Are you using just reported positive cases to infer the value of R on this website? Or are you using estimates from local authorities? Or are you doing your own epidemiological modelling to go from raw positive cases to R values?
In the UK, epidemiological modelling is done by various government bodies and universities, and it is this that is being reported in OP:
tl;dr is that we use a single datasource (not managed by us but by many dedicated others) and use case counts to estimate number of currently infectious and from that we estimate R. The running time of our R estimation calculations for all regions is around 1.5 hours on a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet.
Sometimes strange looking results on our site picked up by guests can be fed back to the maintainers of the datasource resulting in a correction of the data.
On our website, R value estimation is done by my father, a retired computer science professor with a long history of mathematical modelling experience. This is hacker news right? :)
Is it possible to get aggregate numbers? Say for the Nordics and for Scandinavia, or other such regions of tightly knit countries or regions? Most "Scandis" like to compare with the other Scandinavian countries, and with select European countries that are similar, such as the Netherlands and Belgium.
Not at the moment unfortunately. The display breaks down by the hierarchical organisation of the data source.
It might be possible to build up a list of regions as you navigate through the site, and then show only those in the bubble chart so that you can compare them. Interesting idea.
We wouldn't be able to aggregate infectious or R estimates for one or more regions together as the computation for those is done during deploy and then that processed data is uploaded along with the static site (it doesn't connect to a database to fetch data on the fly).
Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November?
Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown?
FWIW I’ve always been suspicious of the way R is used by the government and media. It’s always going to be a best guess averaged over an area, but with asymptomatic transmission and initially poor access to testing, seems like it should be treated with caution. Not dismissed, but not the main driver, I guess.
> what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November
I assume our political leaders made a decision with the following inputs:
0. As someone with a degree in classics, I don't have an intuitive understanding of how fast exponential growth can get out of control.
1. The death rate dropped from 9500/week in mid-April to 300/week in mid-July. And stayed below 300/week until the end of September.
2. Our scientific/medical advisors say we should keep things locked down - but it's their job to be cautious, they're medical advisors not economic advisors. I have to weigh up their advice against other interests.
3. Compared to at the start of the first lockdown, we now have more testing capacity and PPE. Face masks are now available for everyone not just medical staff, for example.
4. There are loads of industries saying if they can't re-open they'll need a government bail-out and we've already spent an eye-watering amount of money on the furlough scheme.
5. Some of these industries, like gyms and universities, point out that having them open is good for the nation. Keeping schools closed seems to be widening the performance gap between rich and poor children. People avoiding hospitals is leading to more cancers going untreated.
6. Countries like Sweden and America haven't locked down at all.
7. We're going to keep a lot of restrictions in place, with restaurants and theatres running at a fraction of their normal capacity, so it's not like we're going completely back to normal.
8. The prime minister's own chief advisor is breaking lockdown rules because he's bored of them, and punishing him isn't an option, so it'd be a lot less embarrassing if we could make what he did allowed retroactively.
Between these inputs, our leaders convinced themselves that lowering restrictions was the right thing to do in August.
I can understand schools opening, but the devastating double peak when universities opened (Freshers week and then the 2nd/3rd years the week after) was totally avoidable.
There is minor peak at the end of August, but that is in my opinion actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, as otherwise it would have been a month long peak.
"the highest risk activity" seems somewhat hyperbolic. Eating at restaurants when tables are appropriately spaced and masks are worn when not actually eating is not extremely dangerous.
what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November?
Starting the new school year, for one thing. For many of us that was critical to letting us keep working (and mass home-schooling and online teaching for young kids was not working).
> Starting the new school year, for one thing. For many of us that was critical to letting us keep working
Is this not why the situation persists? Lockdown hard then go back to pretty-much-normal seems vastly preferable. I say this from NZ.
The hit has been hard, but it seems that partial lockdowns and half measures actually lead to worse outcomes. The death toll is certainly on another scale when you don’t lock down.
Fair point, and you're right something had to give on that score. Classroom pods for young kids seem to work fairly well overall, it just ups the risk for visiting the grandparents.
The university side didn't seem to work out as well - possibly partly because uni staff are (understandably) less willing to work crunch hours to meet duty of care than primary school staff.
Headline begs the question - what the hell did we think we were doing between August and November?
Numbers were low which makes R very hard to calculate. When numbers are low, it doesn't matter much if there is some growth. And, finally, we were under tiered area restrictions depending on local rates (though I felt the chosen restrictions were a bit odd). Finally, in some parts of the country, a full lockdown didn't really make sense even when it was ordered (though arguably, this is lockdown-lite compared to the spring).
Keeping R<1 is the mandatory criteria for not having your health system collapse. So the goal of lockdowns is to make R<1 and to keep it that way.
As soon as R>1 you need the next lockdown, so when it's working and R is going down, it kind of makes sense to wait for R<0.8 and not just R<0.999 before you end the lockdown, or else you'll have to restart the next one very soon.
> Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown?
NO!!!
Sorry this is infuriating. What’s the point of getting to R<1 if you then immediately end lockdown and have it shoot right back us? It’s a necessary step, but just abstep in the process. You need to stay in lockdown long enough to get case counts low enough to be able to fully trace.
I have found it consistently disappointing that the BBC has been putting out UK government statistics and interpretations uncritically - as we see (for example) in the headline here.
The More or Less podcast, also from the BBC, does a good job of digging into what the stats actually mean and whether they're correct or misleading.
Their main beef over the pandemic has been when ministers and the government have been lying fairly explicitly about testing targets (counting posted tests as completed tests).
I find BBC as a whole hasn't been as critical, but they certainly seem to be at least making an effort to explain and contextualise. They aren't parroting government statistics as much as they could be doing.
It's the number to eventually end the largest restrictions but keeping it low was always going to require either continued light lockdown or a large monitoring project to catch and quarantine random popup cases like China is doing. Just recently in the US I've only had two places doing temperature checks which is wild to me at this point, it was the local courthouse and a random artists collective store I was visiting.
> Just recently in the US I've only had two places doing temperature checks which is wild to me at this point
I've gotten a temperature check every time I've entered a commercial building for the last few months (in NYC), but temperature checks hew dangerously close to safety theater.
Temperature checks won't catch asymptomatic people, and a lot of covid cases are asymptomatic. I don't see how temperature checks ought to make anyone feel safer.
Wall-to-wall testing would be my preferred route. In fairness I think that would be gov.uk's preferred route too if they could organise it (they can't).
I got temperature check and covid symptom questionnaire on entry to (private) hospital, but it's not widespread.
The R number is in essence the driver of this pandemic. But like you say the published figure is at best a conservative estimate and at worst an educated guess. Imo the way it’s reduced down into this singular all-explaining number belittles the sheer scale of variables and complexities going on in the real world. But hey, explaining that would be too much like hard work for many tabloid outlets.
R is a useful value for statisticians. For policy makers it’s just mumbo jumbo that means exactly the same as the infections graph: if it’s going up, R is above 1, if it’s going down R is below 1. It’s not magic.
After the first lock down the government allowed everyone to go on holiday abroad. In theory people had to quarantine on their return, but compliance was very low and spread during the flight back was inevitable.
That's not unrealistic though, I don't envy anyone in the world having to balance the economy and their excess deaths - in the US especially economic downturns can directly translate to deaths and suffering of their own.
Looking at https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
and you can see that current daily infections (tested and confirmed) is way higher than any time in September as are deaths. So whilst the R number and how it is calculated may be down, I'll not place my caution upon such `good` news.
After all this R of below 1 is based upon a reduction in those testing positive and 3 weeks of a country lock-down and you would expect that number to reduce, otherwise your whole reason for a lock down would be proven to of been futile. So that's good, lock downs do work - science shown that here(again).
Looking at the same site, I see "People tested positive" is down by 25% in the last 7 days, and the number tested has been stable in the same time interval, so the ratio is also down by 25%.
I don't see any other figure called "current daily infections"; do you mean something other than "people tested positive"?
The reduction in the last 7 days is considerable and suggests lockdown is working surprisingly well (considering it is hardly noticeable in some places, even though other places are more severely closed).
Prior to that it was indeed higher than any time in September, and deaths still are, hopefully just due to time lag.
If it's just time lag and 25% reduction per 7 days is already in the pipeline, that is very promising.
For reference, this is the former head of research for Pfizer. The video (and him) have been banned off all the social media platforms due to “misinformation” (really a disagreement about the efficacy of the PCR protocol and how it has lead to a larger false positive rate).
The reason why they are banned is because what he is saying sounds plausible but is very, very likely wrong.
First of all, the number of tests isn't growing at the same rate as the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths: https://imgur.com/2cVrGz7
You can notice the very low positive rate in mid August (150 000 tests and only 500 cases - even if all false positives, thats 0.3% FP rate)
But okay, lets assume that they did something to ramp up the false positive rate, If we look at the daily rate of growth (% increase) for cases, hospitalizations and deaths:
We can see that there is a perfect exponential 7% rate of growth starting in September and slowly decaying after. But more than that, the rate of growth in hospitalizations and deaths also follows the same pattern almost perfectly but with a 5 day and 16 day delay, respectively!
If you were accidentally getting false positives, you would either not expect hospitalizations and deaths to grow at the same rate as false positives do. Even if they did, you would expect them to grow at exactly the same time without any delays. If there is no causal relationship they should all grow at the same rate, at the same time as any other random subgroup of people
To get the delay to happen, you would have to somehow perfectly fine tune the false positives for hospitalizations and deaths as well. In which case you're better off just making numbers up.
But more importantly, there is a much simpler explanation, which we get if we super-impose google mobility trends % increase in amount spent staying at home, and we shift cases by 6 days (avg time to symptoms), hospitalizations by 11 and deaths by 22 days:
We can see that the rate of growth is almost perfectly inversely correlated with the % increase in staying at home (with perhaps some light seasonal / immunity / other measures effects included).
Additionally we have non-PCR data like the Zoe symptom tracker app largely corraborating more or less the same rate of growth as detected by PCR tests: https://covid.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time
But more generally, there is a fundamental problem with social media: it unfortunately acts a generator of large amounts of "perfect bullshit".
First, it gets thousands of people to generate various conspiracy theories and plausable looking ideas. Many of these will be interesting and have some real merit, but most of them wont. (By itself, this doesn't do much - we're people, we generate ideas and theories, many of them wrong - nothing special about this process).
Then, give people the retweet button, and have them act as a filter for the most convincing looking bullshit. This is where things go terribly wrong. Retweets are a powerful amplifier. What gets retweeted? Is it the most throughly researched content? Highly unlikely, most people aren't experts in the subject (heck, I don't even dare go into the mechanics of the theory, only the math and stats) but they will still retweet if they find it interesting, plausible and aligned with what they strongly believe or wish was true.
Side note: having some authority (Nobel prize, etc) also helps a lot with this process. Still, remember that social networks won't differentiate whether 1 scientist is actually having this idea or many, and worse, it won't necessarily inform you if many scientists are actually demonstrating how the idea is wrong (unless they make it equally interesting for a retweet)
Finally, trick people by giving them dopamine system rewards (notifications for retweets and likes). They inevitably end up surrounded by a group of supporters that praise and retweet what they say. This whole process makes it so much harder for people (even scientists) to go back on what they said if it turns out they were wrong.
So what do you end up with? You end up with a system that delivers the most perfect bullshit to the largest number of people. The scientists that tweet the same old boring conservative stuff (words like "likely" often appear) are largely voiceless.
I don't think any single person is necessarily at fault in this system. But I do think that the system is a total disaster, and we have to invent something better than this. These simplistic social network designs are failing humanity.
I’m sorry, don’t want to ban other (especially qualified) viewpoints just because they are “likely wrong”.
To his point and yours, how does this compare to normal flu? I don’t know, I don’t see that example in your data. The problem as this highly qualified individual states it, is that they’re looking for a diagnosis and are changing the number of times amplification of the dna occurs over time.
Am I sure of his claims, no.
But either way, I appreciate hearing both view points. Having minored in bioengineering in school I can understand both arguments and make the determination myself... provided I have the info.
> But okay, lets assume that they did something to ramp up the false positive rate, If we look at the daily rate of growth (% increase) for cases, hospitalizations and deaths:
> We can see that there is a perfect exponential 7% rate of growth starting in September and slowly decaying after. But more than that, the rate of growth in hospitalizations and deaths also follows the same pattern almost perfectly but with a 5 day and 16 day delay, respectively!
What locale is this graph from? Because it does not at all match.. let's say, the US, where there's now been 3 peaks and the number of daily cases doubled each peak, but the daily deaths was highest in the first peak. They are not growing at remotely the same rate over here, even with a 5 or 16 day delay.
We empircally know he is wrong because when schools went back there was a MASSSSSSIVE spike it requested tests (as school children got their start of season colds and worried parents got them tested in the first 2 weeks of school returning).
But there was not a MASSSSSIVE spike in Covid cases.
If Covid numbers were being driven by false positives then there HAD to be a massive spike in cases as testing numbers spiked. There was not. So false positives cannot be the reason.
The crazy thing for that article is, it basically says there aren't any excess deaths, which is one of those conclusions where you ought to stop and think "Wait, surely that's a high level statistic I could cross-check?" and sure enough yes there are excess deaths statistics calculated, that's a normal thing countries do - and of course the US stats shot up due to COVID-19.
It's written by an economist, which maybe explains why they didn't check. You won't get far in economics if you insist on checking whether your work matches reality. Ask Arthur Laffer.
So compared to 2018 and 2019, there is no change in deaths for those aged 45 and younger.
However there is an increase in death apparent for those aged above that, such that overall deaths when comparing up to Week 46 are 9.5% higher in 2020 than 2019. However, 2019 was a very weak flu season, with no excess death periods in England:
If you reduce 2020 deaths by the amount that didn't occur in 2019 due to the weak flu season but did occur in 2018, then 2020's deaths are only 6.8% higher than 2018. Consider also that in those two years the population of the UK aged 45 and above increased by 1.7%.
The question is - is COVID just shuffling fundamentally unhealthy people off their mortal coil a bit faster than would have occurred naturally? How many COVID deaths are really due to ongoing societal issues like Vitamin D deficiency, air pollution, poor diets and obesity? Or simply just old age?
Is shutting down and completely disrupting society for something which is about 5% worse than a regular flu season in terms of deaths really justified? Would we have noticed without the media attention?
Why would someone who deals in facts do such a thing? Surely the correct position would be to correct and remove.
Personally anyone who refers to his material is tarnished.
On a general point, there are many people now growing in fame (and monetising that) due to the pandemic. Are their interests aligned with a pandemic ending, what do they pivot to?
Even with false positives the real case number is probably larger just because of the combination of asymptomatic cases and the lack of randomized community screening.
In the UK, one of the main things used to estimate the value of R is randomly sampling people from the population and testing them for Covid-19 regardless of symptoms.
Is having the virus without symptoms really a case? The Coronavirus act says so. However, there's only tenuous evidence of asymptomatic and presymptiomatic transmission of the virus.
Brexit was sorted out ages ago. No deal. Johnson has wanted that from the start of his Preimership, doesn't need to deal and can try and blame the EU for when things go wrong.
They probably don't want no-deal, but it's not in their interest to bother to try particularly hard to avoid it.
Regardless the country is not in a good place. I look forward to Kent being flattened and concreted over to form a giant truck stop.
Thank god we're having a government funded festival of Brexit. £120E6 fuck you to everyone who'll actually have to live in the country they've shat on in the coming decades
It does not hijack it. OP simply contains bbc.co.uk link, which gets redirected to bbc.com, so when you press "back" you get back to the bbc.co.uk link and immediately get redirected back to bbc.com. By pressing the button twice fast enough you will get back to HN.
BBC should be doing a 302 (or 301 if you assume people never change countries) redirect. Then the there would be no back button problems. Currently they're serving a page via a 200, then doing a Javascript redirect.
The same is currently happening in Romania [1] (the country that I live in), even though we don't have the crazy and draconian restrictions imposed on countries like the UK. Not to mention that I've read yesterday the British PM saying that those restrictions will most likely last until late winter - early next spring, as "the beast" must be defeated/tamed or similar such non-sense. This isn't even technocratic leadership (which I'm not a big fan of), it's cargo-cult leadership.
Given the population density of the UK is three times that of Romania it’s not really a surprise that you can get your R number below one with less strict measures than we have in the UK.
Most probably the school being out (since I think early October), indoor restaurants and coffee-shops are closed (but this being Romania there are many “original” workarounds for that) and there are a couple of cities under similar lockdown as in Britain (you’re not allowed to go outside unless for work/essential shopping/small recreation) but not a lot of people respect even those (because it’s not heavily enforced).
Readit News
There is also a search on the landing page: https://reproduction.live which I should probably put in the sidebar of the dashboard page as well.
In the UK, epidemiological modelling is done by various government bodies and universities, and it is this that is being reported in OP:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk
tl;dr is that we use a single datasource (not managed by us but by many dedicated others) and use case counts to estimate number of currently infectious and from that we estimate R. The running time of our R estimation calculations for all regions is around 1.5 hours on a $10/month Digital Ocean droplet.
Sometimes strange looking results on our site picked up by guests can be fed back to the maintainers of the datasource resulting in a correction of the data.
On our website, R value estimation is done by my father, a retired computer science professor with a long history of mathematical modelling experience. This is hacker news right? :)
It might be possible to build up a list of regions as you navigate through the site, and then show only those in the bubble chart so that you can compare them. Interesting idea.
We wouldn't be able to aggregate infectious or R estimates for one or more regions together as the computation for those is done during deploy and then that processed data is uploaded along with the static site (it doesn't connect to a database to fetch data on the fly).
Wasn’t R<1 the magic number for ending the first lockdown?
FWIW I’ve always been suspicious of the way R is used by the government and media. It’s always going to be a best guess averaged over an area, but with asymptomatic transmission and initially poor access to testing, seems like it should be treated with caution. Not dismissed, but not the main driver, I guess.
I assume our political leaders made a decision with the following inputs:
0. As someone with a degree in classics, I don't have an intuitive understanding of how fast exponential growth can get out of control.
1. The death rate dropped from 9500/week in mid-April to 300/week in mid-July. And stayed below 300/week until the end of September.
2. Our scientific/medical advisors say we should keep things locked down - but it's their job to be cautious, they're medical advisors not economic advisors. I have to weigh up their advice against other interests.
3. Compared to at the start of the first lockdown, we now have more testing capacity and PPE. Face masks are now available for everyone not just medical staff, for example.
4. There are loads of industries saying if they can't re-open they'll need a government bail-out and we've already spent an eye-watering amount of money on the furlough scheme.
5. Some of these industries, like gyms and universities, point out that having them open is good for the nation. Keeping schools closed seems to be widening the performance gap between rich and poor children. People avoiding hospitals is leading to more cancers going untreated.
6. Countries like Sweden and America haven't locked down at all.
7. We're going to keep a lot of restrictions in place, with restaurants and theatres running at a fraction of their normal capacity, so it's not like we're going completely back to normal.
8. The prime minister's own chief advisor is breaking lockdown rules because he's bored of them, and punishing him isn't an option, so it'd be a lot less embarrassing if we could make what he did allowed retroactively.
Between these inputs, our leaders convinced themselves that lowering restrictions was the right thing to do in August.
They paid us to eat at restaurants ... basically the highest risk activity.
R shot up only during two events. Schools opening and Universities opening, and you can see this clearly on this graph someone else linked:
https://reproduction.live/world/GB
I can understand schools opening, but the devastating double peak when universities opened (Freshers week and then the 2nd/3rd years the week after) was totally avoidable.
There is minor peak at the end of August, but that is in my opinion actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, as otherwise it would have been a month long peak.
> Eligible establishments are those in which food is sold for immediate on-premises consumption.
...
> The discount cannot be applied to the following items:
> ...
> * food or drink that is to be consumed off premises
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/get-more-informat...
20%+ of secondary school kids absent (isolating, ill, or being kept away), but they still stubbornly insist on keeping them open.
Starting the new school year, for one thing. For many of us that was critical to letting us keep working (and mass home-schooling and online teaching for young kids was not working).
Is this not why the situation persists? Lockdown hard then go back to pretty-much-normal seems vastly preferable. I say this from NZ. The hit has been hard, but it seems that partial lockdowns and half measures actually lead to worse outcomes. The death toll is certainly on another scale when you don’t lock down.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.rnz.co.nz/article/ba935329-...
The university side didn't seem to work out as well - possibly partly because uni staff are (understandably) less willing to work crunch hours to meet duty of care than primary school staff.
Numbers were low which makes R very hard to calculate. When numbers are low, it doesn't matter much if there is some growth. And, finally, we were under tiered area restrictions depending on local rates (though I felt the chosen restrictions were a bit odd). Finally, in some parts of the country, a full lockdown didn't really make sense even when it was ordered (though arguably, this is lockdown-lite compared to the spring).
People were rebounding from not being able to visit their friends for 6 months.
R was good enough in London, back then. That's all they were worried about.
As soon as R>1 you need the next lockdown, so when it's working and R is going down, it kind of makes sense to wait for R<0.8 and not just R<0.999 before you end the lockdown, or else you'll have to restart the next one very soon.
NO!!!
Sorry this is infuriating. What’s the point of getting to R<1 if you then immediately end lockdown and have it shoot right back us? It’s a necessary step, but just abstep in the process. You need to stay in lockdown long enough to get case counts low enough to be able to fully trace.
To be fair, they've made a mess of the whole pandemic, which is very disappointing given that public health was invented there.
Their main beef over the pandemic has been when ministers and the government have been lying fairly explicitly about testing targets (counting posted tests as completed tests).
I find BBC as a whole hasn't been as critical, but they certainly seem to be at least making an effort to explain and contextualise. They aren't parroting government statistics as much as they could be doing.
Straight out of the Trump playbook of course... Every critical question and exposure of wrong doing is actually just biased media.
I've gotten a temperature check every time I've entered a commercial building for the last few months (in NYC), but temperature checks hew dangerously close to safety theater.
I got temperature check and covid symptom questionnaire on entry to (private) hospital, but it's not widespread.
https://abc13.com/temperature-checks-covid-coronavirus-sympt...
R tells you: the graph is likely to keep going up (or will peak and go down). Policy makers should care about this more.
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The headline assumes its conclusion in a premise? Perhaps you meant the headline raises the question?
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/beg-the-...
But 'begs the question' is avoiding the issue. Not (necessarily) assuming the conclusion.
After all this R of below 1 is based upon a reduction in those testing positive and 3 weeks of a country lock-down and you would expect that number to reduce, otherwise your whole reason for a lock down would be proven to of been futile. So that's good, lock downs do work - science shown that here(again).
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/the-r-number-in-the-uk#other-key...
I don't see any other figure called "current daily infections"; do you mean something other than "people tested positive"?
The reduction in the last 7 days is considerable and suggests lockdown is working surprisingly well (considering it is hardly noticeable in some places, even though other places are more severely closed).
Prior to that it was indeed higher than any time in September, and deaths still are, hopefully just due to time lag.
If it's just time lag and 25% reduction per 7 days is already in the pipeline, that is very promising.
https://lbry.tv/Mike-Yeadon-Unlocked:0
For reference, this is the former head of research for Pfizer. The video (and him) have been banned off all the social media platforms due to “misinformation” (really a disagreement about the efficacy of the PCR protocol and how it has lead to a larger false positive rate).
First of all, the number of tests isn't growing at the same rate as the number of cases, hospitalizations and deaths: https://imgur.com/2cVrGz7
You can notice the very low positive rate in mid August (150 000 tests and only 500 cases - even if all false positives, thats 0.3% FP rate)
But okay, lets assume that they did something to ramp up the false positive rate, If we look at the daily rate of growth (% increase) for cases, hospitalizations and deaths:
https://imgur.com/bEix1Fo
We can see that there is a perfect exponential 7% rate of growth starting in September and slowly decaying after. But more than that, the rate of growth in hospitalizations and deaths also follows the same pattern almost perfectly but with a 5 day and 16 day delay, respectively!
If you were accidentally getting false positives, you would either not expect hospitalizations and deaths to grow at the same rate as false positives do. Even if they did, you would expect them to grow at exactly the same time without any delays. If there is no causal relationship they should all grow at the same rate, at the same time as any other random subgroup of people
To get the delay to happen, you would have to somehow perfectly fine tune the false positives for hospitalizations and deaths as well. In which case you're better off just making numbers up.
But more importantly, there is a much simpler explanation, which we get if we super-impose google mobility trends % increase in amount spent staying at home, and we shift cases by 6 days (avg time to symptoms), hospitalizations by 11 and deaths by 22 days:
https://imgur.com/UKklUIP
We can see that the rate of growth is almost perfectly inversely correlated with the % increase in staying at home (with perhaps some light seasonal / immunity / other measures effects included).
Additionally we have non-PCR data like the Zoe symptom tracker app largely corraborating more or less the same rate of growth as detected by PCR tests: https://covid.joinzoe.com/data#levels-over-time
First, it gets thousands of people to generate various conspiracy theories and plausable looking ideas. Many of these will be interesting and have some real merit, but most of them wont. (By itself, this doesn't do much - we're people, we generate ideas and theories, many of them wrong - nothing special about this process).
Then, give people the retweet button, and have them act as a filter for the most convincing looking bullshit. This is where things go terribly wrong. Retweets are a powerful amplifier. What gets retweeted? Is it the most throughly researched content? Highly unlikely, most people aren't experts in the subject (heck, I don't even dare go into the mechanics of the theory, only the math and stats) but they will still retweet if they find it interesting, plausible and aligned with what they strongly believe or wish was true.
Side note: having some authority (Nobel prize, etc) also helps a lot with this process. Still, remember that social networks won't differentiate whether 1 scientist is actually having this idea or many, and worse, it won't necessarily inform you if many scientists are actually demonstrating how the idea is wrong (unless they make it equally interesting for a retweet)
Finally, trick people by giving them dopamine system rewards (notifications for retweets and likes). They inevitably end up surrounded by a group of supporters that praise and retweet what they say. This whole process makes it so much harder for people (even scientists) to go back on what they said if it turns out they were wrong.
So what do you end up with? You end up with a system that delivers the most perfect bullshit to the largest number of people. The scientists that tweet the same old boring conservative stuff (words like "likely" often appear) are largely voiceless.
I don't think any single person is necessarily at fault in this system. But I do think that the system is a total disaster, and we have to invent something better than this. These simplistic social network designs are failing humanity.
To his point and yours, how does this compare to normal flu? I don’t know, I don’t see that example in your data. The problem as this highly qualified individual states it, is that they’re looking for a diagnosis and are changing the number of times amplification of the dna occurs over time.
Am I sure of his claims, no.
But either way, I appreciate hearing both view points. Having minored in bioengineering in school I can understand both arguments and make the determination myself... provided I have the info.
> https://imgur.com/bEix1Fo
> We can see that there is a perfect exponential 7% rate of growth starting in September and slowly decaying after. But more than that, the rate of growth in hospitalizations and deaths also follows the same pattern almost perfectly but with a 5 day and 16 day delay, respectively!
What locale is this graph from? Because it does not at all match.. let's say, the US, where there's now been 3 peaks and the number of daily cases doubled each peak, but the daily deaths was highest in the first peak. They are not growing at remotely the same rate over here, even with a 5 or 16 day delay.
Wrong on a spectacular level.
We empircally know he is wrong because when schools went back there was a MASSSSSSIVE spike it requested tests (as school children got their start of season colds and worried parents got them tested in the first 2 weeks of school returning).
But there was not a MASSSSSIVE spike in Covid cases.
If Covid numbers were being driven by false positives then there HAD to be a massive spike in cases as testing numbers spiked. There was not. So false positives cannot be the reason.
Johns Hopkins Newsletter deletes article re excess Covid-19 deaths --
https://twitter.com/JHUNewsLetter/status/1332100155986882562
It's written by an economist, which maybe explains why they didn't check. You won't get far in economics if you insist on checking whether your work matches reality. Ask Arthur Laffer.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
So compared to 2018 and 2019, there is no change in deaths for those aged 45 and younger.
However there is an increase in death apparent for those aged above that, such that overall deaths when comparing up to Week 46 are 9.5% higher in 2020 than 2019. However, 2019 was a very weak flu season, with no excess death periods in England:
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country
If you reduce 2020 deaths by the amount that didn't occur in 2019 due to the weak flu season but did occur in 2018, then 2020's deaths are only 6.8% higher than 2018. Consider also that in those two years the population of the UK aged 45 and above increased by 1.7%.
The question is - is COVID just shuffling fundamentally unhealthy people off their mortal coil a bit faster than would have occurred naturally? How many COVID deaths are really due to ongoing societal issues like Vitamin D deficiency, air pollution, poor diets and obesity? Or simply just old age?
Is shutting down and completely disrupting society for something which is about 5% worse than a regular flu season in terms of deaths really justified? Would we have noticed without the media attention?
Why would someone who deals in facts do such a thing? Surely the correct position would be to correct and remove.
Personally anyone who refers to his material is tarnished.
On a general point, there are many people now growing in fame (and monetising that) due to the pandemic. Are their interests aligned with a pandemic ending, what do they pivot to?
Here's a pretty good explainer: https://twitter.com/andrew_croxford/status/13308829944716533...
And another: https://twitter.com/andrew_croxford/status/13317220787777290...
Lack of it? But isn’t that exactly how R is estimated?
Regardless the country is not in a good place. I look forward to Kent being flattened and concreted over to form a giant truck stop.
Thank god we're having a government funded festival of Brexit. £120E6 fuck you to everyone who'll actually have to live in the country they've shat on in the coming decades
Useful resource for excess deaths in Europe
Or right-click it like a normal person does
(yes, that excludes Mac users, they aren't normal)
(sarcasm)
[1] https://www.graphs.ro/covid_r_ma7.php
Obviously this is a complicated scenario. From what great body of research are you drawing your conclusions?
Have you considered population quantity or density in your comparison of the two nations?