Wuhan virus.

[Workingman]

I feel a bit for those journalists who have to turn up for the daily tedious briefings. I bet it won't be long before some of them claim to have had contact with someone who met someone in the pub who knew someone who has a cough and then go off into self-isolation until the briefings stop.

The briefings will have to stop as they are adding nothing whatsoever to the control of the pandemic but they are making people terribly sick - of them, the briefings.

[Suff]

Well there is news today. The US jumped by over 14,000 cases today. So far today is over 30,000 new cases, likely to hit 40,000 in one day if things go badly.

[Suff]

Quickly updated to 8,000. Looks like someone made a mistake.

[Suff]

Simple messaging.

[cromwell]

I've been doing a bit of maths. I read somewhere that the number of people infected can double every four days.
At the moment there are ten known cases in the Wakefield district.
So going in increments of four days we have 20,40,80,160,320,640,1280,2500(makes it easier to calculate),5000,10000,20000,40000,80000,160000,320000,640000.
So after 16x4=64 days (just over two months, the end of May) 640,000 people in the Wakefield area would have been infected.
Which won't happen, as there are only circa 350,000 people in the Wakefield area.
Plus the government action taken between now and then will slow the rate of infection, hopefully. Plus 60 to 80% of people are expected to catch it, not 100%.
Whatever happens it looks as though the situation over the next couple of months is going to be grim, but the rate of infection should surely fall after that?

[Workingman]

Sorry Suff, but the numbers from the US, Italy or even Paragonia have no impact upon me or us and I / we cannot effect them, They are only of mildly academic interest, however, for some they are fear inducing and we could do without that.

It's the same with the 'what if' numbers. That is all they are: numbers. The only ones that have any meaning to those of us in the UK are the ones presented daily, and even then because we have only been partially testing the 'presumed' cases are false. The only figure of any relevance is for deaths.

On worldometers the linear graph shows a hockey stick, but that is largely down to the chosen x and y scales. The logarithmic graph shows a steady rise which if extended to Friday puts us at about the 750 mark (fag packet maths). Neither is exponential, though it could happen, maybe.

[Suff]

I've been going back over the stats as they evolved and some things are clear, others are emerging.

There are clear step points in the infections. 1-10 is slow. 10-100 can happen in two days or a week but it will happen no matter what the government does because those people are already infected. 100-1,000 can take anywhere from 4 days to two weeks. Faster is also not worse.

1,000 is lift off point and it does depend on how governments act as to how far it goes. But 1,000 to 5,000 is guaranteed because the rest have already been infected and nothing the government can do will change that.

As for logarithmic verses linear? Logarithmic is a mechanism to show a trend, it is explicitly designed to incorporate the mass of information before but to smooth out the continuing trend. For instance things would have to be 100 times worse, then 1,000 then 1,000,000 in order for a logarithmic trend to climb like that.

In terms of an epidemic the very Last thing you want to do is make it look better. Even twice as bad as last week is catastrophic, the only two facts relevant in an ongoing epidemic ate the number of people with a live virus and the transmission rate. 2.5 transmission rate is catastrophic, 2.5 to a logarithmic chart is not even a very large bump because a logarithmic chart includes all the recovered pationts who are totally irrelevant to the problem. There are articles on that.

Now the other parts which are not being said.

Countries which apply extreme draconian measures at single digit infection rates are able to contain it, at least for some time.

Countries that do the same around 100-200 cases will blow up above 5,000 but then it will slow.

Countries that allow full travel and interaction up to around 5,000 cases are on course for 100,000 infections.

Don't believe me? Go check ut the history.

Now consider this, virtually 99% of cases still turning up in Italy were infected before the shutdown, not after.

The next thing to consider is that medical professionals are being infected in Italy at a steady rate. Those people are travelling to/from work and interacting with everyone else who is still about.

This is not about scare or fear, this is about bloody idiots with a blow it off attitude who don't care if they get infected and pass it on to elderly people, killing them in the process.

The excuse these idiots give for doing it is that dire predictions are scare stories. They are not, they are simple maths.

You say, WM, that what is happening in other countries does not affect us. You are wrong on 3 counts.

First because we have not closed our borders

Second because anything which can be learned from other countries is vitally important to the welfare of our people

Third and most important of all, there is a period which has been seen, where an infected person has 0 visible symptoms but they are infectious. That period has been measured from around 4 days to nearly 2 weeks. The longest known case of this virus, from infection to recovery, is 42 days.

Talking about point 2, above, we know it is Pneumonia which is killing most of the elderly. We also know, now the news has told us about Merkel, that Germany is vaccinating for a specific strain of Pneumonia.

Contrast Germanys infectioton to death rate with the UK.

What is the NHS doing in preparation for the onslaught??

So what is happening in other countries is of vital importance. We just need to start acting on it.

[cromwell]

So what's the prognosis for us then Suff?
Difficult I know. I really don't understand why we haven't stopped flights in from Iran, that is just crazy.
People are already interested in why Germany's death rate is so low, compared to other nations.
And while we're on the topic well done to Putin for sending the Russian army to help in Italy. Yes, he might be doing it with a knowing smile on his lips to stir a bit of trouble in the EU, but like my grannie used to say "An ounce of help is worth a pound of sympathy".

[Suff]

You're right Cromwell, Putin is doing himself a favour with a sympathetic Italian government.

Our prognosis? Nearly 6,000 infected, no lockdown, people still travelling in from all over.... Not hard to work it out. People are already infected, they just don't know it. Apparently they don't care if they share it with others.

It will come out in the stats. It is just a matter of exactly how many dead it will take before the government shuts the country down. 500? 1,000? I know they are playing a balancing act with the potential of a vaccine, but people are already infected in ever increasing numbers. The virus is incredibly contagious, witness the number of medical staff going down with it, yet people are acting as if it's the common cold...

An excerpt from the wiki page on the Italian lockdown.

At the time of the decree, over 5,800 cases of coronavirus had been confirmed in Italy, with 233 dead

Sound familiar? UK, yesterday, 5,683 cases, 281 dead.

Somehow we are expected to believe that the UK is different, that it's not going to happen, that Italy is, well, just Italy and it won't happen to us. Don't panic, it will peak at? 20,000? 30,000? or less or more?

No lockdown, no reduction in the rate of growth. Granted our social interaction is much lower than Italy, Spain or France. But not that much lower.

The US is going to overtake China soon and they were well behind us for quite a while. In stead of raiding stores for ever decreasing foodstuffs, the people of the UK should be forcing the government to shut us down.

[Workingman]

So what's the prognosis for us then Suff?

The prognosis is that we do not have a clue.

We have our own data, and models base on those data, and they all show different outcomes; as was perfectly explained by the statistics man from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (who should know something) on last night's C4 programme on self-isolating. And we also have data coming in from S. Korea and Italy and China and other places based on what those places have done and are doing in their own separate ways; and are all different from each other.

The stats and graphs for each, whether linear or logarithmic, are wildly different - even when they use the same units on the x and y scales.

What is singularly missing is the golden method, the silver bullet, the universal solution. There are claims, obviously, but nobody knows for sure and nobody will know till it all washes out of the system.

What we do not need are scare stories. On the 17 th March the UK's chief scientific adviser told the health committee that it is a "reasonable ballpark" figure to assume around 55,000 people in the country have Covid-19. If that is the case then our figures are much nearer those of Germany (much praised) than they are to the oft quoted disasters in Italy and Spain.