the globe.

Yes, indeed. It all depends on what you put in the denominator. That's why the figures are skewed.

It all depends which course one prefers to follow, the IFR or the CFR.

To me the IFR is the unknown and unsubstantiated numbers based on testing small number of people. Much like taking poll samples to reach a conclusion as to which candidate has what percentage to win an election. Often such poll results are all over the place from several “reputable” pollsters. Trumps election victory most certainly taught those pollsters a lesson or two at the last election, no?

CFR deals in real numbers on those who are diagnosed with the disease and what percentage of those who died from it, which gives us an idea how deadly the virus is or not. It does not give us how contagious the virus is or not to the general population however, which is the use of IFR factor, which uses interpolation numbers on the small samples taken, just like Nielsen’s ratings on TV show viewers and elections by pollsters.

If you are going to talk about herd immunity then IFR which basically is a derivative of 'how many of the population in total have been infected' is the crucial thing to 'know', it seems to me.

[Kikapu]

... that doesn't necessarily mean the virus has changed, since death-rate calculations depend on how many cases are confirmed by tests. The high global death rate could point to coronavirus testing limitations across the globe.

Yes, indeed. It all depends on what you put in the denominator. That's why the figures are skewed.

It all depends which course one prefers to follow, the IFR or the CFR.

To me the IFR is the unknown and unsubstantiated numbers based on testing small number of people. Much like taking poll samples to reach a conclusion as to which candidate has what percentage to win an election. Often such poll results are all over the place from several “reputable” pollsters. Trumps election victory most certainly taught those pollsters a lesson or two at the last election, no?

CFR deals in real numbers on those who are diagnosed with the disease and what percentage of those who died from it, which gives us an idea how deadly the virus is or not. It does not give us how contagious the virus is or not to the general population however, which is the use of IFR factor, which uses interpolation numbers on the small samples taken, just like Nielsen’s ratings on TV show viewers and elections by pollsters.

If you are going to talk about herd immunity then IFR which basically is a derivative of 'how many of the population in total have been infected' is the crucial thing to 'know', it seems to me.

I agree.

[Tim Drayton]

An interview with Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, about the epidemic, the lockdown and IFR.

https://youtu.be/DKh6kJ-RSMI

[Tim Drayton]

... that doesn't necessarily mean the virus has changed, since death-rate calculations depend on how many cases are confirmed by tests. The high global death rate could point to coronavirus testing limitations across the globe.

Yes, indeed. It all depends on what you put in the denominator. That's why the figures are skewed.

It all depends which course one prefers to follow, the IFR or the CFR.

To me the IFR is the unknown and unsubstantiated numbers based on testing small number of people. Much like taking poll samples to reach a conclusion as to which candidate has what percentage to win an election. Often such poll results are all over the place from several “reputable” pollsters. Trumps election victory most certainly taught those pollsters a lesson or two at the last election, no?

CFR deals in real numbers on those who are diagnosed with the disease and what percentage of those who died from it, which gives us an idea how deadly the virus is or not. It does not give us how contagious the virus is or not to the general population however, which is the use of IFR factor, which uses interpolation numbers on the small samples taken, just like Nielsen’s ratings on TV show viewers and elections by pollsters.

If you are going to talk about herd immunity then IFR which basically is a derivative of 'how many of the population in total have been infected' is the crucial thing to 'know', it seems to me.

I agree.

Fully agree, too. Glad to see us all on the same side for once. That's why serological studies based on reasonably large random samples from a given population are so important, I think. However, Professor Gupta notes in her interview that there are problems with such studies, too, because some people who are exposed to the virus are not developing anitibodies, so even more people may have been infected than the number shown in serological studies.

[erolz66]

Fully agree, too. Glad to see us all on the same side for once. That's why serological studies based on reasonably large random samples from a given population are so important, I think. However, Professor Gupta notes in her interview that there are problems with such studies, too, because some people who are exposed to the virus are not developing anitibodies, so even more people may have been infected than the number shown in serological studies.

Well the first couple of things Prof Gupta says in this video sound to me like things I have been saying.

Back at end of march you just could not tell how lethal the virus actually was , no one could. There just was not the data to be able to do so. She also then makes the point that there really is only one set up numbers that you can use/ rely on - namely rise in or excess deaths from all causes.

She then talks about how from the small limited antibody studies done so far, on groups likely to have had greater exposure than the population at large the high end is in the region of 24.4% to 33% both of which are considerably under her early modelled with limited data number of as much as 50% of the population already exposed to the virus back at the end of March. At the 'low end' from these studies she does not give a figure just says 'much more modest than that'.

When asked about the Spanish antibody testing that was concluding population exposure of around 5% she makes the point that this could be a 'low end' range because of those who may be infected but not not develop antibodies. Which is fair point but she does not mention any figures as to how much these might 'low end' such results. However as a non expert it seems unlikely to me that exposed but no antibody people could skew these results from say 5% of population to 50% ?

She then makes the point that 'we need to be patient which is difficult given the cost of lockdown', which I interpret as saying until we have better data and numbers we should NOT be rushing to end lock down ?

Any way that took me to the first add break and all the time I have right now. Over all I would say there was much in what she was saying that echos much of what I have been saying here to date.

[Tim Drayton]

It’s a virus, folks. We are surrounded by billions of them. A few are nasty. They have afflicted humanity for millennia. They peak, then most people become immune and that particular virus disappears, but it may mutate and do the rounds again. It happens regardless of whether you lock up or not, as the example of Sweden shows:

[Tim Drayton]

How Sweden's actual performance stacks up against Bill Gates Foundation-financed Imperial College's forecast for the country:

[Tim Drayton]

Coronavirus 'disappearing' so fast Oxford vaccine has 'only 50% chance of working'

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus- ... g-11993739

He (Professor Adrian Hill) told The Sunday Telegraph: "It's a race against the virus disappearing, and against time. We said earlier in the year that there was an 80% chance of developing an effective vaccine by September.

But at the moment, there's a 50% chance that we get no result at all. We're in the bizarre position of wanting COVID to stay, at least for a little while."

Yup, by the time they have the vaccine the virus may have disappeared the natural way, anyhow. Good for Bill Gates’ big pharma buddies that they all seem to be getting massive bungs of taxpayers’ money for developing something that may never be needed up front, so they will get their massive profits anyhow.