danieldwilliam | Entries tagged with corona

I had quite a nice weekend.

The guy who hit in the head on the Meadows by a broken bottle, not so much.

My weekend consisted of

Al fresco family fish and chips with my dad on Friday evening in his wee courtyard. Nice to see him, he was pleased to see us. It was still a bit cold for us to sit out for long.

Saturday was a nice sunny day. The Captain had a couple of social engagements from mid-morning onwards. So after seeing him out the house MLW and I washed her car. It's a black car so the end of it pointing south towards the sun was actually steaming when it was washed. Then we sat out in the garden for a coffee and a bit of a chat. This was followed by a short bit of light gardening including pruning the most viscous rose. I have several rose in the garden and the climber and the rambler are both dangerously thorny. The climber was a bit mismanaged when I first got it and is a bit too tall and has a tendency to lean right over the fence in an anti-social way and I have a long term plan to re-shape it. This includes getting up a ladder to trim the top.

Had a phone call with my sister. She seemed alright.

Then I cooked a Julia Childs' recipe; potato and ham gratin. I bought some ham hough from the butchers and pot-roasted that and it was delicious as a stand alone meal. Put the ham in the gratin. Very nice. Used my new cast iron skillets for their hob to oven capability. All worked well.

Sunday involved rugby training in the afternoon. Nice to see the kids back in the groove. Their physical fitness is still a bit reduced but they are having a nice time. It was hellishly windy on Sunday and difficult conditions for rugby but they managed pretty well.

I got the set up for one of the exercises wrong and ended up needlessly complicating it. This had predictable results with a crowd of 11 year olds. But overall they were on good form.

Spoke to my mum on Sunday. She was little down because she had convinced herself that her most recent operation would be the last operation on her jaw and she could look forward to some lamb chops. However, alas, she needs to heal up from the most recent one before she can do that. So she has been thwarted and was sad. Had an interesting conversation with her about policing and also about institutional racism which concluded when I told her that the total recruitment of BAME individuals to the civil service fast track scheme appeared to be zero and she thought that was a pretty open and shut example of what I was trying to explain. If your actual civil service, the core institution of your state, can't get it together to hire any BAME people in to their senior leadership of the future scheme then, as a citizen, you don't really need to understand the exact mechanics of the problem to see that your state appears to have some problem with racism.

Interesting factoid, apparently in the late 1960's and early 1970's in Manchester, only about 2% of women with East Asian heritage spoke English - which, inter alia, made obs and gyny difficult.

Cooked some lamb shanks in the tagine - and a pie for the Captain as he doesn't eat lamb. That was very nice.

Which leaves us with the fight on the Meadows on Saturday. Lots of people out in the park. It's the first sunny warm day after some restrictions have been eased. Bank holiday weekend. Lots of bored, frustrated people spending a day drinking in the sun. A fight broke out. What made it clear to us that this was a different calibre of fight to the usual rumpus was the police vans driving *on to* the Meadows. Usually between 5 and 8 police vans line up outside the flat. On Saturday, 7 of them straight on to the grass. This time someone decided to start hitting someone else with a bottle. The victim appears not to have been too badly hurt but that will have been more luck than judgement. The police made a couple of arrests. I believe a police constable was hurt.

Not sure if this indicates an escalation in the on going tension in younger people or if this is just one lone idiot getting out of hand and the actual fight was just a more run of the mill brawl.

My current expectation is that the UK will see approximately a quarter of a million deaths by the end of 2020.

The current number of deaths per day looks to be approximately 1,000.(1)

The recent relaxation of English government policy, the VE weekend celebrations and the anticipation of an announcement of much greater relaxation look like we'll see either a continuation of about a 1,000 deaths a day or a second spike (2).

A thousand deaths a day from the current 60,000 excess deaths for 234 days takes us to about a quarter of million deaths.

There are some reasons to think this could be lower. The current death rate includes lots of people who particularly vulnerable to the disease. The rate of spread will fall as more people have had the disease. We will have more effective treatmentw later in the year.

There are also reasons to think it could be higher. There are still lots of care homes that haven't been infected. The excess deaths from avoided hospital treatment for other conditions will happen later in the year. We may have utterly fucked up the return to work and end up with a huge burst of infection in mid-June. The transmission mechanism in schools is not well understood (3)

What is clear to me is that the UK does not have a functioning testing operation or an effective test, track and isolate operation.

My own policy choice would have been to *increase* restrictions across the UK for another 3 weeks, relax them to the levels of the status quo anti for a further 3 weeks. Followed by a phased relaxation along with widespread testing and good test, track and isolate operations.

Even if the current relaxation of restrictions in England goes well I think the UK is already committed to a hundred thousand dead. We are currently at 60,000. We will see a thousand deaths a day for a few weeks. A thousand deaths a day, today, implies a 100,000 infections 2 weeks ago. With an R of between 0.5 and 0.9 there are still hundreds of thousands of colleagues, family and unlucky stranges associated with each of the 100,000 infected persons for another few tens of thousands to die even if we all stayed isolated from today for 6 weeks.

That's all pretty grim.

(1) looking at the Chris Giles excess death to announced hospital deaths there looks to be about a 1.75 ratio between daily hospital announced deaths and the actual number of excess deaths. Hospital announced deaths are falling but still seem to running at 600 a day.

(2) before we've properly finished the first one

(3) medics and science types I know predicted higher deaths than I am when we spoke about it.

In a slight departure for me I've been looking at the English Premiership - Soccer edition.

There has been a suggestion that the league could re-open, playing its games behind closed doors, with the games playing in clusters at neutral venues. Sort of a series of football festivals. The idea is to minimise travel and contain contacts.

So what are the first two festivals? My idea here is to find the games that give the maximum knowledge about "important" questions. Who wins the title, who is relegated, who finishes in the top 4 or 5th European qualification positions. (putting this another way, can we work out which fixtures won't tell us anything of interest or are likely not to - so that we can avoid the unnecessary risk of playing the games at all. The middle clubs, Burnley to Southampton are unlikely to qualify for Europe or be relegated, but when can we be sure that they won't have to play again.)

Clearly the most important question is who has won the title. That can only be either Liverpool or Manchester City. Liverpool are 25 points ahead. Man City have 10 games to play, 30 points available to them. Liverpool winning two games makes them uncatchable. Liverpool winning 1 game and Man City losing 1 game, makes Liverpool uncatchable. Liverpool winning 1 game and Man City drawing 2, makes Liverpool uncatchable.

Liverpool and Man City have a game to play against each other. If Liverpool win that, they win the title. That seems the most obvious game to play. So Liverpool and Man City go in to the 1st festival.

At the bottom of the table things are complex. Bournemouth, Aston Villa and Norwich make up the current automatic relegation positions. However, Norwich, on 21 points with 9 games to play could, if they win all their games, finish with 48 points, which would put them on the same number of points as Chelsea, who are currently in 4th.

We need more information about the fortunes of the current bottom clubs in order to plan the second round of most informative fixtures. So all three of the bottom clubs go in to the first festival. Between them they have three fixtures against either Liverpool of Man City.

There is an important distiction between finishing 5th or 6th. One qualifies you for European competition next year. The other, probably doesn't. So we ought to see if including Manchester United, currently 5th gives us useful information. In a group already including Liverpool, Man City, Bournmouth, Villa and Norwich then Man U would have two games, against Bournemouth and Villa.

Then I looked at the unfulfilled fixtures of other teams to see which teams had the most fixtures yet to play against the current list of six. West Ham would have 3 and Southampton 4. Both clubs are reasonably close to the relegation zone. West Ham only not in the relegation zone on goal difference.

So I would propose that the first fixture festival be between Liverpool, Man City, Bournmouth, Villa, Norwich, Man U, West Ham and Southampton. This gives 13 games (out of a total of 92 to play, or 14%). It should settle the Premiership title and it will give us some useful, but inconclusive information on the relegation and top 5 situation. My rough predictions on the likely results would see Man U climb to 3rd with 5 games to play. If they don't win any games then Chelsea and Wolves have a clearer target. 8 teams out of 20 play in this round.

My proposed round 2 would be to start with the top placed clubs who haven't played; Chelsea, Leicester, Wolves and Arsenal then add in the teams who have the most cross over on their unfulfilled fixtures list. I think these are Spurs, Sheffield United, Crystal Palace and Watford. I'll work out the permutations of this later but this festival includes Chelsea in 4th playing Wolves (6th) and Sheffield United (7th), Leicester in 3rd playing Arsenal (9th), Spurs (8th) and Sheffield United (7th) as well as games between Wolves vs Arsenal and the ever popular North London Derby, Arsenal vs Spurs. 8 teams out of 20, running total 16/20

At this point the following teams have not played since lockdown, Burnley, Everton, Newcastle United and Brighton and Hove Albion. So round three is those 4 clubs, plus Norwich ( 3 fixtures against those clubs - total now of 6 games out of 9), West Ham (2 fixtures - total of 5 at least), then 2 out of Liverpool, Man City or Sheffield United depending on earlier results (eg if Liverpool have not yet won the league they should play). Liverpool has a game to play against each of Brighton, Burnely, Newcastle and the derby against Everton. Both Man C and Sheffield United have games against 3 of those 4 clubs. Assuming results go as indicated by current league position then this round starts to properly open up a gap between those who could qualify for Europe and those who probably can't. Results against the curent league positions of the top teams start to confirm relegation for clubs in the bottom three. The advantage of including Liverpool rather than Man City or Sheffield Utd is that, on current form, Liverpool ought to be shoe-ins to win all of their games and this probably reduces the amount of information necessary to conclude the league the most.

If Norwich have lost all of their games the would be 21 points with 3 games to play, with the best points tally availabe to them 30 points. West Ham will have 4 games to play, assume the beat Norwich but no other wins they would be on 28 points with a maximum of 12 points from 4 games, taking them to at best 40 points. Aston Villa (assume they beat West Ham but no other wins, would be on 28 points with 21 points available from 7 games for a maximum score of 49. 49 points would put them above Chelsea currently 4th, but Chelsea would (probably) have won a few of their round 2 fixtures. The relegation situation would be far from settled but it starts to become clear which fixtures could be avoided.

I'll look in more detail at rounds 2 and 3 next

Posting mostly to check my maths and the not-craziness of my assumptions

930 newly reported coronavirus deaths yesterday. Allowing for reporting lag, approximately 1,000 casualties.

Total deaths approximately 7,000.

Estimate of the peak of deaths occuring 20th April. Assuming approximately 1,000 deaths a day until the peak, followed by a two week period on the other side of approximately a 1,000 deaths a day. With roundings takes us to 35,000 deaths within a few weeks.

Assume 1% of symptomatic cases result in death. That implies 3.5 million people have had coronavirus with symptoms. The next bit is a guess on my part but assume for every one person with symptoms there is another person who is asymptomatic. Total number of UK residents infected with coronavirus approximately by the end of April, 7m.

Ball park. A little over 10%.

Which if I have understood the literature correctly

a) doesn't help much when using antibody tests with a 95% accuracy rate in sorting the genuine positives from the false positives. You'd see 1 false positive for every 2 real positive reports. (This is going to turn in to some real life and death version of the Monty Hall problem)

b) doesn't help much with reducing the speed at which the virus spreads. If each infected person infects 3 other people and only 0.3 of those people have already had it then 10 infected people infect 27 people who in turn infect 73, compared to 3>>30>>90.

If, at the end of April the transmission rate is 0.9 due to movement restrictions then I estimate 9 blocks of 3 weeks, 27 weeks in total from 1st May, until the total number infected persons reaches approximately 2/3rds of the population which seems to be the lower limit at which the chains of transmission start to break down because of herd immunmity.

Other than the fact that I finally understand the Monty Hall problem I'm not seeing a whole lot of good news here.