Zero deaths!

Sit down before you swoon lemongrove. I agree with you.

A tiny percentage and we are all held to ransom. Yes, I do know, every death number represents a person with a family and it’s very sad. But come on, out of 66 million people? These numbers are a tiny drop in the ocean. This is getting crazy now.

The Swiss just back-tracked on a promise of quarantine-free travel for those with both jabs, so are just as bad.

FWIW I don't think the country needs another national lockdown (yet). We are still in a relatively good position, but local infection control and support is needed. That means putting resources into tracking, testing and tracing and supporting the infected by providing alternative accommodation, good financial incentives to stay off work and whatever else it takes.

I also think that the country needs border controls and enforcement of quarantine rules.

If localised outbreaks can be controlled, there is hope that they can be contained, but people need to be patient.

Urmstongran

A tiny percentage and we are all held to ransom. Yes, I do know, every death number represents a person with a family and it’s very sad. But come on, out of 66 million people? These numbers are a tiny drop in the ocean. This is getting crazy now.

The Swiss just back-tracked on a promise of quarantine-free travel for those with both jabs, so are just as bad.

And if you happened to be one of the tiny percentage, would it bother you if nobody else cared less about you?

The numbers in some areas are not a drop in the ocean. If we let down the guard now, the whole country could be back in the same situation.

The numbers in some areas of the country are high (Bolton near us for example) but that doesn’t mean deaths are high.

My final thought on the topic ...

I think we can be pretty sure after all these negative expectation-setting announcements that restrictions won't be lifted on the 21st and if they are it won't be for long.

Urmstongran

The numbers in some areas of the country are high (Bolton near us for example) but that doesn’t mean deaths are high.

Deaths in England are currently increasing exponentially (they never were zero). Vaccinations mean that the most vulnerable are protected, but don't fool yourself that younger people aren't being hospitalised and dying.

Not only that, but nobody knows yet how much protection the current vaccines give against new variants. If infections are allowed to increase as they are now, mutations will happen more quickly and vaccines might not be able to keep up.

Only a fool would think the country can now go back to "normal". It might very well be that in a couple of months, it's considered that we have been over-cautious, but we won't be able to undo deaths and permanent disabling conditions.

https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202106/medium-250332-capture.png https://www.gransnet.com/uploads/talk/202106/medium-987914-capture2.png

Deaths in England are currently increasing exponentially.

Taken from the governments Coronavirus data webpage, deaths by date of death. 6,6,3,5,3 is not an exponential progression.

We scientists like a fact

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

I just found these stats too....

Young people being hospitalised and dying....this is from the ONS data which uses the wider definition of COVID death as being anyone who has COVID mentioned on the death certificate. The data only goes up to the week of the 21st May because it takes longer to collect, of course.

In summary; in the week of the 21st May 3 people under the age of 45 died with COVID on their death cert; that number had fallen steadily over the previous 6 weeks.

Presented with no commentary....

growstuff

Sit down before you swoon lemongrove. I agree with you.

? I only swoon at Sean Bean as Sharpe.

Alegrias thank you for facts. Opinions are not facts as we all know. Deaths are not
increasing exponentially, and the graph showing deaths by age confirms what I already knew. Young people and children almost never die of Covid. Age is the riskiest factor with Covid, and we can do nothing about that.

Deaths are low, but long COVID apparently affects 1.7% of people who have the virus based on evidence so far, and some people have significant long term health problems as a result. That is a significant number of people every day who will get long COVID, so rising numbers of infections is bad news. I haven’t seen a study yet that breaks incidence down by age, has anybody else?

Alegrias1

^Deaths in England are currently increasing exponentially.^

Taken from the governments Coronavirus data webpage, deaths by date of death. 6,6,3,5,3 is not an exponential progression.

We scientists like a fact

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths

It appears there are scientists and scientists. Professor Ravi Gupta is a professor of clinical microbiology at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Disease at the University of Cambridge. He is also a member of the faculty of the Africa Health Research Institute in Durban, South Africa.

Now that is someone whose opinion on the virus I just might want to pay attention to. Three days ago the BBC reported him as saying that although new cases were "relatively low" the Indian variant had fuelled "exponential growth". He also added that ending Covid restrictions in England on 21 June should be postponed.

Now he may have used the more general meaning of the word exponential i.e., becoming more and more rapid but using the alternative meaning would not stop me thinking he is someone who has more knowledge than most of us in the right area so I am very likely to take his view of the general trend.

What is it about Sean Bean?

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) says that the number of people with Covid-19 in England leapt 76 per cent in the week ending May 29,

Casdon

Deaths are low, but long COVID apparently affects 1.7% of people who have the virus based on evidence so far, and some people have significant long term health problems as a result. That is a significant number of people every day who will get long COVID, so rising numbers of infections is bad news. I haven’t seen a study yet that breaks incidence down by age, has anybody else?

Age Distribution of English Cases [4th June 2021]:

0-9: 5.44% (270)
10-19: 19.88% (987)
20-29: 31.22% (1,550)
30-39: 18.29% (908)
40-49: 12.29% (610)
50-59: 7.92% (393)
60-69: 2.78% (138)
70-79: 1.23% (61)
80-89: 0.71% (35)
90+: 0.24% (12)

Incidence rates in English schools were deliberately suppressed.

I agree PippaZ and after listening to Indi Sage today, and hearing lots of many knowledgeable scientists including Prof Stephen Reicher, Dr Kim Yates, prof Deenan Pillay, Prof Susan Michie, Dr Zubaida Haque, and Prof Christina Pagel, amongst others, I think there is no room for complacency.

PHE also released a report yesterday which said that the Delta (Indian) variant had increased by about 5,000 from previous week, and that the Delta variant was associated with 2.61 times higher risk of hospitalisation within 14 days than the Alpha (Kent) variant.

I understand that hospitalisations thankfully are still low, but may be too early to be thinking of removing all precautions.

maddyone

Alegrias thank you for facts. Opinions are not facts as we all know. Deaths are not
increasing exponentially, and the graph showing deaths by age confirms what I already knew. Young people and children almost never die of Covid. Age is the riskiest factor with Covid, and we can do nothing about that.

I like facts too. Unfortunately, they're not looking too good at the moment.

And I thought you claimed to care about young people maddyone. Some of them have died and more have developed long COVID.

growstuff thanks for this, my fault because I didn’t explain what I meant properly in my last post, I was wondering about the incidence of long COVID by age. It’s worrying if younger people aren’t taking the risk into account as it could affect them for the rest of their lives - but probably early in the pandemic for this to be calculated accurately though.

Ah! OK! I'll see what I can dig up. One issue is that the NHS didn't recognise it as a condition until recently. I don't think it's a question of young people not taking the risk into account. Millions of them are schoolchildren, who have been forced to return to school. Twenty to thirty year olds are also over-represented in zero hours jobs, retail and hospitality, which are known to have a high infection rate.

I can't find a definitive figure, so here's some reading material:

www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4470

www.thelancet.com/journals/lanres/article/PIIS2213-2600(21)00123-5/fulltext

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has published data from the UK Coronavirus Infection Survey which looked at how many people showed symptoms five weeks after infection. The ONS described these as ‘experimental estimates’. The estimates suggested that almost 13 per cent of children in the survey aged between two and 11 and 14.5 per cent of children aged 12 to 16 reported certain symptoms including fatigue, cough, headache, muscle aches or loss of taste or smell five weeks after falling ill with Covid-19. It is important to bear in mind that ‘experimental estimates’ means the data are still being tested. The data was based on 9,063 respondents of all ages but it is unclear what proportion of these were children. However, it is clear that some children are affected by lingering symptoms following initial infection.

www.bhf.org.uk/informationsupport/heart-matters-magazine/news/coronavirus-and-your-health/long-covid#children

www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/long-covid-in-younger-adults-study_uk_60a5119de4b063dcceb13ab8

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7927578/

For PippaZ:

The thing about scientists, whether they are favoured by anonymous internet forum posters or not, is that they tend to use language accurately. So “exponentially” means something specific for a scientist, it means “of or expressed by a mathematical exponent.” TV presenters and newspaper feature writers tend to use it to mean “really quick”, but that is incorrect. So if Prof Gupta used the term “exponential” he was probably using it in the scientific sense.

I didn’t hear him, but it would appear that he is talking about cases. Cases in Bolton etc are probably growing exponentially. But when posters on internet forums say that deaths are growing exponentially, when they are actually currently flat, there’s no way of spinning that, it’s just wrong. If that’s the first sentence of a post, and its wrong, it does make you wonder what else in wrong in the post. Deaths may start to grow exponentially, but any scientist worth their salt wouldn’t say something that was so scientifically inaccurate.

Now then, the 76% growth in people with COVID-19. Can you spot that on the graph attached? It’s the little blip at the end. I wonder if the source of your statistic is the SKY news report or the actual ONS Report? Obviously a big increase is concerning, but as SKY themselves say: In many areas positivity rates are very low, meaning trends are difficult to identify since they are affected by small changes in the number of people testing positive from week to week.

Science is quite complicated, isn’t it?

Here you are:
Long COVID has a lower incidence rate for young people than it does for older age groups, but it's still a significant number.