August 7, 2020 - 7:00am
There’s been a lot of talk about local lockdowns and resurgence of the virus lately. That’s worrying, obviously, especially for people in the affected areas – which are, at the moment, much of the North of England, as well as Leicestershire and Luton.
I thought it was worth, though, keeping it in context to some degree. I spoke to Tim Spector of King’s College London for my column this week, the creator of the Covid Symptom Study app. While I had him on the line I asked him a bit about the scale of the new outbreaks.
Back at the peak of the outbreak, he said, around March, “we were seeing perhaps 100,000 people a day getting infected, maybe up to 200,000”. Now, those numbers are down around 2,000.
And the number of people who were estimated to actually have symptomatic Covid-19 at the start of April was probably over two million; now, it’s probably a bit less than 30,000. Even in the most badly affected areas now, the disease is affecting about one person in every 200; in the worst places when the virus was really raging, it was “one in 20 or even one in 10”.
The ‘R’ value, the average number of people who each person with the disease passes it on to, is still around one, says Spector: “We’re still ticking along around the ‘one’ level. The highest is 1.3, not two, or three,” which is where we were a few months ago.
What is interesting is why they’re happening almost exclusively in the North. The people affected seem to be younger now, says Spector, so it could be about socialising; “potentially [people in the North] are socialising more inside because it’s slightly cooler” – the difference in risk between indoor and outdoor contact is huge, he says, “bars and gyms are totally different from parks and beaches” – or perhaps it’s because of economic differences that mean more people are doing jobs that put them at risk, such as factory work.
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SubscribeI am not scientist but as I understand the numbers it’s maybe time to rehabilitate John Ioannidis, Johan Giesecke and Sunetra Gupta as the leading voices of science in this matter, I just can’t figure out how it is possible that such big names are not taken seriously worldwide. The percentage of the a-symptomatic part of the population is rising worldwide, all the time since testing capacity keeps increasing, also in the Netherlands where I am from. A simple look at the WHO corona-dashboard will confirm this.
Completely agree in principle – and long term they may be proven correct.
However I still think the risk of being wrong still outweighs the probability of them being correct if that makes sense.
Also factor into this the politics. As the risk from the actual pandemic reduces the more political things will become over what is and was right or wrong. Put clearer, as the real risk to people goes down, the more the government will make decisions based on their perception than their actual impact.
Which goes back to your point actually – as in the end, if these scientists are proven to be the most accurate, amplifying their message is more important
But not only are they most probably more accurate. I would also emphasize that the WHO, Fauci, The Imperial college, the Robert Koch-institute etc.,etc., have been astronomically wrong from the beginning up untill right now, over and over again and the ‘better safe than sorry’-argument can, by now, in my opinion, easily be countered by the negative social and economic effects of the measures (that also massively affects public health in a bad way) … So I would say the risk is now much more on the side of the fearfull scientists (or call them conservative if you wish but that’s less accurate) and less on the side of the experienced, sceptic and data-driven scientists.
“Also factor into this the politics. As the risk from the actual pandemic
reduces the more political things will become over what is and was
right or wrong. Put clearer, as the real risk to people goes down, the
more the government will make decisions based on their perception than
their actual impact.”
I would argue that at least in the US, this has been the case all along.
Completely – this and the whole BLM/woke debate is one big game of left/right football in US at moment with the looming election – the facts be damned
This is only true in a fantasy world where lockdowns have no effect on people’s livelihoods or on their health or on the general fabric of society. Since in the real world lockdowns are devastatingly toxic to all three, it is not true.
End the lockdowns now.
That’s not what I said, and not the point. I do not disagree with the negative effects of lockdown as I have mentioned elsewhere.
The point is that it is not 100% clear that the virus has passed through a lot of the population (although it looks more and more likely), and it’s not clear that we are through the worst of it (the virus has started becoming more prevalent among younger people than before, reasons still unclear).
To that end among many other uncertainties that i have not outlined, it would be reckless to make a rash complete lifting. We will never get to 100% certainty either way in the real world of course, but care should still be taken as probabilities gradually decrease/increase etc.
I am not against your point in principle – it’s what I want also – but there should be control
It’s completely irrelevant if the virus has or has not “passed through” the population.
From the beginning, we had at our disposal a “total impact” of the virus with the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
There we KNEW that in a closed setting:
-1,045 crew, avg age 36: 145 infected (14%), zero deaths
-2,666 guests, avg age 69, 567 infected (21%), 13 deaths
total MAX lethality: 0.35% of population, 1.8% of infected.
Had countries focused on securing the elderly, the maximum rate would have been greatly reduced, WITHOUT ending civilisation as we know it.
I recognise that many in epidemiology prioritise the catastrophist view. And please, let us name it thus, just so we’re clear about that! 😉
Conversely, they have UNDER estimated the health (mental and physical) costs to the rest of society:
– Wife and child battery
– Depression from lack of schooling
– Depression from lack of parental capacity
– Death by lack of medical care with other diseases
– Death by overdose
– Permanent psychological trauma and mental health costs to future governments
– Depression from loss of employment
– Depression from loss of income
– Depression from loss of social connectedness
– Multi-decadal economic loss which WILL translate to losses in social programs, mostly hurting the poor. (In Canada it’s not just a few extra billion dollars in debt, it is a DOUBLING of the national debt, going from mostly domestic Canadian debt to mostly foreign debt.)
Declaring this a “pandemic” was erroneous because it does not (statistically) affect the entire population, only the fraction with comorbidities.
Shutdowns were wrong in the long term, as evidenced by Sweden’s lack of significant difference from comparable countries.
People need to stop comparing infectivity in Asia compared to the rest of the world. Asian viruses will by default have better outcomes in Asia.
As a society, we have erroneously become addicted to pharmacological solutions to all our ills. It’s a ridiculous outlook.
I’m not sure we have sufficient evidence to conclude “the reason cases are staying low is because our behaviour has changed”. Historically when respiratory viruses have spread without radical attempts at intervention they have naturally passed in a matter of weeks.
Correlation is not causation. Unless we have a control group who return to normal behaviour (no masks, no distancing, back to the office, back to school) then the evidence is weak.
Good post.
The hysterics said that there would be mass graves after the VE Day parties … it didn’t happen.
The hysterics said that there would be mass graves after the sunny beach parties … it didn’t happen.
The hysterics said that there would be mass graves after the BLM-Antifa terrorist attacks … it didn’t happen.
The hysterics said that there would be mass graves after the partial lifting of lockdown restrictions … it didn’t happen.
That’s enough evidence of people who have returned to normal behaviour to say that the cases are low simply because, in the grand historical scheme of things, this virus is utterly insignificant, noteworthy only for the bizarre over-reaction that it provoked. It is primarily a socio-cultural phenomenon, not a biological one.
Exactly my point all along, thx. Since all of the predicted horrors never happened the discussion about risk is becoming an absurdity since nobody really knows what this future risk could be. It’s the same thing as saying the world could end by tomorrow but can be prevented by lock down, because hey , the next day I wake up and what do I see out of my window: the world with its law abiding citizens is still there, amazing….must be the lock down… We are all forced to believe in a religious way, not a scientific way, that measures taken had a profound effect on the spread of the virus and we are not willing to take any risk on this topic while dying in a car crash is more likely to happen, but somehow in that case we believe to be more in control.
Yup. We could all remain enclosed in our homes for the rest of our lives and vastly reduce our longevity!
I was just about to make my first post this exact point, glad not the only one who spotted this irresponsible concluding thought of the writer. To just casually throw that in there as if it is incontestable is rather reckless of Mr Chivers. To also suggest our behaviour _must_ stay changed when in the article itself it is acknowledged there is a huge % of asymptomatic / immune people…
If most people are unharmed by this, why on earth are we still being asked to change our lives in such huge ways (and they are huge changes) – never before has the majority been expected to sacrifice their lives for such a tiny tiny minority of people who might come to harm, and nor should we be – it is not selfish to think like this, I’d suggest those wishing masks and lockdowns on the majority are in fact the selfish ones.
There is just one wave with a long tail. The numbers are reducing as more and more people have immunity(antibody and/or T cell). It just get harder for infected people to find bodies to infect. That’s why the Re number goes down.
If there is a 2nd wave, it will be in countries that strangled the first wave(eg Victoria in Australia) T cell study in Stockholm suggested 40-50% infected and given that people under 20 years of age(usually 20% of population) is much harder to infect, the virus is finding it harder and harder to find receptive bodies. No evidence anywhere yet that one could get infected twice.
Yes. I’ve been saying this for a while. If you turn the first wave into a ripple by terrifying people into hiding in their bedrooms, the “second wave” is the first wave that wasn’t allowed to progress. For all the “we have to learn to live with this” narrative, it has become apparent that Governments are not prepared to let people “live with this” and if a few cases are found in an area they will try and get everyone back in their bedrooms. Thus prolonging the inevitable.
As far as I am aware, a problem has never been solved by hiding from it and refusing to face it.
Furthermore, “country stats” are pointless.
Infections progress by leaps and bounds, from hotspot to hotspot. Putting into the same melting spot places that haven’t even seen it yet with places who were the first to see it crazy, is mixing apples and oranges.
We need to get away from country stats and compare infected city by by infected city, STRICTLY on the basis of days since 1/100,000 infections reached.
The media have constantly presented faulty statistics, it’s bewildering.
We need to stop talking about “waves”.
The only reason media are obsessed with “waves” is because during the Spanish Flu, when the scientific understanding was poor, they experienced a “second wave”.
But today we know better.
It the contagion fails to be contained, then it will continue SEASONALLY. The Plague went on for 67 years!
What we’re seeing now is not “waves”, it is the result of more or less confinements PLUS seasonality.
IF governments had locked down HARD (100% two-week shutdown everywhere simultaneously) we might have eradicated this particular coronavirus, but since most Western countries did half-arsed lockdowns, in fear of appearing “racist” by shutting down travellers from infected countries, and failure to mandate two-week quarantines to ALL traveling arrivals, SARS-CoV-2 will be with us for the foreseeable future.
At this point, lockdowns must end.
People who refuse to take ANY risk, living in bubbles, live longer.
Captive animals live longer than in the wild.
Bill Maher once stated that alley cats have shortened lives, but he’d still rather be an alley cat then a imprisoned cat.
Longevity is NOT a barometer of quality of life. Let’s move on!
Trishia, I have had mixed reaction to your posts, but am becoming more persuaded by your wider perspectives. I think though that there is a need to examine (or acknowledge) that this virus does have a high lethality when (and only when) it reaches a “vulnerable population”.
On the Spanish Flu and death age – someone pointed out that a MUCH lower proportion of people were aged 65 and over in those days…
There already is in bonnie, wee little Scotland, and no doubt a third and even a fourth are planned.
Sadly you will struggle to rationalise the irrational – it’s easy to believe anything, a lot harder to identify the truth of a thing. If you cannot see the obvious then are you being driven by emotion? Be it fear, hate, love, or egotism. I do not fear the virus, but I certainly despair at the reaction to it. Alas the irrational has taken over – some may argue it usually does. One thing is for sure – a second wave of despair is a certainty.
There is something seriously askew when failure to wear a face mask in a supermarket means a fine of e2,400 or 6 months in prison. This is the case in Ireland from last Monday. For some reason cafes, restaurants, post offices and banks are exempt.
The weirdness continues when the same sanctions apply if you enter the Republic by ferry or plane and fail to put yourself under house arrest but not if you simply cross the border from Northern Ireland.
People are aware of this so they drive to Belfast, fly to London to do business, returning by the same route in the evening. And our government has no problem with this.
The minutes of government meetings, if any are being kept, will make very interesting reading when they are released. Oh, that I live long enough to read those. Maybe I have the memories and exposes to look forward to before too long.
80% of people who get the virus show no symptoms at all. Is this the same for all coronaviruses like colds and flu? Because if not this makes no sense to me at all. How can a virus be so deadly when it’s so ineffective in most of its hosts??!!
It’s not that the virus is that deadly, it’s that the people who die of it are that rotten at fighting it. These mostly are the same people who are rotten at fighting flu, too, but some of them can greatly benefit from a flu shot. However, since flu shots work by producing an immune response in the patient, if your basic problem is that you are too old to mount a good immune response, then the shot won’t protect you as much.
For some reason, people seem unaware that respiratory diseases are the third leading cause of death for the elderly in Europe — after circulatory diseases (i.e stroke, heart attack) and cancer. see https://ec.europa.eu/eurost… Note that while ‘seasonal flu’ is the largest segment of the respiratory disease subcategory, you also find the people with asthma and other non-infectious diseases here, so you cannot just grab the number listed and shout ‘Here! See how many people died of flu last year!’
So. Covid-19. Worse than the flu. The figures being tossed around are ‘~20 times as bad as seaonal flu’, and ‘kills 15% of those over 80 who catch the disease’, but those were calculated when we also thought that serum antibody testing was a reliable way to determine if a person had been sick and recovered, whether or not they showed symproms. Now that we know that this is not true, and that many people who are absolutely known to have been previously sick with Covid-19 — because they were swab tested for it — have no detectable antibodies when we go looking for them later, either because they never developed them in detectable numbers or because they did, but they faded to the undetectable level within weeks — we are back to honestly not knowing how many elderly people, like everybody else were sick with it and had no symptoms. But it’s clearly bad if you are elderly.
We knew MAX effect from the CAPTIVE humans aboard the Diamond Princess, WITHOUT economic shutdown, the “do nothing” approach:
-1,045 crew, avg age 36: 145 infected (14%), zero deaths
-2,666 guests, avg age 69, 567 infected (21%), 13 deaths
Total MAX lethality: 0.35% of population, 1.8% of infected.
High rates of asymptomatic infections are apparently common for many other respiratory illnesses. That’s something that I just learned recently.
An study in England over several flu seasons found about 50% to 75% of those infected with seasonal flu were asymptomatic – https://twitter.com/Balloux…
A study in New York found 40% to 50% of those infected with seasonal flu were asymptomatic, and up to 75% were asymptomatic for other respiratory viruses (including one of the coronaviruses that causes a cold) – https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.go…