It would take about 2 weeks for the first sign of any increase.
It would take about 2 weeks for the first sign of any increase.
I know but I still find it strange that London has the lowest transmission rate in the country by a decent margin.
More office based workers who can wfh?
The state of folk in Hyde Park
Who was the French footballer on the front page of the papers this morning? I’m assuming his surname rhymes with Drogba?
It’s up because there is more of it in care homes than in the community. There isn’t that much of it left outside. You could have an R of 10 in care homes and 0 in the community and the national number would be 10.Originally Posted by Yevrah
For most of us the new number is good news.
You what? How the hell does that work?
0.27% of people outside of NHS and Care workers had it over the last 2 weeks. That's 1 in 400. That doesn't seem that low to me.
Here we go again.
What's up cunt chops?
Exactly as described. The same reason it went up to Germany to 1.3 because there was an outbreak in a single community which dropped back to 0.8 as soon as they detected and isolated people. The smaller the overall number, the more volatile the overall reproductive number.
So taking it to the extreme, the disease could only exist in a single setting and have a high R. It not existing elsewhere doesn’t mean the R isn’t the R. It’s just the reproductive value of the disease where it exists.
Last edited by Lee; 16-05-2020 at 04:49 PM.
It does to me. In any case it’s going down and once it is low enough (which won’t be long given how quickly it’s falling) you just track and trace cases where they emerge. Which is why there won’t be a second wave anything like this first one.
The government has done a fucking great job at scaring people out of their skins here, I’ll give them that.
I don't understand. What you're saying makes it a completely meaningless number.
It doesn’t at all. It just means it isn’t the only thing you should be focused on. The R does exactly what it is supposed to do; it describes how many people are infected by a single person (or multiples thereof).
The reproductive value is below 1 everywhere other than perhaps Scotland and Northern Ireland. The epidemic is shrinking. The article underneath the headline you linked even says the reason the R has gone up is because the proportion of cases in care homes and hospitals is higher, and the R is higher (for obvious reasons) in those settings.
It’s terrible reporting combined with the tendency of people to shit themselves about this far more than is merited.
Last edited by Lee; 16-05-2020 at 04:56 PM.
If you're saying our r is up only because it's rife in care homes and that it could be the same number nationally as it is in my house then it's a meaningless number.
Once again, absolutely nothing to do with the scientific advisors? Just the government.
It not meaning what you want it to mean doesn’t make it meaningless. It literally means what it means. If you’ve chosen to attach more meaning to it than what it’s meant for then it isn’t the fault of the metric.
The government chooses those advisors and makes decisions based on their advice. They’re free to cast their net wider.
Chris Whitty was only the other day at pains to tell everybody that for the vast majority this thing is a few days in bed at worst.
Which is what the government have said too.
I'm not scared. My nearest and dearest are all under 40. We'll be fine. My concern is being stuck indoors again, no holidays, no restaurants, no fucking fun. With that in mind, risking a second wave can fuck right off.
If continental Europe can open in June so can we. In September.
I don’t really understand your issue. I mentioned the government (who are in charge and rightly accountable) in a single post and suddenly I’m determined to blame the government over advisors? They’re one and the same thing. If the advice is shit that’s on the government. They choose the fuckers.Which is what the government have said too.
And if they government is saying that, they aren’t saying it loudly enough. I’ve read through the last few pages of the thread (and similar places elsewhere) and you’d think this is the plague rather than something which has killed fewer than 240 under 60s with no other health conditions in England. So the message obviously hasn’t been clear enough.
America's going to fuck this for the rest of us, unfortunately.
If we have a second wave anything like this one it will be the result of incomprehensible government incompetence. As much as I’d love to level an accusation of such at our mob, I don’t see it.
Numbers are dropping and will continue to do so. We’ll be able to track and isolate as necessary. Life won’t go back to normal but it will be much closer to it than at present. We have the advantage of being able to see what happens elsewhere. So far countries which have opened up a bit (Germany, Austria, Norway, Denmark) haven’t seen a resurgence in case numbers or R in the wider community.
Last edited by Lee; 16-05-2020 at 05:38 PM.
If they were to spread that message, the lockdown would have been completely ignored by half of the population.
Apologies Lee, don't mean to sound spikey.
The scared stuff just riles me as it's so tedious. Nobody thinks this is the plague.
I've spent today writing a 1,300 word document on how to use cricket nets safely in groups of maximum two. This had better be the fucking plague.
I agree on the second wave though.
Given we basically did nothing to prevent this, for 3 months, you'd have to go some to hit those levels again.
At some point in the not too distant future they’re going to have to. We can’t carry on like this and probably don’t need to.
For all the screaming headlines and furious tweets every time people venture outside when the sun appears, there hasn’t once been an increase in cases associated with the behaviours criticised. Because the chances of catching it outside unless you’re sat talking in somebody’s face for hours on end or coughing on somebody’s face are negligible.
We are going to have to stop certain things. Packed offices, pubs etc are off the table for a bit. But the propensity of the population to behave moronically has been hugely overplayed. People have played ball more than expected, by the government’s own admission. They don’t fancy getting it or killing granny.
I don’t think that’s true. Well, obviously it’s literally true but it’s obvious enough I’m exaggerating for effect. There are plenty who think it’s worse than it is. I get it. We haven’t experienced anything like this in our lifetimes and it is frightening. But we need to start moving towards managing the risk rather than hiding from it. It was only 80 years ago you could die of a cut finger. We still went to the pub.
Last edited by Lee; 16-05-2020 at 05:17 PM.
I genuinely don't think people are frightened, well, not beyond those that are actually at serious risk from it.
And yes, we do need to move on, hence why I've been so critical of the government and our advisors, as there seems to be no tangible plan.
The most obvious plan means making a decision no government wants to make. Keep the old and (very) vulnerable locked away and let the rest of us get on with it as normal. And I mean properly as normal given the relative risk. People can choose not to if they like, of course.
The issue is the old and vulnerable won’t go for it. I wouldn’t if I were them. It’s unfair and unenforceable. And they’re the people who vote, don’t forget. So the rest of us are going to have to put up with something less than normal to protect those who are more at risk. I don’t suppose that’s actually that raw a deal.
I’m 36 a couple of years without the pub and foreign trips feels a bit annoying now but in a few years I’ll look back with pint in hand from some beach and not think much of it. The real problems start if it becomes apparent that a vaccine (or treatments) are fucking ages away. There will be real tensions between the generations of it comes to that. I doubt I’ll feel so reasonable about even this limited level of sacrifice if it’s indefinite.
Yep. I'll reiterate how at work we're hearing a lot more claimants contemplating suicide over this. Heck, I scratch my head at the teenagers that wind up in the news for following through. For the most part, this is an inconvenience, not a terror.
The rational ones might. You try telling 18-24 year olds you’re not getting to party and enjoy your youth for a few years because a disease that won’t effect you is about.
It’s been what 7 weeks and it’s already spilling over.
My reasonableness is already at breaking point. The strategy in your first paragraph is absolutely what we should be doing and if Norman and Vera want to kick off / go out anyway, then let them crack on.
It is up to someone with a nut allergy to avoid nuts.
To a point. But if every Norman and Vera is at it they end up taking up all the hospital beds and you’re not going to get your cancer treatment or your knee surgery. I understand Norman and Vera’s point, too. If I’m 80+ who the fuck knows whether I’m waking up with an exploding prostate or a massive stroke tomorrow anyway? I’ll take my chances and get a bit of pleasure out of seeing the grandkids rather than being sentenced to a lonely death.
Corfu got cancelled today, by the way. I’ve still not completely given up on Krakow but confidence is low. FFS.
Last edited by Lee; 16-05-2020 at 06:40 PM.
There seem to be an alarming number of people out there (on twitter etc) who are currently bang up for locking down forever. Let's see how long that lasts. I'm on day 66 of not seeing anyone bar 4 much older colleagues and whilst the despair has bottomed out a bit, if I reach day 150 and I'm still not seeing more than my parents / one person at a time in a park, then the whole thing can fuck off.
As I saw on Twitter the other day, the biggest problem with shutting the wrinklies away indefinitely is that an awful lot of people depend on them for childcare. Good luck plugging that one indefinitely.
The now-redundant restaurant critics can all become nannies to fill the void.
Make Team Furlough do it.
It isn't safe!
Let the children go back to school but hold all the classes in pubs.
Keep the schools closed so that the kids have to stay home. BUT, kids are asymptomatic super spreading cunts, so ORDER us all to work from pubs?
ITKScouse has it on good authority that the WHO fear a vaccine could still be two to three years away.
It's interesting reading your posts, as I'd been focusing maybe a bit too much on the r0. Just to clarify, in layman's terms, if there was only one person in the country with the virus (let's say they're elderly and live in a care home) and they infected ten other people in the care home, then the r0 would be 10 across the whole country?
If that's the case then it stands to reason that as overall numbers come down, the r0 could easily shoot up and provide a false outlook?
I still look at daily infections as a better idea of where this is going.
Some people really shouldn’t be allowed near the internet.
Well it gives a true outlook. It is only supposed to tell us, on average, how many others an infected person spreads the thing to. As with any metric you shouldn’t focus on any one data point and you should only use it to measure what it’s designed to measure. If we aren’t using it correctly it’s us not using it correctly rather than the metric itself being useless. To illustrate:
100 people in a care home have covid with R of 1
100 people in hospital have covid with R of 1
100 people in the community have covid with R of 0.5
Overall R = 0.83
Reduce the number of cases in the community to 50 but keep the R values the same all round and suddenly your R increases to 0.9. But for most of us that’s good news as the number of community cases is lower and the epidemic, having an R below 1, is shrinking.
What would be helpful is if they gave us the differential R0 between settings. We have it by region now. London is down at 0.4. The Midlands at 0.68. Other areas around 0.75-85. Scotland and Northern Ireland still around 1, perhaps just above.
What are the actual numbers in those three categories then?
EDIT: And more importantly, vs. where we were before when the overall was 0.6 to 0.9.
No idea. They aren’t referred to individually in anything I’ve read. The articles just say ‘it has crept up because the increase in care home/hospital cases as a proportion of total cases’.
Given that the most populated areas in the UK are well below 1, care homes in particular must have a fucking horrible rate. People aren’t dropping like flies in hospitals and almost all hospital deaths are from people who caught it in the community weeks ago. The risk to healthcare workers is about the same as the general population, although that’s because they’re wearing PPE. The poor cunts going to work in care homes.....fuck me.
Anyway, the good news is that we probably aren’t far from the end of the epidemic in the community. The reporting of it has been a disgrace though. Both the BBC and Sky websites went big yesterday with ‘INFECTION RATE INCREASES’ as their main headlines. No context. They knew the context. They quoted it in their fucking stories. They just chose to sensationalise it.
The big scandal from all this, by the way, is going to be that hospitals were allowed to just ship people out to care homes without testing them, at what now seems to have been the peak of the crisis. I led it for my region. We were just told to do it and the truth is we got excited at being able to finally discharge people who didn’t need to be in hospital out, combined with assuming we had to clear out because of what we assumed was going to be a Bergamo/Madrid scenario. Hospitals seeded the care homes epidemic.
Last edited by Lee; 16-05-2020 at 10:49 PM.
I think I mean a false outlook for people who don't understand it properly. A differential would be useful, as you say. I think Yorkshire and the north east are the worst as a region.
So as long as numbers of new cases and deaths continue to fall, the r0 rising slightly doesn't necessarily spell bad news, and may even be expected.
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