Covid-19 and Politics

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Boris' Dad flew to his Villa in greece via Bulgaria to get round the travel ban from Greece to the UK.

A few people are being critical. (to say the least)
 
That's interesting. And worrying. It's clear the virus has been circulating pretty freely in Leicester for weeks, and who knows about other towns. This is not the place to be when you're opening up. The place to be is that you're poised to jump on every new case and contact-trace it into oblivion. To contain any clusters that pop up so that the virus doesn't get a hold in the wider community. Opening up when the virus already has a hold in the wider community is suicidal.

Contrast the cluster in Annan and Gretna. Nine cases. (Only seven in the reported stats so two must only have been identified yesterday.) The first of these cases was reported on Monday of this week. Three days ago. They're on it. Everyone is at home isolating and the contacts are being tracked down. I imagine the people involved in the English side of the cluster (Longtown?) are being treated the same way. That's how you try to do it. I don't think they have a hope in hell in Leicester unless they lock down a lot harder, and how are they going to do that unless they put a police cordon round the area 24/7?

And by the way let's not blame English visitors for the Annan/Gretna cluster. I'd bet very heavily on this being caused by Scots travelling south to visit the flesh-pots of Carlisle, given that Carlisle is open and Annan and Dumfries are still closed - or were until Monday. Yes we need some sort of control on the border, but it's as much to keep Scots living in virus-free areas from going to the pub in an infected area as it is to control virus introduction by tourists coming north.


If you've signed up to the Covidzoe app, they show some extra data from their own analyses.

This is from their latest report to the government on people reporting not feeling well.

SmartSelect_20200702-111132_Drive.jpg
 
If you've signed up to the Covidzoe app, they show some extra data from their own analyses.

This is from their latest report to the government on people reporting not feeling well.

View attachment 42503


That's interesting, but of course there could be any number of reasons for people not feeling well. The modellers in Scotland, who are not known for their over-optimistic forecasts shall we say, think there are only about 1,500 people in the country in the infectious stage of the virus at the moment.

This map is interesting.

[imgw=640]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eb3K9z3WsAAeikm?format=jpg[/imgw]

I wonder if Wales is going to have to lock down Merthyr Tydfil. Some other bits of England are looking a bit dodgy too. Is that Bradford, Sheffield and Manchester standing out?
 
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That's interesting, but of course there could be any number of reasons for people not feeling well. The modellers in Scotland, who are not known for their over-optimistic forecasts shall we say, think there are only about 1,500 people in the country in the infectious stage of the virus at the moment.

This map is interesting.

[imgw=640]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eb3K9z3WsAAeikm?format=jpg[/imgw]

I wonder if Wales is going to have to lock down Merthyr Tydfil. Some other bits of England are looking a bit dodgy too. Is that Bradford, Sheffield and Manchester standing out?

Yes, that's consistent with the data from that app.


https://covid.joinzoe.com/data

Blackpool looks potentially concerning
 
Here's an interesting article from a Welsh newspaper.

https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/areas-wales-highest-levels-coronavirus-18517404

It points out that of the 12 councils with the highest number of recorded coronavirus cases overall in Britain, almost all are in Wales and two are in Scotland. There isn't a single English local authority in there at all. However if you look at the recorded death statistics these councils are nowhere to be seen. Because England has never published true figures on infections detected. It's harder to hide the deaths (though they tried that too for a while by only counting people who had died in hospital).

(Midlothian is the real surprise there for me. It's the next LA to where I live, the county boundary is only three miles away, and it's where I do any shopping I can't do in the village. It's never been a problem area at all in Scotland terms, unless they're including Edinburgh city in there which I suppose they might be, and last week it had no new cases at all.)

Is the under-testing and under-reporting in England just incompetence, or are they actively trying to mislead and make England look good when it's not, I wonder.
 
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Is the under-testing and under-reporting in England just incompetence, or are they actively trying to mislead and make England look good when it's not, I wonder.
Given who's in charge a mix; incompetence that they're happy with.
 
I suspect you're right. At the beginning Sturgeon said one thing I agreed with (probably the only one at that point), that she was determined to get honest recording of cases and deaths. By and large she seems to have succeeded in that, although now the natural noise in the reporting as odd cases are added and subtracted is actually swamping the real results, as the prevalence is so low.

Ironically we periodically got pelters from Tory politicians about how bad Scotland was compared to England by this or that metric, when in fact the truth was that England was hiding at least half its care home deaths, and a huge slice of its positive test results. The true statistics as they come through show that Scotland's death and infection rates have been catastrophic, just not as catastrophic as England's.
 
I suspect you're right. At the beginning Sturgeon said one thing I agreed with (probably the only one at that point), that she was determined to get honest recording of cases and deaths. By and large she seems to have succeeded in that, although now the natural noise in the reporting as odd cases are added and subtracted is actually swamping the real results, as the prevalence is so low.

Ironically we periodically got pelters from Tory politicians about how bad Scotland was compared to England by this or that metric, when in fact the truth was that England was hiding at least half its care home deaths, and a huge slice of its positive test results. The true statistics as they come through show that Scotland's death and infection rates have been catastrophic, just not as catastrophic as England's.

Is this the place to talk about so-called lockdown sceptics?

Lots of cherrypicking and messing of data to claim it's no worse than a bad flu season and that deaths are mostly due to the lockdown (yes, really claiming that!)

Anyway the ONS data doesn't support that - especially for England and Wales ( Scotland is recorded separately).

It's probably relevant because you can see the undercounting by 2000 to 4000 per weeek for the 5 weeks of the peak.

EaFTlSsXQAErfow.jpg

ETA you can see that now, we at least look to be accounting for the COVID-19 deaths

I ended up making a a Twitter thread about this, and unsurprisingly getting blocked by one prominent advocate when I asked how he made his graphs.

This graph was in reply to one claim that winter 2017-2018 was equivalent
 
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No figures on deaths or infections today?
I haven't been able to find the figures for yesterday. Even the BBC's summary page, updated daily, doesn't include them for the first time ever AFAIK, though it looks like they've added them to the graphs. By eye, yesterday's deaths seem to be slighter higher than Wednesday's, which was 176.

ETA: Actually I'm not sure they have had added Thursday's figure to the graphs. They repeat that Wednesday's figure was 176 but even that's buried in the text. In previous updates there's been a graphic near the top of the page giving, aot, the previous day's number of deaths and new infections. That graphic seems to have been removed entirely.

E again TA: The global Covid tracker I use doesn't have any UK numbers for yesterday either, only the cumulative numbers.
 
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seems the govt hasn't released them, I wonder if that's anything to do with the pubs opening on Saturday?
It's being pushed by the govt as 'Super Saturday'
Don't want to worry people.
 
seems the govt hasn't released them, I wonder if that's anything to do with the pubs opening on Saturday?
It's being pushed by the govt as 'Super Saturday'
Don't want to worry people.

Remember, if you get sick because of the government rushing through lifting lockdown restrictions in the middle of an uptick in infections during a pandemic, it's your fault for being insufficiently alert. :rolleyes:
 
seems the govt hasn't released them, I wonder if that's anything to do with the pubs opening on Saturday?
It's being pushed by the govt as 'Super Saturday'
Don't want to worry people.

This site says 89 for yesterday.

It does have this note, which might explain any delays:
The methodology for reporting positive cases changed on 2 July 2020 to remove duplicates within and across pillars 1 and 2, to ensure that a person who tests positive is only counted once. Due to this change, and a revision of historical data in pillar 1, the cumulative total for positive cases is 30,302 lower than if you added the daily figure to yesterday’s total.
 
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Is this the place to talk about so-called lockdown sceptics?

Lots of cherrypicking and messing of data to claim it's no worse than a bad flu season and that deaths are mostly due to the lockdown (yes, really claiming that!)

Anyway the ONS data doesn't support that - especially for England and Wales ( Scotland is recorded separately).

It's probably relevant because you can see the undercounting by 2000 to 4000 per weeek for the 5 weeks of the peak.

View attachment 42511

ETA you can see that now, we at least look to be accounting for the COVID-19 deaths

I ended up making a a Twitter thread about this, and unsurprisingly getting blocked by one prominent advocate when I asked how he made his graphs.

This graph was in reply to one claim that winter 2017-2018 was equivalent
A Facebook friend was trying to claim it was no worse than flu, pointing at the ONS figures, but that was before Covid-19 deaths were actually showing up in the published figures.
 
A Facebook friend was trying to claim it was no worse than flu, pointing at the ONS figures, but that was before Covid-19 deaths were actually showing up in the published figures.

Ah.. I'm talking a lot later... like now.

Anyway here's my thread on it as Alistair Haimes seems to be a goto person for such spurious analyses.

https://twitter.com/ParkinJim/status/1275854955778314240?s=20

Basically, this graph, if not completely "fiction", is about as true as a John Wayne war film "based on real events"

EbS-yGpXsAAloyb.jpg
 
This site says 89 for yesterday.

It does have this note, which might explain any delays:


Scotland announced five new infections and one further death yesterday at the usual time (12.30). The local authority area new infections added up to ten though. With the numbers so low the noise in the data sometimes overwhelms the actual numbers!

England apparently decided to sort out its data recording yesterday and incorporate the pillar 2 tests they'd been concealing for months to make themselves look better. By all accounts they have been doing a thorough job of it, by allocating the newly-disclosed results to the correct days and also removing duplicate counting (some people were tested by both pillar 1 and pillar 2 and had been counted twice). So this explains the delay in the England figures I think and anyone looking at them now should be able to get a much better idea not just of what's going on but of what was going on. Just a pity they didn't do it sooner and it took Leicester to bring it to a head.

I also saw a report that they were going to start issuing the results, in public, by postcode area. If this is true it will be absolutely great and will allow people to get a real idea of what's going on in their local area. I've been howling about this for weeks, because the LA region where I live is about 100 miles wide and rumour had it that the grumbling viral activity being reported was all centred on a care home in Eyemouth which is genuinely getting on for 100 miles from me. So if England starts producing postcode area data hopefully Scotland will have to do the same. I can't wait!

One thing that's coming out is that Leicester really is the worst area in England by a fair margin and other towns that have been mentioned do not have problems to nearly the same extent. The only other comparable area is Merthyr in Wales where there was a big meat packing plant cluster which bumped the numbers up really high but which the authorities say they have under control by contact tracing. So maybe Leicester will be an isolated incident at least for now.

The very high infection numbers for many places in England are still a worry though, considering the opening up that's happening. The cases occurring at the moment aren't being contact-traced and isolated so how will they manage when people are going to the pub?
 
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