The updates below were first published on Facebook during the period 30th March through to 29th December 2020. Please click the link here to visit my other covid stats blogs for some earlier and some later blogs. Covid Stats
30th March 2020
Stats update…for those who are asking…
With the usual disclaimers on like-4-like methods and few data points… Sadly the stabilising of new cases since Thursday looks like it hasn’t continued – not a good day (3,436 new), and it means fatalities mid-April will probably still not be falling. Was hoping it was a steadying trend. It would have meant that enough people were being careful a week before lockdown to reduce spread rate, but was too much to hope for. But lockdown works (in near term at least) so hopefully ‘new cases’ (which means mainly only new Moderate/Severe cases currently) data will stabilise within a week. We gotta get this down from doubling every 3/4 days to stable initially. Then the good news is it goes down quite fast after that with continued effort (though not as fast as it rose).
Beware…everyone’s an ‘expert’ now…!
31st March 2020
Quick CV19 UK stats forecast for those who asked. It will need updating soon as “exponentials+time-lags+low-testing” doesn’t make forecasting at all easy, but here goes.
New cases per day (not total cases) tops out on 4-8 April at 4-6,000 per day if lockdown reasonable, as growth becomes linear. Tops out earlier if pre-lockdown habits were good, later if lockdown wasn’t strong (I realise there are two different variables here). Personally I think what we are doing is enough.
Sadly, fatalities per day keeps rising til 12-16/4 🙁. Controlled de-lock first discussed when new cases (remember at present this mainly only includes Moderate/Severe but will soon include NHS staff which reduces positive testing % but increases new cases pd but luckily caught early) gets below 500pd which comes a week after (mid-end April) if we are good lockdown boys and girls 🙂.
Fatalities per day never goes near 5 figures, thankfully, but (ugh) may exceed 1000 per day in a couple of weeks for a short period if we haven’t locked down hard enough, or if pre-symptomatic period or time to fatality is longer than I’m estimating.
After that (mid April) our two key stats change to… 1. Managing ‘R’ >1 or < 1 closely (ie. is the lockdown action we are taking leading to fewer infections per day or more?). By then it will be well below 1 but we need to keep it there while considering economy and freedoms, and 2. Hierarchy of de-lock priorities – what are the first activities to allow based on a) economic importance – suggest eg. strategic construction industry, and b) risk level eg. organised outdoor low-density kids activities. Possibly talked about doing by end May. Why not suggest your (sensible) hierarchical list of what you think is de-locked first, as things open up with R held under 1? I know my man Ed (hi Ed) would rather hammer the lock longer and starve the virus altogether despite economic and social short-term harm, to avoid ‘2nd wave’. We will hear in a couple of weeks whether the medical scientists and proper statisticians (unlike educated amateurs like me) think that’s doable.
Keep safe and love one another. Lighter side encouragement…Rule 1 for yourself – don’t put an unsoaped finger into any hole in your skull!…take care and hope my model is too pessimistic. It will be out of date soon I’m sure…hindsight is a wonderful thing.
6th April 2020 – Delock?
Quick stats update for those who asked…No real change in my forecast from my previous forecast written 31 March. Yesterday’s spike in reported new cases keeps us unsure of the peak of new cases (I estimated it would start to top out 2 weeks after lockdown). So hope for ‘daily new cases’ to start to top out this week then fall solidly. If so, the plan towards ‘controlled de-lock’ is still on. Already the Secretary of State for BusinessEIS has written to the construction industry to encourage them to work where safe to do so. If ‘new Moderate/Severe cases per day’ gets and stays under 4,000 (horrible I know) then NHS will be under heavy pressure but not totally overwhelmed as feared. This allows consideration of further de-lock (or a policy of quick harder lock to starve the virus completely) before end of April.
15th April 2020
Quick stats forecast for those who asked…
We are currently losing 800-1100 people per day (from or with) CV19 – including 10% for deaths in the community. But at least it’s not doubling every few days any more as per my last warnings.
At this time of year fatalities for all reasons is usually a bit under 10,000 per week. So with 20% of all those dying having CV19 (2,000pw), CV19 is clearly still a major reason for a large % increase in deaths compared to other years, unless 20% of the population is currently running around with CV19 which they aren’t. So CV19 is far more deadly than flu (though 90+% of cases are Mild/Moderate) and much more infectious, unchecked. The age/vulnerability factor is a big one of course, though actuaries say most people dying had at least 5 years more to live, often many more.
Maybe there are some dying ‘with’, but not ‘from’, CV19 (and would have recovered) but not really that many I think from the above argument. So the overall direct death toll so far is probably about 10k and has been reduced by 10x to date by lockdown, as it was doubling every 3 days (=1000x worse in a month, amazingly). Are we close to everyone ‘who could get it has had it’? Nowhere near in my view. A clear minority have had it. With 2000 new Mod/Severe cases per day average until recently and 95% mild or asymptomatic that’s 40,000 per day getting it. So with 4-5k per day new Mod/Severe cases recently (who caught it around lockdown time and in close family units just after), maybe still as low as 1.5m-4m have had it? All we’ve done so far (although it’s a massive achievement) is just flattened the curve to fit Severe cases through NHS capacity. Very successfully balanced in numbers terms, if that’s the plan. These exponential things are v difficult to get the timing right for. So maybe the ‘plan’/fatality allowance (an inevitably horrible policy business) is for 100k a day to catch it, 5k Moderate/Severe, 500-1k pd fatalities but NHS coping – managed by controlled de-lock within a few weeks. Sounds nasty but then most get it in 2020 except for protected vulnerable and it’s largely over. But easily towards 50k+ fatalities. Or we reduce fatalities at cost of economy and a longer process, and holding out for vaccine to truncate the process then.
As always, I wonder if I will be way out as conditions change, but that’s my best latest guess.
In general CV19 most easily attacks densely-populated areas of federalised and fiercely libertarian heterogeneous democracies (eg USA, urban Italy) more easily than more centrally-planned rural economies and homogeneous societies (therefore eg. Sweden I think can escape the worst results soon). UK social fabric surviving well so far, despite the many complaints (some justified, some unrealistic judgements and comparisons). Sensible comments to help are welcome.
26th April 2020 – Lockdown
Stats update…Time for a review.
In response to a few friends asking, I’ve been suggesting on here how Covid might go – since 4 March. Hope you’ve found it helpful amid the noise. No claims of perfection! So it’s time for a review. Maybe it makes you think about how your world and perception has changed since then too.
Of course, many of you will think Covid is being taken too seriously, and many will think not enough. These two large camps can argue that between themselves elsewhere! I feel sorry for the politicians (flawed but we collectively elected them) in the middle being hit by both sides and threatened with future criminal action by baying mobs whichever way they go. You try! But then we are in the ‘Blame’ stage of Change (and I predict that gets worse before it gets better), and hindsight as they say, has 20/20 vision. Am I critical in some areas? Yes, but I’m imperfect (extremely!) myself. ‘Judge ye not…’ and all that.
First mention of Covid was 4 March – Table Tennis England float the idea of not shaking hands at end of table tennis matches. I agreed, saying it was a ‘serious’ point.
6 March: Bought Genesis tickets. Couldn’t have been that worried about lockdown by December! Hmmm…didn’t account for social distancing though!
18 March: Shared Imperial College research and the ‘power of social distancing’…
19 March: (40 fatalities that day). “We are heading for a rapid and sustained increase in deaths. Maybe 1248 on 2 April without lockdown”. This was having been confidently told by a ‘don’t take it so seriously’ expert type that lockdown would be over by 2 April. It was 569 on 2 April. ‘Bout right in an exponential situation. In hindsight the 569 didn’t include Care Home fatalities at the time. It took another week for official figures to get to a sad 1000 a day.
30 March (7 days after lockdown): “Fatalities mid-April will still not be falling”. They weren’t, but thank goodness they stayed around 1000 and didn’t go to the many thousands per day that I predicted was likely without lockdown, or with lockdown too late. Agree with the policy or not, but if the goal was to accept that total starvation of the virus was not feasible in our society (probably true, sadly) and so to time lockdown to get to NHS capacity but not exceed it, the timing of lockdown was spot on, except for a nasty PPE distribution crisis.
31 March: “New Moderate/Severe cases per day tops out at 4-6,000 at 4-6 April if lockdown reasonable.” This has been a good estimate, and has held well after previous consistent sharp rises but is not falling as soon as predicted – I said by towards end April. I think incubation periods are longer than I thought (this makes forecasting and hence de-lock policy harder to time correctly). Plus I think we had more ‘2nd-generation’ infections in homes after lockdown as families huddled and cross-infected each other (not a bad policy but inevitable short-term issue). Think I underestimated that. Also inevitably some types don’t lock down properly, so this makes me worry that the virus continues to be more infectious than we think upon de-lock.
15 April: Calculation that CV19 far deadlier than flu, even accounting for over-stating numbers dying ‘with’ CV19 not necessarily ‘from’ CV19. Now from the figures that I can see, it’s dangerous for old/vulnerable, but also about as deadly for middle-aged people as flu is for old/vulnerable people. So not nice. Against this we have to balance increased future fatalities from other causes, caused by our lockdown or bad/reduced data. That’s for another policy conversation but very important.
I guessed that 1.5m-4m people have been infected by now in UK and recovered. So still a long way to go. I hope more have had it (I reckon 100k per day who dont need hospital with lockdown-lite) and are now immune. Data on this is still poor at this stage. So we can’t bank on that.
15 April: Countries without large cities (eg Sweden) have an option of no lockdown. I stick by this and I now think this is even more true for some USA states and for many rural countries that have good communications, education and social cohesion. Its a voluntary and cultural form of social distancing. But would never have worked in large cities with so many naysayers around. Democracy, eh?!
16 April: Among others, my cousin (50 yr old female bodybuilding champion and NHS nurse) recovers slowly from v bad CV19. It’s not at all like flu. Their husband also gets it, plus many friends around the country. Not all the older ones my friends know personally have survived, though many have.
So that’s my stats story so far.
I hope you are well and managing, and can enjoy the next two weeks of lockdown before de-lock is even considered.
When we emerge, it will only be the end of the beginning…
Next? Well at this stage, its dangerous growth is temporarily halted – good. Expect little new data/policy from the government right now. They will be holding lockdown in place as far as they can for another two weeks (they know they can’t hold it forever – socially or economically) and playing desperately for time to put things in place (PPE supply chains etc, temporary mortuaries etc). And to learn about this thing (and our behaviour!) from a medical-social point of view – commissioning and receiving an increasing range reports on national differences explanations, reliability of testing (I’m not confident in this yet – for both current and historical cases), infectiousness, transmission methods, social cohesion models, vaccination accelerations, better treatments, effects of lockdown release at various stages. It is the chaos stage internally as tons of ideas and activities need collating and integrating, before a clear next government policy emerges. They will need to integrate several elements – medical, statistical, social, political, economic and technological. But buying time not only improves your chances of getting ahead of the game, it also means you give yourself more chance of getting lucky. For example, optimistically, we may find nature helps us – sunlight or warmer temperatures would be a nice killer of the virus. But until we have something we can rely on….Enjoy (manage) the next two weeks.
Good luck. Take care of people. It’s been rocky and more rocks to come.
3rd May 2020 – Just Hang On
Quick stats update for those who asked…
1. Lockdown works. We stopped the doubling of this thing every 3 days. That’s 1,000 times worse if you left it a month longer. Without lockdown we would almost certainly have had many hundreds of thousands of excess deaths so far – and part of this is once you have an overwhelmed health service we lose maybe 5 times the number of people, and the age profile of fatalities comes down. Non old/vulnerable
(like Boris age and health) who survived in hospital only because we flattened the curve within NHS capability. This is not a political show, it’s just how it affects a proportion of mid-age people. So we did the right thing to lockdown. Well done all, and thanks to the younger generation who would 99% be fine without lockdown. Nice of you on behalf of the rest of us.
2. But three big problems…in order…what economic cost? Where are we now? And what the heck to do next?
3. Make no mistake…the economic cost is huge. As well as the current effects that are only just the beginning, national income is (was) a bit over £2 trillion per year and is currently being trashed of course. We’re already borrowing towards a trillion on Covid-19 soon via government. Economically, borrowing can’t just be ignored later. It means our children’s and their children’s tax rates will be far higher through their lifetime as they pay this back on our behalf. Sorry kids. We did this without asking your permission of course, but that’s what we always do. That’s what government borrowing is about! That will be in the order of £1,000 pa per working person for your child’s whole career. And with a smaller economy due to all this. Oh, and we had already borrowed enough for another grand a year, so just add this on. Thanks kids – sorry about that.
4. Country comparisons: Unsurprising that fatality rate is correlated (probably in a squared relation or so) with population density, eg Sweden is 10x less densely pop than UK; New Zealand much less again. With good info, education and social cohesion that’s automatic good social distancing and aware hygiene – and that’s all you need. So many countries can and should eradicate the whole thing. Unfortunately UK has about the highest population density in Europe (except Holland – who have lost more people per population than UK but have done a fantastic job of flattening new cases in recent weeks) and a massive city – London. Many European countries have nothing on this scale. So it’s tough for UK, although it’s the densely populated cities of the poorer world with less institutional infrastructure that I worry most about next. They started later but numbers are climbing. Hope there’s a reason these will manage OK.
5. What now? Well we said last week that Government will be in the chaos phase of data for the rest of initial lockdown, so no big news to come from them yet. Lots coming in to them…new data, thoughts and ideas about virology, R- estimates, country comparisons, social behaviour predictions, PPE, testing, tracing, etc. All to be integrated into an overall analysis and a simple plan. Lots to synthesise, and good decisions will vary widely depending on the interaction of these unreliable variables. Fascinating work for the statisticians, and then they interact with the social scientists and then the politicians and advisors to estimate what the public will do with any messages. So it is necessarily political, as it’s about what the public will think and do with the messages. We, the ‘free’ public are both the solution and the problem. Not easy for them all but interesting work to try to optimise. As data converges, a clear set of options will emerge.
6. Looking ahead: The relief for the politicians for the moment is that fatalities per day has peaked, new hospitalisations are down. ‘New cases’ are not falling despite lockdown, but this data-point is ever more meaningless at this stage as testing has risen so much and we are logging the milder cases more and more. So a great relief for Ministers as the first challenge recedes and they have the illusion of control for a moment. But next is big – lockdown is already softening from mixed messages (this is deliberate so people can self-define ‘essential travel’ in order to survive, and especially to see how sensitive ‘R’ the re-infection rate is, as human interaction increases). If R is not sensitive, we de-lock partially but confidently (government is using the term ‘sure-footed approach’). And then we delock further if R still holds low. But don’t bank on that. I think natural R is high (2-3-ish) and still not enough people have had it yet. If R shows itself very sensitive and hospitalisations jump as lockdown-lite softens, we have the same problem as we had 8 weeks ago, but with a trillion already gone and its social consequences.
The choice then is threefold:
1. ‘Freedom’: Hundreds of thousands of excess deaths as we open the economy, made several times worse as NHS overwhelm means tons of people of Boris’ age and health die for lack of medical availability, in addition to the older, and younger vulnerable.
2. We maintain lockdown-lite to enable some economy and hold the curve flattened to 100% of NHS capacity with associated 500-1000 fatalities per day for foreseeable future until something changes. 3. We lockdown harder to save lives short-term and have to let the economy crumble altogether and accept we are at 1945 when we come out (yes we built the NHS then but it was very hard during, and for a decade long after, and there was no economy to try to salvage anyway). In my view the political choice will be clear – lockdown-lite with 50-100% of NHS capacity the goal (remainder of NHS can do some non-Covid work) until enough people in the population have had the virus and new cases falls away. Politicians won’t be able to make any other choice.
Conclusion: So hope for a low R. If not, then expect a long and austere 2020 and I’ll have to forego my Genesis concert tickets for December. The reason not to go for full ‘freedom’ by the way, is the risk that with an ongoing high R we consign hundreds of thousands to unnecessary death soon, only to find that a vaccine or treatment or natural virus-killer comes sooner than we had assumed, and had we been patient, they would have been OK. Oops. By playing for time, we may find tech or nature may come to rescue the hunkered.
Just like in Ping Pong, if you’re losing and have insufficient capability and few ideas, still just play for time. They might break a leg, or there might be a power cut and you get a draw! You never know, so just hang on, suffer it a bit, lose slowly, and keep going til the metaphorical ‘sun comes out’. Eventually it will.
I hope you have a good and lucky week.
9th May 2020 – What Next?
Quick stats update for those who asked…(oops, they’re getting longer, and with more brackets!)…
This will soon be overshadowed by Boris on Sunday 7pm of course. But let’s stay grounded to watch what’s happening between the lines.
What we do with the virus and its data depends on our societal structure and norms. That’s why different countries are dealing with it very differently. Compare the response of South Korea to Sweden to Brazil to Thailand to USA to Vietnam. Countries are following their usual societal assumptions quite predictably – whether they are functional for this situation or not. South Korea had MERS and learned and prepared PPE/test/track/trace/isolate from before Day 1. Vietnam too. It was the best way, but only because their publics also understand the need to play ball and physically distance while working on. And their economies are set up better than ours to do this. This enables the ‘silver bullet’ of slower fatality rate while maintaining some economy. Sadly, we’ll have to wait until the next UK epidemic to be ‘ready next time’. Geography/demography also matters a lot. Low population makes it so much easier to eradicate; so does low population density. New Zealand eradicated it because these numbers are so much in its favour. In Sweden, ‘collective volunteerism’ means no lockdown or new laws. In a nation of 10% of our population, 10% of our population density, and no city over a million (and even that is 14 islands) I support them in that policy. Though their care-home epidemic has been a nasty and shameful surprise to them too, as has ours. UK, Italy, France, Spain, USA – were not at all prepared either physically or psychologically, and UK has the highest population density among these, plus London. We’re not used to this and deep in our collective unconscious is our arrogant Empire past which looks down on the East and its plights as foreign and distant. And we think will-power and grabbing a sword will beat the virus. Futile – the virus is not negotiating. Add Belgium to that list – they fit this group nicely – and actually it’s they who have easily the worst deaths per population on the planet right now. A big job to fix then. In the traditional West the genie is out of the bottle. ‘Twas always going to be the case without a changed mentality. Austerity apart (0.5% of additional GDP in NHS was not enough to make much difference to this situation) I didn’t see ‘PPE’ etc in any Party manifestoes in the last decade. But then it’s not a Donkey Derby. To paraphrase sports talent identification, “In the early days of emergence, current performance is not a good predictor of long-term success”. Let’s see if high-density areas of Asia can keep it down long-term, and which nations deal best with post-lockdown-lite. We are now far enough into this pandemic that UK Ministers are starting to admit they could have done some things differently, while maintaining the overall approach was right. If the UK public are as diverse in view and indisciplined as some think, then without the reality shock of this virus for next time, containment and eradication Asia/Oceania-style was never on the cards here. Therefore blame for lack of containment can’t be laid at the feet of Ministerial decisions, and we go with a hybrid ‘herd’/economy/suppression model. But logistics and production/distribution has been poor despite late scrabbling.
For UK, our relatively democratic ‘first-past-the-post’ Constitutional monarchy has its weaknesses (concentrated privileged power) and many strengths. It’s lasted hundreds of years for many good reasons and to good effect many times in the end. It means we pretty much get the Government we deserve, except it’s normally skewed to the right by the concentrated privileged power bit. And a system creates a culture. The government leads a bit but then has to listen to the electorate and so follows a bit too, or it knows it will get thrown out at next election. Normally we say that’s a good thing. The UK Government didn’t really lock us down. The public did it by consent, even demand, and Government desire was aided by some predictable servile mainstream media messages clearly targeted at us in the right critical periods (eg. lots of disproportionate young dying patients just before lockdown messages etc). That’s OK, to make the point – we’re not stupid. We understand and tolerate the message. That’s not to say there’s not been a bit of new legislation to compel us, but every week we legislate a lot in many areas of life to regulate and steer collective action and societal expectations. It doesn’t make us a police state suddenly, as long as restrictions are lifted later. This is what the libertarians of the right-wing continue to warn about – here and especially in USA. One part of this is it’s hard for digital personal data to be ‘forgotten’ later, I get that.
Current downside: 4-5,000 new cases per day despite lockdown. But with more testing of Mild cases of key workers now, these lead to maybe around 2-300 fatalities per day at end May (unless the virus is self-sustaining within the NHS long-term), not the 600-1,000 we’ve been having in March/April. But it does indicate the virus is waiting to be unleashed again. The 4-step, 4-week-ish time lag from infection to ‘new case’ to hospitalisation to fatality will make any initial de-lock look hugely successful at first. Like any form of complacency, this time-lag is a big danger. Unfortunately this will encourage indisciplined social behaviour in segments of the public, eg young adults with no elderly relatives to care for, or that they care much about. With the now-famous ‘R’ value (reinfection rate) at around 2.5-3.5, a de-lock could put us back to a doubling of cases every three days again and overrun the NHS with thousands of acute hospitalisations per day before we can reverse the de-lock. We have no data to say we are anywhere near ‘herd immunity’ yet. In fact, we have little reliable evidence on anything much yet. Government will still be in chaos mode. Loads of data coming in but lots conflicting. Far too many equations for the constants to put into them. No accuracy on how many people have been infected, how people are catching it, how transmissible it is (the now-famous ‘R’ value) depending on each transmission-reducing measure, how many people are naturally immune, how many people have had the virus, the degree to which infection has led to immunity and for how long, what the fatality rate is, either overall, or for specific demographics. We don’t even know whether different countries are fighting the same mutation and transmission rates. This makes the problem ‘complex’ rather than ‘complicated’ – lots of unknown variables rather than just too many sums to do. Add an unreliable ‘free’ public mood and indiscipline, and this takes it from a ‘complex’ to what’s called a ‘wicked’ problem. Wanna be PM right now with this set of stats?
What will happen next: Boris speaks Sunday 7pm. At PMQs this week in the House of Commons, Boris talked of, “suppress and keep suppressing the virus”, and also, “getting the economy back on its feet”. He made it sound like these horses are reasonable friends, but of course they are galloping in opposite directions. Boris is riding two horses with only one backside. Any PM would have to. And yes, he said these in the same sentence. Luckily Boris is a natural facilitator rather than a conviction politician so he’s good at doing the splits (to a fault). So he’s balancing a trade-off. Last week I said though, that the politicians won’t be able to make any other choice than lockdown-lite for remainder of 2020 with the goal of no less (yes less, not more) than 50-80% of NHS capacity taken up with new cases as we move slowly towards ‘herd’. The remainder of NHS can do some non-Covid work. The embarrassment and political exposure of overwhelmed NHS (and with its attendant 5x fatality rate without treatment available) would be unacceptable and it means that a stronger ‘herd immunity’ policy was never planned, countenanced or tolerated in my view. Of course, Boris can’t say all this. You’d tear him apart for approving death. So he’ll waffle with some ‘clarity’ and it will be an implied psychological contract with enough of the electorate realising it’s a balance, to move ahead. Alongside there will be detractors from both wings with good arguments (but insufficient data to guarantee their arguments). Then fatalities go down (due to past lockdown), then people get giddy where offered an inch they take a mile, then new cases goes up, then we get warned about increased lockdown again. Large dangers plus time-lags naturally leads to Yo-Yo effects.
Final thoughts: To those who say the old and sick have had nearly all their life and are expendable, an ethical statistician has to at least countenance the question. What’s the human cost of the opposite? Might be far worse. But just in case you were feeling a bit callous, careless or Darwinistic, VE-Day quickly reminds us what we owe the older generation. Everything. And an Actuarial society estimates the average fatality had 5 years’ life left. It’s both a practical and a values-based question. The irony of BBC revelling in covering VE street celebrations yesterday with clear social distancing breaches, and the hypocrisy of younger people partying closely while supposedly out respecting our ageing war heroes, just left me cold. You? Slightly less seriously, having bought the Genesis concert tickets for December, Phil Collins, Tony B and Mike R had better put on 15 extra concerts in December to allow all the fans to see Genesis live but with a coffee table between each attendee. Hope all this helps as you track Boris next week. Stay lucky.
17th May 2020 – Chaos Ending?
Quick?! stats update for those who asked…
Hi again. In the last post, before the Prime Minister’s de-lock statement last Sunday 7pm, we said, “So he’ll waffle with some ‘clarity’ – it will be an implied psychological contract with enough of the electorate realising it’s a balance, to move ahead”. That seems to be about right. ‘Stay Alert’ and ‘Control the Virus’ were the new mantras, clearly designed to put the responsibility on the population not the Government. In situations like this a lot of people will freeze or panic and expect government to solve everything on its own. The idea of a couple of dozen Ministers (local elected MPs) running the country top-down, making all decisions brilliantly, is a common fallacy, but ludicrous. It takes tens of thousands of decision-makers (and track and tracers we still don’t have yet) to run a country or a pandemic reduction project. Ministers mainly just set direction. So two goals were activated. 1. Get the focus of responsibility away from Ministers and onto the public’s own behaviour (yes, partly for their own political survival as we move from shock/denial to the anger/blame stage of the change process – some rightly), and 2. ’Alert’ and ‘Control’ are very active words (one quite Brexit-y), designed to get us moving again for fear of a dead economy otherwise.
Industrial Relations: The wording was deliberate again to force people (workers, Unions, employers) to have their own conversations and make their own choices – the government saw this as their optimal choice of communication. So the next two weeks will be messy with industrial relations conversations and the less powerful (as always) pressed into less distanced work. And let’s be clear. If our population were just healthy children and non-vulnerable adults to age 50 we’d just live with COV19 – it’s less troublesome than the flu for them. Ultimately it’s for the over 50s and vulnerable that this whole costly effort is for. Of course, those with vulnerable relatives and friends, and those who value all these lives and more immediately, go more for ‘safety’ than ‘relaxed economy’. I’m among them. We owe the elderly everything and this is a team game. We can’t just dance away and bring infection closer to them, dropping the problem in their laps while there is hope of new treatments, controlled ‘herd’, vaccine, etc before too long.
Individual circumstances apart, there are the usual detractors of government policy from both left and right political wings. The left want more ‘safety’, and the right want more ‘economy’. It’s interesting to see how the left-wingers honestly think the now-famous ‘R’ value is high (because they want to believe in the power of collectivism and it suits their political cause to lock down more and create socialistic solutions) and how the right-wingers honestly think the now-famous ‘R’ value is low (because they focus on so-called individual responsibility and it suits their political cause to open the economy and re-create more individual agency and capitalism). I’m simplifying these political philosophies, but in aggregate I’m fascinated how this a great example of ‘confirmation bias’ at its finest from both sides! This common bias affects our decisions and life chances in many ways, so it’s always good to check our own.
The next concern was for the impact of re-opening more of the economy. We said last week, “The politicians won’t be able to make any other economic choice than lockdown-lite for remainder of 2020 with the goal of no less (yes no less, not no more) than 50-80% of NHS capacity taken up with new cases as we move slowly towards ‘herd’. The remainder of NHS can do some non-Covid work.” Hence the de-lock is to regain some economy and to take up the newly-constructed Nightingale capacity around the country – potentially 10,000+ extra beds, but that stretches our NHS and key workers hugely near this level. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘go back to work’ will inevitably create an increasing rate of new infections (R>1). In my town our biggest manufacturers are now seeing internal outbreaks. Nature, eg ‘herd’ and ‘sunlight’ alone is not nearly enough yet to slow it below R=1. And forget a vaccine for a long time – wishful thinking in the very short term, and remember we still don’t even have one at all for the common cold.
Looking back, new hospitalisations were doubling every 3-4 days until we got to 1,000 fatalities per day (that’s 30,000 per month and rising, if allowed to continue), which was only slowed by 23 March lockdown with a 3-6 week lag. The R-slowing factor now will be millions of individual decisions to ‘Stay Alert’ and just being personally careful, plus the more middle-class ability to do so. I expect it will now become a jungle of virus in the populated indoor or crowd environments out there. And so the risk of bringing the virus home to vulnerable loved ones. With original R=2.5-3.5 (=doubling every 3-4 days) and individual avoidance now bringing new effective R down, by June it may become R=1.5-ish. But no chance of less than R=1 in my view despite the Government’s optimism on this. I hope I’m wrong. So no doubling of new hospitalisations every 3-4 days again, but perhaps a doubling every week or two during June and July. But with a low current base, that buys the Government and statisticians until maybe 31 July to observe and suffer a steep-ish incline in cases, which may well delay further openings of the economy. There are only 24 new cases per day in London now, they say. Sounds like we’ve beaten it? No. With a doubling of infections each week (slower than before) that’s still enough to gradually fill all the Nightingales through July-September once the genie is out of the bottle again.
The good news is that we are ending the chaos period and getting some decent data now – you’ll have seen this with new and more useful charts this week on the Government updates. Also from independent Universities. Better predictive information will come as antibody/serological testing finally becomes reliable. These tests are easy to make but hard to ensure are valid and reliable. As we sample the population with good antibody testing, this will tell us what % of the population has had COV19 and recovered. This provides two important datasets at last: 1. Fatality rate, including fatality rate per demographic segment, and 2. Predictions of how long this pandemic will last before sufficient herd immunity slows it. That will be very useful for all of us to know. But we won’t know for a while how easy it is to catch it twice, and how badly. This is a major question remaining for a while.
So in summary I see an increase in cases and a long and bumpy Summer, but a gradual control of what we’re doing long-term. If you are older or vulnerable, I hope you are one who can choose their level of exposure to any increased infection. Not all will be able to – that’s what the rest of us should help with.
31st May 2020 – Herd?
Quicker?! stats update for those who asked…
The progress through these times is about stats but also about people and economics, and how these interact.
Last time we said we were entering more fully the ‘blame’ stage of the change process – and we certainly are. Party politics aside, for those who study the process of change after a deep shock and loss, have a look at the classic Kubler-Ross curve. The next stage (massive blame will continue too as some things are shown to have gone wrong and people focus their loss on rightful accountability, but also scapegoating and demanding of blood) is now happening, where people test to see whether it’s possible to ‘just go back to how things were before and all will be well’. Hence all the indiscipline as people come out of harder lockdown. They just want things to go back to what we used to call ‘normal’. It’s called ‘bargaining with the change’. The bargainers/testers will be proved wrong – things have changed and cannot go back to the way things were – so nostalgia and forlorn hope leading to indiscipline on social distancing will only make things worse. The virus is not eradicated, and it is not negotiating. This is where a second wave flare will happen.
So to reiterate what we said last week, “The politicians won’t be able to make any other economic choice than lockdown-lite for remainder of 2020 with the goal of no less (yes no less, not no more) than 50-80% of NHS capacity taken up with new cases as we move slowly towards ‘herd’. The remainder of NHS can do some non-Covid work.” Hence the de-lock is to regain some economy and to take up the newly-constructed Nightingale capacity around the country – potentially 10,000+ extra beds, but that stretches our NHS and key workers hugely near this level. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘go back to work’ will inevitably create an increasing rate of new infections (R>1). In my town our biggest manufacturers are now seeing internal outbreaks. Nature, eg ‘herd’ and ‘sunlight’ alone is not nearly enough yet to slow it below R=1. And forget a vaccine for a long time – wishful thinking in the very short term, and remember we still don’t even have one at all for the common cold.
“Looking back, new hospitalisations were doubling every 3-4 days until we got to 1,000 fatalities per day (that’s 30,000 per month and rising, if allowed to continue), which was only slowed by 23 March lockdown with a 3-6 week lag. The R-slowing factor now will be millions of individual decisions to ‘Stay Alert’ and just being personally careful, plus the more middle-class ability to do so. I expect it will now become a jungle of virus in the populated indoor or crowd environments out there. And so the risk of bringing the virus home to vulnerable loved ones. With original R=2.5-3.5 (=doubling every 3-4 days) and individual avoidance now bringing new effective R down, by June it may become R=1.5-ish. But no chance of less than R=1 in my view despite the Government’s optimism on this. I hope I’m wrong. So no doubling of new hospitalisations every 3-4 days again, but perhaps a doubling every week or two during June and July. But with a low current base, that buys the Government and statisticians until maybe 31 July to observe and suffer a steep-ish incline in cases, which may well delay further openings of the economy. There are only 24 new cases per day in London now, they say. Sounds like we’ve beaten it? No. With a doubling of infections each week (slower than before) that’s still enough to gradually fill all the Nightingales through July-September once the genie is out of the bottle again.”
I’m just wondering now whether we will even get as far as 31 July before it some re-tightening is warned about or necessary.
So stay as safe as you can and look after your loved ones while the ‘bargainers’ do their experiment and the virus is flying around out there.
Have a good week.
6th June 2020 – More Blame
Quick? stats update for those who asked…
Blame, Looking Back, Looking Forward, Irony and Black America/Covid stats (next time)…
Well last week we said the Blame stage of Covid is well in swing (Dominic Cummings, media both ways, party political echo chambers on social media etc).
In a way, this blame is an expression of relief. People have short memories. Last weekend of February I enjoyed a weekend with my kids at the English Senior Nationals Table Tennis (Sam got a medal 😊). No-one mentioned anything about a virus (though I knew there was some vague background about a new virus in China. Not a peep from me or anyone in conversation though). I started writing on this topic 9 March. The virus got hold, and quickly became worse. We did not know where the exponential increase in infections would stop. It was a very scary situation nationally. We had 1000 deaths per day on a sharply rising trend within a few short weeks.
Had the fatality rate of the virus been unstoppable (R=1 or over even with lockdown) we were staring at 500,000 fatalities by now with a totally overwhelmed NHS ICU service. Total national disaster. Remember that at the time (pre-Italy peak) we had no idea whether a ‘Western-style lockdown-lite’ in a democratic nation could match the effectiveness of the Chinese authoritarian ‘throw your cat and dog out of your 12th-storey flat right now and stay there for as many months as we say and we will shoot you if you come out’.
So UK fatalities is 10% of the worst-case nightmare scenario. But like we said back then, ‘lockdown works’ and almost all countries followed Wuhan with a form of lockdown and it worked and so we reversed the trend within a few weeks. Phew! But with a semblance of relief and restored control comes a false memory that it was always plannable, always controllable, and therefore the path taken is easily blame-able. It wasn’t. It was a dynamic, emergent situation requiring a wide range of complex assessments and decisions, sometimes on an hourly basis. And for anyone ‘in charge’, all with a sense of panic, brain freeze, personal incompetence (some of course true, some only induced by fear), plus complex group dynamics in a melee of a situation. Add to that a rabid media and political opoosition dragging you away from your focus to attend to their own panic and complaints. Not easy. My Dad was a lifelong Civil Servant, meeting sometimes with Ministers. That’s the demand on Ministers, who are not experts, but ordinary(?) people who put themselves up for election as MPs and then may get invited into Government positions in a strange portfolio. In our democracy, what more can you expect?! Even then, there may have been a lot to be desired in government minister performance I agree. And the whole strategy is arguable. But it’s a good example of the normal irony that it’s the (partial) success that gives rise to the blame. ‘The fear comes out when the fear recedes’. Hence the excessive scapegoating right now. It will calm a bit in months to come, except from the most passionate opponents. Unless of course, an objective review next year opens large questions of impropriety not known to us currently.
Which brings me to the second statistical irony. As you know I’m a critic of so-called ‘Remoaners’. And it’s the current Government critics who actually put Boris, Dominic Cummings and co there in the first place of course. Why? Well, 2019 was clearly the Brexit election. In 2016 we finally had a vote on whether to Leave the EU or Remain in it. Rightly or wrongly 1.4 million more people voted to Leave than Remain. That margin is far and away enough to secure a safe parliamentary majority in our system (look it up). But some losing Remainers became Remoaners and fought the democracy of it. I happen to think democracy is important, and seemingly a lot of other people do. Because faced with a back-track on Brexit (Remainer Theresa May doing her best to get a compromise path), Labour plan (whatever that was), or a clear Boris Brexiteer plan, the electorate reiterated strongly for Brexit (or the democratic principle involved). Tell me I’m wrong about this, but give me a proper stats-based alternative narrative if so.
Lots of people already thought Boris was lacking in truth-telling and in detail ability (Michael Gove himself did so famously in 2016). But following this narrative, it was this unfolding that forced millions of ordinary people (14m of them actually) to have to vote for this dodgy affable chap Boris to ‘Get Brexit Done’. So no point complaining about their ways now. It could have been a very different Government had these remainer people organised themselves differently.
Back to this week and we see that most of those who were trying to leverage out Dominic Cummings last week (rightly or wrongly) are actually these ones who put him exactly where he is. And while his behaviour was arguable at best, it’s possibly far more about undermining Brexit again. Did you see the behaviour of the media photographer melee he has to put up with every day? Not a semblance of respect for social distancing. Every day they could probably infect him. Sack Cummings, but if so, sack the controllers of all the media companies too who accept the pictures. Disgraceful media behaviour – and of course that culpability was not mentioned in the self-righteousness of eg Newsnight. To be honest, had I been DC I would have done exactly the same safe escape. His is not a safe house to live in with a family of Covid infections and a rabid, infected, merciless and uncaring press at the door. That’s my judgement anyway. Not sure about Bernard Castle mind!
So we get Boris and co for a covid situation. Not ideal, though mercifully some around have clear objective and detail skills like Rishi Sunak and the Professors and a few more decent Ministers. That’s just the way it is now. Almost more importantly I hope someone can make them into a good team.
Coming up then…enjoy a heavy political year as the government are constantly attacked as if it were an Election year. The Opposition and the EU will be attacking the government under pretence of Covid to stop Brexit again by 31 July and then 31 December.
But if we are refocusing on Brexit, it must mean people think there is a valuable life beyond Covid, of a sort, to fight over…but Covid still works away at killing many and often. And the ones we should protect most. Sadly.
Black America/Racial/Covid stats next time I hope…
Keep tight and enjoy the outdoors and physical activity where you can.
Have a good week.
14th June 2020 – Slavery
Stats??! update for those who asked…
Government is terrified of economic position post-furlough. The numbers across their desks look catastrophic. Companies who need human proximity (airlines, restaurants and pubs etc etc) are collapsing soon. We lost 20% of our economy in April. This is unheard of and the road back will be very, very hard, leaving funds for public services 2021 decimated unless we push the debts even further at our teenage children’s earning generation.
Having discussed how Covid-19 blame was overlapping a bit with the new emerging Brexit agenda in places, we then had the George Floyd murder charge (raised from Murder 3 to Murder 2 probably only because of demonstrations). So race is now an issue. We can make this a great opportunity to be honest about the work still to do in society on this, or we can destroy the debate and polarise behind false self-righteousness on all sides.
I saw a great post this week about terrible post-war Empire atrocities by the British in Kenya. I agreed we should (and need to) ‘un-re-write’ UK colonial school history. Or more accurately, include and publish more truth of our recent colonial dark acts, as well as balance up the wording on the plaques next to statues and put some – lawfully – in museums instead of in victims’ descendants’ faces every day from on high.
The result however will always be a ‘version’ of some kind – it’s not possible to balance perfectly the saints and sins, and these are so mixed too (eg Churchill). But the result should be a balance of good and bad, as both existed simultaneously. Self-flagellation alone at this time leading to self-loathing now, is not helpful or accurate. But a period of reflection, asking, and correction, yes. It highlights there is much to do.
I think we should include more older historical shameful truths with the context of their time (not our current context) and balance up more recent post WW2 stories (Windrush etc). And then also to ask other ‘races’ and ‘groups’ to be honest and balanced too.
Long ago, slavery existed wholesale in black Africa before the white colonialists arrived. Witnessing this may even have given the white colonialist opportunists the idea and some warped sense of justification. American indians committed many atrocities not connected to whites. They also had slaves. We were conquered by vicious Viking hordes. It’s complicated and all modern-day ‘groups’ need to own their own sins first (I am not equating here) before attacking others. Otherwise a sense of perspective is lost and justice will never be achieved. The danger is that a false sense of self-righteousness just replaces one tyranny with another.
‘Remove the plank in your own eye before condemning the splinter in another’ is a nice reminder, before we or any ‘group’ of any kind get too self-righteous.
Here’s one bit of relevant history. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/facts-about-slavery/
While I see the large majority of UK people are good and fair people and UK is better than most nations (try living alone and as an ‘outsider’ in Middle East, Arab nations, Russia, eastern europe, China, India, France) there is still a lot of ‘soft racism’ – subconscious and conscious – as well as overt acts by a nasty minority to eradicate here. It only takes a very few % of these nasty types (plus lack of empathy from those with unconscious inter-generational soft superiority? and blindness? – I’m off to tidy up my own act again with my grandfathers’ old-language voices in my head as a check-sheet) to exist in order to ‘colour’ a whole life of a black person in this country. But overthrow and a new, different, tyranny is not the answer on any side. We all need to work peacefully but energetically for more cross-understanding and justice now.
23rd June 2020 – Threat Levels
Stats update…
The Government 5-4-3-2-1 Covid-19 threat level system is sadly a ridiculous death-producing tool, or being inadvertently used as one. Systems thinking basics is about three things: exponentials, natural cancelling processes, and time lags. This tool does not anticipate or educate as it does not allow for any time lag. But it is being used to inform public behaviour. 🙈🙈.
I am back where I started on 9 March talking about bad use of data by ‘authorities’. I was originally incensed by the terrible BBC (and WHO). BBC saw new hospitalisations doubling every 3-4 days but focused on communicating less useful and mis-named numbers (eg ‘total cases’, ‘new cases’, ‘deaths today’ rubbish) and who should know better about the presentation of statistical data to the public.
Yes we need to get the economy going again. But while taking the Level down to 3 is factually correct (and politically expedient for the more well-off who can more easily protect themselves and their livelihoods from this point through a pandemic), it is not directionally correct. Level 3 behaviour leads to Level 4 results. This Level 3 call has emboldened many people into a false sense of security about their behaviour relative to this virus, which is then self-defeating for the tool. Bad habits re-form from this info and pushes us back towards Level 4. Everything we already know about systems is that when the basics are not understood it leads to repeated cycles, sometimes with increasing amplitude (eg Spanish Flu 1919-20, 1950s free market agricultural prices etc).
I accept some other countries notably Vietnam, Thailand have much lower virulence or transmission – but not in UK and many other places, and until we understand the differences we cannot assume the conditions are the same and copy them. Look at Germany’s recent difficulty.
Luckily we know more now about how it transmits (mainly indoor, mainly through breath and by non-washed, face-touching hands – this is simplistic but a decent start) and there are a lot of sensible people minimising their personal risks as far as they can while making a living (some workers are more exposed than others despite their personal efforts I know), and all these people’s actions improve the ‘fire-break’ of transmission. So R should not ever rise to 3 again anywhere, but we need to run an economy and keep it as far below 1 as possible and eradicate it. Telling the public it’s (for a moment) not increasing exponentially does nothing to help maintain these human fire-breaks. It’s the wrong message.
So ‘keep keeping safe’…keep your Level 4 guard up. It’s where we are heading again in any place in the UK where people don’t take the virus seriously.
Hug only those you know can’t possibly have the virus – and when you know for sure you don’t either!
Have a great week and keep looking for the good and useful facts behind the poor quality media/social media ‘information’. You can do it 😊.
16th July 2020 – TT Clubs Closing
Quick stats update….
A good question from Martin on his feed…. ”Which Table Tennis club will be the first to close due to a second covid outbreak?”
Well, hopefully none, as distanced/hygiene TT is not a super spreader environment like a pub/dense factory. Interesting though.
So… we were closed 13 March in the first outbreak. Looking back, this date of 13 March was only 12 days after the Senior TT Nationals, where no-one even mentioned Covid-19 or Coronaviruses. Then within a month of closing, UK was getting 1,000 UK fatalities per day. So it can spread fast from a low base and kill 2-10% of older or vulnerable people.
It has not gone away. Summer may be helping the mid-risk environments to stay lower – we know the half-life of covid-19 (cov-sars-2) like many non-novel coronaviruses is far lower in higher temperature and in ultra violet light (latter up to 100x).
But Hereford and Leicester remind us his thing spreads quickly if we give it the conditions to do so, and there’s every reason to think October through Winter to come, may be more virulent like March/April. It may mutate by then to less dangerous – but that can’t be gambled on.
The main things to remember:
1. It’s the Over 50s and vulnerable it hits badly. Young and fit kids and adults rarely get it badly, but they do spread it to the at-risk groups. Schoolkids spread it much less, many experts think. I hope they are right.
2. We cannot afford a second lockdown – the economics are already going to be horrendous, and felt badly in coming months as furlough and Govt ££ slows. And 2021 & 2022 will be really horrible for unemployment. We just need to work safely.
3. It’s a global phenomenon (definition of pandemic) but don’t think of it in averages as you watch the national news. That makes you feel helpless – it’s not a good mindset. Remember it spreads from individual to individual – one person at a time…mainly through breath or a touched surface, and indoors far more likely than outdoors. Simples…
4. So indiscipline by irresponsible people is still awful – it makes them responsible for killing people by giving them the virus unnecessarily – not nice but a sobering truth.
5. So what to do…One good way to proceed post-lockdown is a new personal vigilance. As well as hygiene and distancing (it’s more accurately physical distancing not social distancing) – consider the environment you are entering and imagine where this invisible virus could be…on people, on surfaces, in breath. See it like you are wearing X-ray specs. And maintain that view and manage your movements accordingly.
6. By being as safe as poss, you are one more ‘fire-break’ that breaks the chain of the virus. We have learned that these human ‘fire-breaks’ are how we kill it off – the virus can’t live long outside the human body. It dies very quickly (usually in minutes outdoors or hours indoors) if we don’t quickly give it a new human (you or your loved ones) to thrive in.
So we can beat this nationally by being a personal fire-break as far as poss, and encouraging others to take responsibility for being a fire-break too. It’s an optimistic message – we win nationally by personal and local means repeated across our whole land. And we dont have to be perfect. A good all-round effort will do (on average!).
Enjoy summer – keep finding and looking after those finding it difficult economically or mentally 😊.
22nd July 2020 – Masks
Quick stats update…thanks Philip. Reliable and non-political evidence is now clear…we all need to wear a basic, comfortable cloth mask around other people, like is normal in many Asian countries, or in hospitals, to protect others from our breath droplets. If we do, its community and economic effect is huge – greater than a second lockdown (many of these Asian countries didn’t even need a first lockdown! – maybe that’s why).
This is a reliable meta- study which concludes…
In the current pandemic, the consensus is growing that public masking should be used in combination with other efforts rather than not at all 1,5,9,82,89,92. Even the cautious and consensus-driven World Health Organization, which initially recommended against masks, now encourages their use in areas of widespread COVID-19 transmission, in light of new information on the disease and the results of large-scale comparative studies.
Lots of good general information on latest Covid-19 knowledge in this report too.
Proper regular handwashing, cleaning surfaces, avoiding touching face, and physical distancing of 2m where possible – and we can go about our business effectively, restart the economy and our face-to-face relationships, while protecting the vulnerable in this new world.
Article of Interest:
https://pws.byu.edu/covid-19-and-masks?fbclid=IwAR2G6PtKYJTlprxheaU2vBju6jWnf6Wu8YZnrhixTsfyaMVJW2f2mxt3x5g
21st October 2020 – Second Wave
OK, OK a ‘Quick’ Stats Update by popular demand! (sorry I’ve been really busy)…
So…welcome to the Second Wave of Covid, as we outlined in July. No surprise here. The Government saw the dire long-term economic consequences of Wave 1 and over-optimistically tried rapid (rabid?) opening up of close-quarters. ‘1m minus’ social contact (public transport, pubs etc), was done in hope rather than science, which also gave people the impression the virus was beaten and so encouraged the worst non-protective culture and habits possible. Crazy in an exponential (fast-accelerating) system and with February/March’s exponential experience to learn from, because it is individuals, not government policy directly, that stops or transmits this virus. In my opinion this totally unscientific messaging to the public was the biggest communications mistake of all so far. The virus hasn’t changed its characteristics of course, and familiar coronaviruses of all kinds love cold rather than warm temperatures. So we are now facing the need to limit the economy severely again, with an infection level as high as March, but are now totally skint as a country from Wave 1 to support the economy. And the virus has been pushed into a new peak (of impending hospitalisations) at the start of Winter, when NHS demand is always at its height. Ugh.
So it’s going to be a long, hard Winter until the sun comes out (metaphorically with treatments etc, and physically) in April. Ah, well. But no completely easy solutions I suppose. So just batten down whatever hatches you can. I have been in Sweden recently and while they have suffered too, their brave pro-economic approach, low population density and relatively very high social cohesion means they have a fairly intact economy to face the Winter with.
The partially saving grace for UK is that this time round we know more about the virus (treatments are better, infrastructure is better prepared, though key workers will get burned out) and we know better how to reduce and avoid transmission from person to person. So infections have doubled every fortnight recently, whereas it was doubling every 3-4 days in Feb/March. Which is actually 4x slower growth or R < 2 not the previous 3.5.
So we won’t see 1,000 deaths per day again I hope, but it will be back in the hundreds per day for a significant while. That’s equivalent to maybe 50-100,000 pa (though it won’t last that long) or 3-6x worse than flu, even with restrictions. In terms of overall stats, I don’t actually mind if fit Under 55s catch Covid. It’s nasty for some but in the grand scheme of Public Health the level of death and damage (long Covid) is not worth killing the economy and freedoms for. But to avoid rule-based restrictions these people have to explain how they will not pass it on to the millions of Over 55s and younger vulnerable people. And as yet I haven’t heard this. “Isolate for 2 years if you are Over 55 or vulnerable, while we play” is not a responsible or viable enough strategy. Or at least no means of delivering it yet. We may yet have to get creative about separating young and old better.
While most cases in August and September were in low risk groups (and deaths down to the teens per day), the graphs show no ability of us yet to contain the virus within low-risk groups as it accelerates. The large number of recent young adult cases are sadly currently running up and up through the age categories. And you know what that will mean for November and December fatalities.
So we have to bring the general R back to about 0.7 as before to reduce daily infections consistently again. And then keep it there with an open economy. Actually K is an even better figure to locate – it is thought that some individuals are super-spreaders and some not, but we have no world-class TT&I system to identify this, if you weren’t already aware of that!
What I don’t like is the plethora of arbitrary rules in every industry, confusing and some of which are unnecessary. It’s a non-scientific scheme of immense detail, and exception-based detail at that. I understand the exceptions are to enable more economic activity, but I think fewer, simpler, clear virus-behaviour-based laws (yes, rules, not guidelines) would be better accepted by the public. It would release some industries, but it would mean allowing lame-duck industries that rely on ‘close-quarters indoor crowd contact’ to innovate or collapse (close-quarters pubs, nightclubs, some airlines, fast-moving indoor environments). 2m distancing, restricted density, masks indoors in public, and one-way systems with rapid frequent surface cleaning will do it. Not an economic lockdown. We can’t afford it. But yes, restricted household mixing. Outdoor gatherings with controlled social distancing and density-movement limits are fine. Actually I think these ‘social’ indoor industries would complain bitterly but offer no solution, and would then innovate to 2m physical distancing and frequent cleaning of surfaces, with new ideas and business models in some cases, though many would (will anyway) collapse, sadly.
Whatever furlough etc we do now will be limited by cost. Manchester etc in Tier 3 only get about £100 pp but in millions across the country it pushes Gov’t debt over 100% of GDP – and the red line is 90%. Expect unemployment to rocket now (increases on the scale of perhaps 100,000 per month) and become even higher than in Margaret Thatcher’s famous second term within 18 months.
So….cardigan on for Winter and don’t get infected if at all possible – before you know you have it you’ll give it to someone who gives it to someone with a 15% chance of fatality or severe chronic problems from it. Keep well and keep economically active as safely as you can. It won’t last forever. Really.
Next time we’ll look at the use, value and limits of quantitative easing and government borrowing in all this, and explain how come your house (rented or owned) is ‘worth’ more than ever despite the current and impending economic hardship. Odd isn’t it, until you know how Governments organise their monetary policy (hmm….!).
24th October 2020 – Tiers – Scotland
Quick ‘Regional Tier 3’/Scottish Five Level update…
I think the new restrictions around the UK will be enough to get ‘R’ back down under 1 by mid-December (more slowly than it should as a significant minority will not adhere and keep spreading), but at massive economic debt costs and often massive personal costs as a result.
Scotland…looking ahead…oh dear. These new Level 0 and 1 ‘rewards’ for Scots to work towards, they repeat Boris’ over-optimistic slackening and encouragement for indoor household mixing in July/August. This is how to create an exponentially-rising virus for yet a third wave in January onwards from Levels 0 and Level 1 policies that ignore how the virus spreads. The virus can’t actually count to 8 or 15 ya know! (who said most people can’t either?! – especially when they don’t want to!) – or be polite and non-infectious until after Nicola’s threshold of 8-15 is reached.
When will politicians learn how to balance economic production necessity with measures to keep ‘R’ less than 1 long-term? This is nothing like science and more like a Yo-Yo panic and complacency oscillation over the medium-term. We are making this much harder for ourselves than it needs to be!
#systemsthinking #causalloops
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-54659056?fbclid=IwAR0VzkTZDe5z63i8svQu-HK9itm80QClu1x21t3No1YECSBRbenSlJiOFAo
29th October 2020 – Infectiousness
Quick stats update…Infectiousness.
From this news report let’s then predict infectiousness…
Sadly little is still known about distribution of infectiousness (‘K’, who, more than others, spreads it and at what point) and the duration of infectiousness. These figures are therefore not much reported but this is unfortunate as they are more relevant for prediction than the two data types used here and widely – ‘cases’, or numbers ‘with Covid’.
Given a lot of mild cases are never tested, and infectiousness begins before symptoms, but falls away later in the symptomatic phase, then as an informed rough guess I think maybe 1 in 50-300 people (wide margin I know) in UK are currently infectious. In terms of those who may be infectious and ‘out and about’ I estimate more than half of those infectious don’t know it (as 100% of asymptomatic untested cases won’t know it, nor the pre-symptomatic cases which have 1-4 days of infectiousness). But others will be isolating or careful. So maybe 1 in 100-600 of people ‘around’ is currently infectious. And R=1.5 now so that number range will halve in 10 days without improved distancing and surface cleaning. Ugh. So be careful. But then things improve by 1 Dec if decent Tier 2/3 behaviour kicks in now.
In general it’s still the same story…Covid is totally local, not national…you caught it from someone infectious who is or was recently within 2m of where you physically were then, not from someone far away.
So it’s hard to self-isolate for ever, we need each other. I chose to take a risk this week for example. But we need to learn how to minimise mass transport; make towns more into bubbles (to stop ‘local’ quickly becoming ‘national’); do good distancing and not breathe on people (except thankfully Primary schools are less a problem); and conduct frequent (religiously!) relevant surface cleaning without shutting the economy. It can be done, but many close-quarters businesses (nightclubs, airlines, standing/heaving pubs) and large-distance transport-dependent businesses will have to innovate or go. Just go 5,000 miles East now to see this behaviour already (literally) ‘at work’. If they can do it, we can do it, though our winter makes it worse, so don’t expect to match the figures of warmer countries.
So stay engaged in life.. but avoid infection as far as possible.
31st October 2020 – Mutations
‘Quick’ stats update….Mutations, the ‘Spanish strain’, and Policy-making.
From a good ‘mutations’ question from Shaun…
Coronaviruses tend to mutate slowly, which historically generally makes them no more deadly than they were (per infection), but means vaccines last only until the next mutations (so there are more infections and overall sickness). The Common Cold vaccine research programme was abandoned after decades of trying (though flu vaccines are 20-80% effective each year) due to 250 mutations circulating.
The Spanish strain of Covid, 20A.EU1 was brought back by holidaymakers in Summer, but there’s no evidence it’s any different in its effect from what was circulating in Feb/March. Back then it was doubling every 4 days (R=3.5) and killing 1,000 old/vulnerable per day before lockdown stopped it rising fast after the predictable time lags from infection to re-infection to fatality. Now the Spanish version is widespread but we ‘only’ have R=1.5 here in UK with a more careful society than in February, so on balance I don’t think it’s worse, just interesting we can track its source.
This is helpful though to show again how a small number of infections in one place in Summer can soon become very wide. That’s the exponential effect of R>1 sadly. It’s especially true now anywhere in cold, densely populous, interconnected Europe. This is a nasty combination of factors, all of which encourage greater spread compared to say Vietnam or South Africa.
The suggestion of abandoning measures and going for herd immunity fails because the old/vulnerable are numerous in Europe and not sufficiently ‘isolatable’. Until this is solved the herd advocates are unfairly dumping the problem on them. I estimate ‘herd’ with no careful behaviour costs the UK roughly 600,000 fatalities in the first year and 400,000 in year 2, with NHS staff totally (and beyond) overwhelmed with Covid rather than other important health work. And this in itself damages the economy and fatalities badly too.
So we need to keep the economy as open as possible, though it will need to shift. We can create and promote more ‘localism’ – better virus ‘fire-breaks’ to better isolate all levels of geography from national (reduce international travel) to local (household, WFH, village, town bubbles) where, and as far as, possible. We will become a more primary-focused economy. Grow your own, make your own, fix your own. Great for reducing pollution, waste, climate too. Travel still happens, but less needed. The obsession with financial measures of success like Gross Domestic Product finally falls away. Unemployment is serious but becomes mixed with programmes for simple self-sufficiency. Lots of innovations come forward Eg Why doesn’t each village or town surround itself with a ‘moat’ or ring of tens/hundreds of thousands of fruit trees that anyone needy can pick for their own needs?
Crossing macro fire-breaks (deliveries, sports teams across cities) is only for those virus tested and certificated. It will come, and will get easier as systems improve. This slows R to less than 1 and then, even without a vaccine, the virus is then dying progressively, as long as it’s maintained after this (unlike Scotland’s short-sighted Level 0 ‘reward’ of greater mixing). Then everything gets easier, as long as it’s maintained for a year or so.
Another mutation in Sars-Cov-2, called D614G, has been identified which is believed to make the virus more infectious.
So if we let a more infectious mutation go around, this is bad news, and shows even more need for the fire-breaks.
All of us demanding very good personal Covid behaviour (hands, face, space – but add frequent soap surface cleaning by everyone) is a start. Then collectively a move to more and more voluntary/local authority area localism is gradually the way forward in my current view.
This causes change and difficulty for the economy and society, but the least change and difficulty, and has some benefits for post-heavy-industrial sustainable living.
Not perfect, but an emerging idea. Happy to hear better well-founded ideas…with my Facebook mates we can avoid too many tragedies and fix this thing 😀.
21st November 2020 – Funding
‘Quick’ stats update…Funding the Pandemic: The so-called Quantitative Easing part is strange and interesting, and will follow on as a Part 2…
Our UK Government just borrowed another £22.3Bn in October alone. It was double this in April and May, so be grateful for small mercies! This is a long trend now with furlough etc through to March. These sums also cover a massive hole in tax revenues which is being borrowed against. Plus the Gov’t did further ‘borrowing’ of £300Bn of Quantitative Easing (QE) this year. More of this method in Part 2. Assuming this QE is paid back, overall borrowing to fund the pandemic (started March 2020) will be miles over half a trillion within a year, or around 30% of everything that everybody in our economy made and spent in 2019. Wow. So the pandemic is costing us in effect over a quarter of all we earn – most just haven’t felt all this…yet.
Of course the Gov’t would face massive opposition if the economy collapsed to this extent, hence the borrowing. Borrowing simply spreads the payments, like buying a sofa on credit. But of course you pay a lot more this way – mostly much later. Worse, the sofa may look good and provide comfort, but it won’t last long and will be long gone, many years before the payments run out. Have you ever had a long-term loan on a short-term product? I’ve messed up before here and it’s just chronic financial pain! So watch the recession to come later. Our prediction of 100,000 jobs lost every month has been happening the last three months fairly closely. New furlough may slow this, but won’t solve this rising unemployment.
So our other earlier prediction that the pandemic will cost every working person about an additional £1,000 per year every year in tax for the rest of their working lives to pay the debt down, looks still to be about right.
This is made even worse because, since we never recovered public finances fully after the Financial Crash of 2008, the Gov’t was already in hock to the tune of £1.8 trillion – or 85% of everything we earn each year. That means each working person in the country will have to pay around £50,000 in future taxes just to pay for PAST spending and get debt very low. And the pandemic borrowing now adds another £10,000+ per taxpayer to that. Of course, no-one in politics plans to pay it back – just pay the interest at 2% and throw the capital debt at the next generation. Hmm…that’s not a solution if you keep doing it.
To put the numbers into context, the interest and a reasonable bit of long-term capital repayment on the pandemic borrowing applied to the Education budget only, will reduce the amount we can spend on Education by a third over the next 20 years compared to not doing this borrowing. Or the NHS by a fifth (not both though, but it’s a lot of future lives affected either way). It’s massive.
This month is the first time since 1961, when Gov’t debt was coming down rapidly as we paid off WWII, that this debt is more than a year’s salary per taxpayer – over 100% of GDP. Of course the political plan is never to pay it off, but to get the nation’s rapidly rising overdraft stable in 2022 and after. But with business stricken, tax revenues will stay low, and this won’t happen.
The next problem will be whether ‘people’ (savers, banks, pension funds, other financial institutions, more wealthy foreign governments) will even want to lend to us – either at all or at the required low rates of interest. They may start to think we won’t be able to pay it back without ‘printing’ it and causing problems that way (done by QE). Boris and Rishi have to make sure we don’t lose our AAA/AA-ish credit rating as a nation any further.
But does Quantitative Easing help or hinder the debt problem?
An exponential pandemic with infectious asymptomatic time-lags is a nasty threat, threatening the older and vulnerable (up to 15m people in UK are in this category of risk) and long covid issues for some younger ones has led us to this point. We are balancing fatalities, NHS overload threat, and unknown long-term virus harm, with opening the economy. It’s tough, but hopefully some light from April. The sooner things get sorted, the more the Government are justified in their debt actions. But if it takes longer, the debt spiral may start to get out of control and any health/economy balance will have to swing back to opening the economy at the cost of exponential rises in fatalities. Hence the Gov’t’s relief at the vaccines on the horizon, rightly or wrongly. Hobson’s choice otherwise.
And no wonder the libertarians are mad. From their perspective we’re descending into a permanently more controlled ££-tech/bio-tech, socialist (Gov’t was already spending 45% of GDP itself and currently it’s massively more), fake money, crippling public debt society with some global giant companies doing well (tech, deliveries, megastores), while small indigenous free market creative entrepreneurs get banned from operating by ‘big brother’. I don’t buy all that, but it’s partly the case, and not a good look. Fortunately I have great faith in British creativity and entrepreneurism at all socio-economic levels and people will bounce back despite everything.
What’s for sure either way is that our future younger workers will long feel resentful of our 2020/21 borrowing when the reality of the ‘exponentials with time lags’ threats fade in the social memory. Post-pandemic, those who are benefitting from the current ££ support need to realise it, and will need to keep explaining why we did what we did for a long time!
I hope you’re doing well both economically and health-wise. 2020 has been hard on us all but all good wishes for Diwali, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah etc, and for 2021.
#givethanks
29th December 2020
Quick(!) stats update (UK):
So the virus is still with us and we are trying to hold daily fatalities under 1000 again, like in April/May. So it’s proving to be the sad, long and difficult winter we thought.
Great article from Full-Fact here. https://fullfact.org/health/can-we-believe-lockdown-sceptics/?fbclid=IwAR3hsQSEK6DoiC6rxHPXC1pXRPGwBV3nN-cXw-ufenK-y6wH7CtZJTxoqpM Thanks Roger and Gordon.
I challenged Ivor Cummins’ complacency on this back in summer on FB, in response to a covid Q from a friend. His analysis and bias does not stand up and I think he has a commercial agenda to defend, to the point of lack of objectivity. Dangerous. Had we taken his ‘advice’ we can see from recent events that the NHS would have been overrun in April/May, increasing the death rate hugely and exacerbating social cohesion problems significantly.
If a Full-Fact-compliant simple analysis exists I think it is:
Exponentials x time lags – temperature/sun – firebreaks = infections x mortality rate = deaths.
I make no account for herd immunity in this equation as we are either a) two years away from that as many people are careful and slow the spread a bit, or b) we could accelerate herd immunity only by throwing hundreds of thousands of our 15m older and more vulnerable people to the lion of covid at a point when vaccines are just around the corner. And herd immunity does not mean people don’t continue to die. Vaccine will accelerate this date, hopefully, without the lion’s roar being so bad.
And I make no account of the massive disparity in personal risk for age/condition. If the population was all under 60 and well, we would take no economic restrictions at all as it’s nasty for some and some various Long Covid, but mortality rate v v low. But sadly we have been unable as a society to protect this older section (15m at 2%+ risk) from younger, infected, safer people without lockdowns on all adults to reduce the likelihood of spread. Currently deaths are back in the hundreds per day and without distanced behaviour it would be thousands.
Ivor Cummins’ initial point about early herd immunity was always a hoped-for guess made with seductive confidence and now proven false with 20-30k new cases per day currently. Hitchens’ point about 23 March lockdown and fatality peak ‘too soon’ afterwards (supposedly proving deaths not related to lockdown) ignores the prognosis variations and also the efforts people made after initial severe warnings before laws were introduced that bent the spike over earlier a bit. And covid dislikes higher temperatures and especially UV light as spring opened up.
It’s true Government don’t put out true trends all the time for political reasons, and to justify themselves, but I think we can see between the lines OK.
In one respect Hitchens may have a point about other factors than lockdown reducing R. If (only if) temperature and UV light have a larger positive effect on killing covid than as a nation we tested in May (as I suspect – look at more Equatorial countries’ results, and UK low hospitalisations in July/Aug well after lockdown ends) then the first lockdown of 2020 may in hindsight have gone on unnecessarily long and pushed the inevitable second wave back in time dangerously far into this winter – now – when it is most deadly and disruptive. But to be fair, hindsight is 20/20 and at the time we didn’t know how long or short to make the leash, on this exponential/time-lagged major problem.
So Chancellor Rishi Sunak has made his decisions on the economy with furlough etc til 30 April, borrowing yet another £120bn+ (a further 5% of GDP – eek!) to do so. This fits with our thinking – that the pandemic is a huge problem through the rest of winter but sufficiently under control by 1 May to open up the economy again permanently. Sun, warmth, and enough vaccines before the sun goes down next autumn enable this. With a small risk the vaccines don’t work or have issues to sort out and be delayed.
So that’s our temperature-laden forecast!
So roll on the spring, sun and May 2021.
Happy New Year – I hope at some point for you.