I know we are tired of Covid19 posts but this is worth a separate one....

6 tested positive but were asymptomatic I think.

 

Helen. Where did that figure come from. The figures quote in the origina reports had it the other way round i.e. only 1 in 10 was showing symptoms. The others were reprted as having contracted it and had no synmptoms

 

Help me out here guys I have been crunching numbers based on figures from various sources (and as many of you know I have ...ahem... 'history' of getting it spectacularly wrong on percentages.. The figures beolw are conservative as I have taken the lowest figures in the various ranges that mitigate the casualty rates....

UK population is around 67 million.... Tests seem to indicate that around 70% of people contracting corona virus are either Asymptomatic or Quasisymptomatic leaving 30% who are ill .

So even if we take a higher figure - say 50% contracting the virus having symptoms and assume the entire UK population catch it, that gives 33.5 million...
Now take 5% (a higher than current figure s available) of those with symptoms requiring hospitalisation... and a death rate of those hospitalised of 3%...

I get the figures below..

UK population .. 67,000,000
50% symptomatic 33,500,000
5% hospitalised 1,675,000
(3% death rate) of hospitalised ...50,250

Whilst a collapse of the Health system could lead to a doubling of deaths due to shortages of ventilators or oxygen supplies that would still come nowhere near the figures being banded about.... 500k - 1 million deaths in UK!!! quoted in various media and that is with only 80% of the population catching it.
What am I missing? Does not make any sense.

 

I don't think we will be anywhere near half a million deaths- I hope not anyway!- but even if a small fraction of that hospital percentage entered services it would totally decimate capacity. You have to therefore assume the toll would be much higher than 50k IF we were all to get it.

 

caveat 1
I could be wrong - note I'm refusing to guess how many dead because I don't believe we have anywhere near enough data.

The key assumption I believe that you have wrong is the death rate of those hospitalised - because I think that the 3% may be closer to 'the death rate amongst those tested positive' worldwide.

In the UK - we might only have been testing those hospitalised, but that's not true everywhere, and obviously that changes the data significantly.

As I posted earlier in this thread but was accused of being unhelpful... We in the UK (just as everywhere in the world) can only extrapolate a death rate from our own stats because our testing regime is unique, our decision making, our population spread is different, our health care system etc etc.

edit to add. a back of *** packet figure gives me 4.5% death rate in the UK (of those tested) but given the exponential nature of the numbers, that could change significantly in a matter of days (in either direction)

 

Agree data is lacking, although I thought the 3% figure was being quoted for UK deaths for hospital admissions. It would probably be higher in Italy anyway due to average population age being far higher but I find it hard to believe we could be so far out as to be overestimating UK deaths by a factor of 10 or 20 ....

 

duplicate post

 

I know below is a bit pointless as it would not work that way but I was up at 5 with one of those 'cant get back to sleep' moments after being woken up twice by the bl**dy cat (we love him really)

Anyway... based on my (suspect) figures in the last post...(Donny-red if you read this post ..I know you can ride a 'coach and horses' through the conclusions as there are too many assumptions).
1670000 hospitalised.... 1900 roughly number of UK hospitals gives 880 admissions. for Covid per hospital, That is around 34 per week per hospital over a six monthe period the half of which (current stats) require Intensive Care. In reality it would be far worse as you can't average it weekly over six months. Many hospitals would not be suitable for Coronavirus admissions anyway and geographically the spread will be uneven, and on top of the normal admissions especially in ICUs it would overwhelm the system
That is doubtless why isolation and lockdown is essential to allow Health services to gear up for the influx. If measures delay it until a vaccine is developed then it will relieve pressure. Obviously the downside to all this is that measures will continue far beyond the 12-16 weeks being suggested by auithorities in various countries.

In our house we have pretty much written of 2020 as regards holidays or trips (even a trip to Verona to a concert we booked last year for the coming September, in our minds at least ia looking dubious!)
Roll on 2021!!

 

A long post about the findings from Vo for anyone who can be bothered to read it.

Cards on the table... All of my assumptions about the village of Vo were previously based on not having read the articles - but being pretty certain that the findings were misreported. And the above kinda proves my point. 3 people have read articles and believe 3 different things.

So I decided to read half a dozen articles, find what numbers I could and see if we can make sense of it, and see if there's anything useful to be gleaned.

Firstly the numbers themselves are awful - most reports have the village population at 3,300 but some idly report 3,000 (that rounding is unacceptable). I've also read 3 different figures of the number of people who tested positive (90, 89 and 66), again it makes any calculations a bit weird.

They started testing everyone almost by accident, and the original findings that 'over half' the people who tested positive were showing no signs of being infected.

That doesn't mean that all those people remained asymptomatic. This ought to be obvious - in a disease with an incubation period of up to 2 weeks, plenty of people will not have symptoms. We also already knew that many victims aren't very ill at all.

But importantly for them all positively tested cases were isolated. They isolated people who most of the rest of the world are allowing to roam free and infect many others.

When they re-tested everyone only 6 people of those originally tested positive remained asymptomatic. So somewhere between 6% and 9% of those testing positive remained asymptomatic. (depending which number of positive cases we use) The reporting is wildly misleading about that (see below).

Given what we already knew; that most kids are largely asymptomatic and some healthy adults were also asymptomatic - I don't believe we learned anything new there either.

Now the misreporting - misleading quotes and outright ignoring the real story.

“I think that for every case that goes to hospital, there are more or less 10 people without symptoms.” That is easily misread as 'only 1 in 10 people get ill, so 90% of people have no symptoms - particularly as we've just read 'most people who tested positive showed no signs of being infected'.

Sadly the actual headline is ignored -
In one Italian town, we showed mass testing could eradicate the coronavirus

Why is this?
Well - we have been inundated with 'measuring doesn't make anything bigger', 'simply testing doesn't help' etc for years.

This is utter nonsense:- Mass testing led to isolation of people and eradicated the virus, but because mass testing is hideously complicated and expensive no one believes it's possible. It probably isn't possible, to do on a wider scale in the UK - but lets not pretend it would make no difference.

If anyone wants the sources - I'm happy to post a link to all the articles I read below.

 

I simply took the current number of deaths and current number of known cases - but as \i said, with the numbers rising exponentially they could be pretty far out in either direction.

If you can find any official statistics which predict the number of deaths - I'd be tempted to believe they're within 10% (because unlike you and I, they have a full set of data and the knowledge to analyse it)

 

Us too - we've got a couple of holidays booked and we were doing some serious work in the house - the winner out of this will be the garden which I usually have no time / enthusiasm for.

 

Unfortunately my wife bought 15 litres of paint for the internal walls in our house before the lockdown...She is now angling at decorating every room.

 

serious case of this going about