Showing posts with label data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 September 2020
Thursday, 13 August 2020
Cherry Picked Information
Only 56 Million Cases to go until we reach H1N1 (Swine Flu) Cases from 2019!
Remind me again how long were schools shut down for?
Remind me again how long were schools shut down for?
What type of masks were popular back then?
Not having anything like as much data analysis to do as would be the case were we not in a pandemic, I've investigated the above meme which has appeared in my Facebook scroller due to posting by a Friend and getting liked/commented by enough other people to make it the first thing I saw.
The first thing that occurred to me was "is this data accurate"? I am not sure which data sources, location, or how recent it is, but as the poster has an intertest in US politics, it's probably about the US even though there are no citations to back up the statement.
However, it is consistent with the US CDC’s data. Over a period of one year (from April 12, 2009 to April 10, 2010), the CDC estimated there were 60.8 million cases of H1N1 in the United States [1]. Using the same source, the current cases of Covid-19 in the US are 4,920,369 (about 4.9 million) [2]. So as of today, we need roughly 55.9 million more Covid-19 cases (almost 56 million) to catch up on the 2009 H1N1 cases. So, yes, the data in the meme seems accurate.
Now, what about the argument? Although the conclusion is implied, the argument appears to be:
Premise 1: There were more 2009 H1N1 cases than the current pandemic
Premise 2: But we wear masks and close schools for this pandemic, but not for the 2009 pandemic.
Conclusion: we (or the US if my initial assumption is correct) are overreacting and don’t need to wear masks and close schools for this pandemic.
So on first reading, and without any sort or critical thought, it seems to make a sensible point, but a closer look shows it to be spurious. The argument rests on the hidden assumption that the case numbers are the primary determining factor for deciding if masks should be worn and schools should be closed.
But that doesn't make much sense as the average adult probably gets the common cold a few times a year, and given the US population, the cases of such a mild illness would be several hundred million a year. Clearly, other factors must be considered when deciding how to mitigate disease, whether that mitigation is with masks, closing schools, social distancing, or whatever else.
There are a number of important metrics in epidemiology such as incident rates, morbidity rates, mortality rates, hospitalisation rates, and many others, so only focusing on the cases is ridiculous, especially when these two diseases, H1N1 and Covid-19 are very different.
Going over each metric would be take way too long when there's cricket on the television, but we can clearly see that these two diseases are different by looking at the deaths in conjunction with the cases. The US coronavirus deaths to date attributed to COVID-19 is about 160,220 since January 2020, with an estimated 4.9 million cases.
However, H1N1 had substantially fewer (12,469 deaths from April 2009 to April 2010), from a whopping 60.8 million cases. But there is something else to think about. The death data for H1N1 is for one year, whereas the COVID-19 numbers are for only 8 months—and it may not slow down for several more months. Moreover, the H1N1 pandemic had relatively few precautions to attenuate its spread. Few people wore masks, there was little social distancing, etc.
So what does this mean? This means that over a period of 8 months, with social distancing, Covid-19 has more than 12 times the deaths (with social distancing and masks) from less than 1/12 the number of cases H1N1 had over one year. Though the 2009 pandemic was concerning, it was clearly nowhere near as deadly as this current pandemic. Therefore, at least concerning how society should react to the two diseases, it doesn’t make sense to compare these two diseases as equal.
So therefore this meme, which probably took seconds to compose, and maybe a couple of hours to pull apart with cited sources, makes a fallacious argument by using cherry-picked data from two very different diseases, and hyper focuses on case numbers as the sole metric for these decisions.
Who would have that sort thing would be all over T'Internet eh? :)
1. CDC website. 2009 H1N1 Pandemic (H1N1pdm09 virus). Last reviewed: June 11, 2019. Accessed Aug 12, 2020.
2. CDC website. Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID19). Cases, Data, and Surveillance. Last updated. Aug. 8, 2020, 07:00 PM. Accessed Aug 12, 2020.
Wednesday, 6 May 2020
Raging Against the Machine is Rational, not Heartless
There was an article in yesterday's Times where one of the columnists tried to make a case that supporting governmental panic and the imposition of arbitrary authority by enforcing the current lockdown is a rational position.
Melanie Phillips lauds the Prime Minister's refusal to offer any serious prospect that the deprivation of personal liberty and economic strangulation may be nearing the end. She goes as far as to state that "Urged days ago to announce a speedy exit from lockdown, he has refused to be pushed. He'll set out his plan next week amid signs that restrictions will be lifted only slowly. This has taken courage."
I don't know anything about Ms Phillips's background or expertise, but in my opinion, this is ridiculous: we've not been supplied with any evidence to support claims that the lockdown policy has succeed. Even the government's official figures, now exaggerated by imprecise recording methods and the inclusion of categories not thought necessary a week or so ago, align more to my predictions from early March than those of the Imperial College model.
The much-vaunted new intensive care hospitals haven't been needed - 100 patients treated in total at the London Nightingale when there are 4000 beds! - and nor in my opinion will they be. Any assertions that this is because of the lockdown doesn't have any obvious basis. Just because B follows A doesn't mean that B caused A. It doesn't take "courage" for a largely pointless policy to have its outcome smoothly misrepresented as a success, courage would be the admission that the draconian restrictions on our civil liberties are an error.
The case against the PM's panic policy is not some arbitrary transient choice between compassion and money/freedom, or the worry that governments given or allowed the powers ours now has have always been reluctant to part with them. Melanie Phillips doesn't appear to care: "Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there's no acknowledgment of Johnson's complex balancing act. For such people, lockdown must end immediately. Some of them claim, moreover, that there never was any need for it in the first place. The virus, they say (with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts) poses no serious threat because it only kills relatively few old people or those who would have died this year anyway." and adds that "A dismaying number of these "economy-firsters" have seized on certain statistical studies to claim that the virus death rate is lower than had been forecast and therefore Covid-19 is not so dangerous after all."
Well I'm most definitely not an "economy-firster", and would like to think that I'm compassionate, sensitive and understanding (although my wife may disagree!), but you don't need statistical studies to know that the forecasts on which the Panic Policy was based were flawed: the empty Nightingale Hospitals show that.
The question is simply whether the government’s actions have caused the death rate to fall to "manageable levels", or whether they haven't, despite Ms Phillips assertion that "it's only because of the lockdown that it's under control". At the moment, without any evidence whatsoever to back that claim up, the jury is still very much out on that one.
Ms Phillips adds: "But all these statistical calculations are suspect because we still don't know how many have been infected, nor how many have died." Well, it is true that we won't really know how many have died until the outbreak is over, but even then it will be almost impossible as there is no rigour to the way deaths are attributed to Covid-19: They appear to be have been simultaneously over-estimated (in general) and under-estimated (in care homes).
I've got no doubt that there are heartless individuals "with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts", it is very, very wrong to suggest that they are the only people who oppose the PM's policy.
Some of us are not materialist. We simply analysed the data we had available and came to a very different conclusion, and we've yet to be proven wrong.
Nobody I know, and nobody any of them knows, has had, let alone died from Covid-19, which strongly suggests that the Lockdown Panic Measures are an unnecessary danger to the long-term life and health of the British public. We are going to end up living in a country which will not be able to sustain the health and welfare services we currently take for granted and which won't be able to afford the living standards which sustain health.
And all in response to a problem which even the government's chief advisor knew was never the size he'd claimed it to be, otherwise he'd have kept to his own social distancing values wouldn't he?
Melanie Phillips lauds the Prime Minister's refusal to offer any serious prospect that the deprivation of personal liberty and economic strangulation may be nearing the end. She goes as far as to state that "Urged days ago to announce a speedy exit from lockdown, he has refused to be pushed. He'll set out his plan next week amid signs that restrictions will be lifted only slowly. This has taken courage."
I don't know anything about Ms Phillips's background or expertise, but in my opinion, this is ridiculous: we've not been supplied with any evidence to support claims that the lockdown policy has succeed. Even the government's official figures, now exaggerated by imprecise recording methods and the inclusion of categories not thought necessary a week or so ago, align more to my predictions from early March than those of the Imperial College model.
The much-vaunted new intensive care hospitals haven't been needed - 100 patients treated in total at the London Nightingale when there are 4000 beds! - and nor in my opinion will they be. Any assertions that this is because of the lockdown doesn't have any obvious basis. Just because B follows A doesn't mean that B caused A. It doesn't take "courage" for a largely pointless policy to have its outcome smoothly misrepresented as a success, courage would be the admission that the draconian restrictions on our civil liberties are an error.
The case against the PM's panic policy is not some arbitrary transient choice between compassion and money/freedom, or the worry that governments given or allowed the powers ours now has have always been reluctant to part with them. Melanie Phillips doesn't appear to care: "Yet among people for whom damage to the economy outweighs all other considerations, there's no acknowledgment of Johnson's complex balancing act. For such people, lockdown must end immediately. Some of them claim, moreover, that there never was any need for it in the first place. The virus, they say (with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts) poses no serious threat because it only kills relatively few old people or those who would have died this year anyway." and adds that "A dismaying number of these "economy-firsters" have seized on certain statistical studies to claim that the virus death rate is lower than had been forecast and therefore Covid-19 is not so dangerous after all."
Well I'm most definitely not an "economy-firster", and would like to think that I'm compassionate, sensitive and understanding (although my wife may disagree!), but you don't need statistical studies to know that the forecasts on which the Panic Policy was based were flawed: the empty Nightingale Hospitals show that.
The question is simply whether the government’s actions have caused the death rate to fall to "manageable levels", or whether they haven't, despite Ms Phillips assertion that "it's only because of the lockdown that it's under control". At the moment, without any evidence whatsoever to back that claim up, the jury is still very much out on that one.
Ms Phillips adds: "But all these statistical calculations are suspect because we still don't know how many have been infected, nor how many have died." Well, it is true that we won't really know how many have died until the outbreak is over, but even then it will be almost impossible as there is no rigour to the way deaths are attributed to Covid-19: They appear to be have been simultaneously over-estimated (in general) and under-estimated (in care homes).
I've got no doubt that there are heartless individuals "with scant regard for either humanity or settled facts", it is very, very wrong to suggest that they are the only people who oppose the PM's policy.
Some of us are not materialist. We simply analysed the data we had available and came to a very different conclusion, and we've yet to be proven wrong.
Nobody I know, and nobody any of them knows, has had, let alone died from Covid-19, which strongly suggests that the Lockdown Panic Measures are an unnecessary danger to the long-term life and health of the British public. We are going to end up living in a country which will not be able to sustain the health and welfare services we currently take for granted and which won't be able to afford the living standards which sustain health.
And all in response to a problem which even the government's chief advisor knew was never the size he'd claimed it to be, otherwise he'd have kept to his own social distancing values wouldn't he?
Thursday, 19 March 2020
The Way I See It
The media (and the UK government earlier today) is calling Covid-19 a once-in-a-century pandemic, but it might also be a once-in-a-century series of interconnected chaotic global responses to a problem that hasn't been adequately defined.
Many countries have introduced draconian measures in an attempt to counteract the disease, but as far as I can tell, there just isn't enough reliable evidence as to the numbers infected, or continuing to become infected, for governments and modellers to make such monumental decisions or to monitor their impact.
If the pandemic dissipates, whether that's on its own or as a result of social distancing and lock-downs, the impact of it may allow the world to return to something like "normal", whatever that will mean for the next decade or so. However, if the pandemic continues to spread around the world, how will those making the decisions be able to ascertain whether they've made a positive or negative impact when the consequences of long-term lockdowns are unknown and vaccines or affordable treatments take years to develop and test properly.
The data collected so far (or at least the information I've been able to find), on the number of people infected and how the epidemic is evolving don't appear to be particularly reliable statistically speaking as it's probably safe to assume that some deaths and the vast majority of Covid-19 infections are being missed due to the limits on testing. Therefore, it's impossible to state with any degree of confidence if we are failing to capture instances of coronavirus by a factor of three or 300 as few countries, if any, can test a large number of people and so don't know how prevalent the virus is in a random sample of the general population.
This creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19 as the reported fatality rates (according to the World Health Organisation it's 3.4%) don't just create fear and panic, they're completely meaningless. As far as I can tell, those who have been tested for Covid-19 are disproportionately patients of some description with severe symptoms and bad outcomes, and since few health systems have unlimited testing capacity, this sample selection bias will only get worse.
There has been only one instance of testing an entire, closed population, that of the passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess cruise ship where the case fatality rate was 1.0%, but it needs to be noted that this was a predominantly elderly demographic for whom the Covid-19 death rate is thought to be higher than the general population.
Taking the Diamond Princess mortality rate and applying it across the age structure of the UK, our death rate of people from (or possibly with) coronavirus would be 0.125%. However, we need to caveat that as this calculation uses what I consider to be extremely thin base data (7 deaths from 712 out of almost 4000 on board) the true death rate could be one fifth of that (0.025%), or five times higher (0.625%).
We also need to consider the possibility that some of those infected may die later, and that cruise ship tourists may not be truly representative of the rest of the developed world (i.e. their lifestyle, on or off ship, may mean they have different frequencies of chronic diseases) so if we say double those base estimates we get a varying case fatality ratio somewhere between 0.05% and 1.25% across a country like ours.
That difference indicates the risk of what is being done as a population-wide fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza, which if it is the true proportion, the world's global lock-down and its likely social and financial consequences is not at all rational.
Now of course the Covid-19 case fatality rate isn't likely to be that low, and there are many common-cold-type viruses that have case fatality rates up to 10% when they infect the elderly, particularly if they're residents of nursing homes, but these “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of worldwide deaths every year without the vast majority being tested for their existence.
We've had successful influenza surveillance systems for decades, and typically something like 20% of laboratory tests confirm its presence in the samples sent for testing, while the estimated number of annual influenza-like deaths in the UK is between 4,500 and 11,000, therefore a positive test for coronavirus should not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.
If we take a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis of say 0.3% as the case fatality rate of individuals with Covid-19, and assume that 15% of the UK gets infected (7,000,000 people), that translates to about 30,000 deaths, but without anybody knowing there was a new virus this would just get buried in the annual noise of deaths due to an influenza-like illness.
According to the Office for National Statistics, this year's death rate remains below its five-year average, and a long way under the levels of 2017-18, but even if the 2,100 were to be added to that total we might casually just note that this season's flu seems to be a bit worse than average, and the media coverage would be proportionate to that which accompanies the marriage of two minor celebrities.
It's obvious from the empty shelves in our local supermarkets that many people are worried that the 104 deaths from (or with as it should probably be more accurately labelled) Covid-19 in the UK as of right now is going to increase exponentially to 520, 2600, 13,000, 65,000 ... and that the pattern will be similar all over the planet, but is that realistic? At what point will the curve flatten as our Chief Medical Officer keeps talking about every time he's on TV?
Statistically speaking, we can't answer those questions without knowing the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population, then repeating the exercise at pre-defined time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections, but unfortunately that's information we don’t have.
So in the absence of data, we've got prepare-for-the-worst reasoning which has led to lock-downs and social distancing without knowing if these measures have any sort of positive impact. Closing the nation's colleges may reduce transmission rates, but it may backfire if students socialise anyway, and the school closures might mean children spend more time with susceptible grandparents, or disrupt their parents ability to work.
And looking further forward, with the caveat that I know next to nothing about virology, might school closures also have the potential to reduce the nation's chances of developing long-term herd immunity in an age group that is apparently free of serious disease?
"Flattening the curve" to avoid overwhelming the NHS as our country is apparently attempting to do is admittedly conceptually sound because it theoretically means that other common diseases and conditions can be adequately treated. However, if the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and these extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, flattening the curve could make things worse by crippling the NHS for longer instead of a short, admittedly acute, period of time.
The bottom line is that we simply don't know how long lock-downs and social distancing can be maintained without irreversibly crippling our economy, and destroying the fabric of society for generations, possibly even to the extent of civil unrest and long-term mental health issues.
The very minimum we need right now is unbiased prevalence and incidence data, and that means not prioritising testing for those suspected of infection, but a true random population sample so that governments can make evidence-based decisions, not ones based entirely on theories and models.
The most pessimistic scenario I've had on my TV this week, and one that my maths mean I really don't subscribe to, is that Covid-19 might infect 60% of the population before we develop a herd immunity and if only 1% of infected people die, there'll be more than 40 million deaths globally. And since that would make Covid-19 as deadly as 1918's Spanish Flu (although in this case the deaths would be mainly the elderly or people with pre-existing conditions), this is the justification for lock-downs and social distancing, making them not just desirable, but imperative.
Hopefully, rather like back in 1918, life as we know it can continue, at least in something resembling civilised societies, but lock-downs of months and years have consequences we can only guess at, and the lives of billions, not just millions, will be impacted, so we really ought to have some data before continuing with these plans to jump off the cliff just in case there is a chance of actually landing somewhere safe.
Many countries have introduced draconian measures in an attempt to counteract the disease, but as far as I can tell, there just isn't enough reliable evidence as to the numbers infected, or continuing to become infected, for governments and modellers to make such monumental decisions or to monitor their impact.
If the pandemic dissipates, whether that's on its own or as a result of social distancing and lock-downs, the impact of it may allow the world to return to something like "normal", whatever that will mean for the next decade or so. However, if the pandemic continues to spread around the world, how will those making the decisions be able to ascertain whether they've made a positive or negative impact when the consequences of long-term lockdowns are unknown and vaccines or affordable treatments take years to develop and test properly.
The data collected so far (or at least the information I've been able to find), on the number of people infected and how the epidemic is evolving don't appear to be particularly reliable statistically speaking as it's probably safe to assume that some deaths and the vast majority of Covid-19 infections are being missed due to the limits on testing. Therefore, it's impossible to state with any degree of confidence if we are failing to capture instances of coronavirus by a factor of three or 300 as few countries, if any, can test a large number of people and so don't know how prevalent the virus is in a random sample of the general population.
This creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty about the risk of dying from Covid-19 as the reported fatality rates (according to the World Health Organisation it's 3.4%) don't just create fear and panic, they're completely meaningless. As far as I can tell, those who have been tested for Covid-19 are disproportionately patients of some description with severe symptoms and bad outcomes, and since few health systems have unlimited testing capacity, this sample selection bias will only get worse.
There has been only one instance of testing an entire, closed population, that of the passengers and crew of the Diamond Princess cruise ship where the case fatality rate was 1.0%, but it needs to be noted that this was a predominantly elderly demographic for whom the Covid-19 death rate is thought to be higher than the general population.
Taking the Diamond Princess mortality rate and applying it across the age structure of the UK, our death rate of people from (or possibly with) coronavirus would be 0.125%. However, we need to caveat that as this calculation uses what I consider to be extremely thin base data (7 deaths from 712 out of almost 4000 on board) the true death rate could be one fifth of that (0.025%), or five times higher (0.625%).
We also need to consider the possibility that some of those infected may die later, and that cruise ship tourists may not be truly representative of the rest of the developed world (i.e. their lifestyle, on or off ship, may mean they have different frequencies of chronic diseases) so if we say double those base estimates we get a varying case fatality ratio somewhere between 0.05% and 1.25% across a country like ours.
That difference indicates the risk of what is being done as a population-wide fatality rate of 0.05% is lower than seasonal influenza, which if it is the true proportion, the world's global lock-down and its likely social and financial consequences is not at all rational.
Now of course the Covid-19 case fatality rate isn't likely to be that low, and there are many common-cold-type viruses that have case fatality rates up to 10% when they infect the elderly, particularly if they're residents of nursing homes, but these “mild” coronaviruses may be implicated in several thousands of worldwide deaths every year without the vast majority being tested for their existence.
We've had successful influenza surveillance systems for decades, and typically something like 20% of laboratory tests confirm its presence in the samples sent for testing, while the estimated number of annual influenza-like deaths in the UK is between 4,500 and 11,000, therefore a positive test for coronavirus should not mean necessarily that this virus is always primarily responsible for a patient’s demise.
If we take a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis of say 0.3% as the case fatality rate of individuals with Covid-19, and assume that 15% of the UK gets infected (7,000,000 people), that translates to about 30,000 deaths, but without anybody knowing there was a new virus this would just get buried in the annual noise of deaths due to an influenza-like illness.
According to the Office for National Statistics, this year's death rate remains below its five-year average, and a long way under the levels of 2017-18, but even if the 2,100 were to be added to that total we might casually just note that this season's flu seems to be a bit worse than average, and the media coverage would be proportionate to that which accompanies the marriage of two minor celebrities.
It's obvious from the empty shelves in our local supermarkets that many people are worried that the 104 deaths from (or with as it should probably be more accurately labelled) Covid-19 in the UK as of right now is going to increase exponentially to 520, 2600, 13,000, 65,000 ... and that the pattern will be similar all over the planet, but is that realistic? At what point will the curve flatten as our Chief Medical Officer keeps talking about every time he's on TV?
Statistically speaking, we can't answer those questions without knowing the current prevalence of the infection in a random sample of a population, then repeating the exercise at pre-defined time intervals to estimate the incidence of new infections, but unfortunately that's information we don’t have.
So in the absence of data, we've got prepare-for-the-worst reasoning which has led to lock-downs and social distancing without knowing if these measures have any sort of positive impact. Closing the nation's colleges may reduce transmission rates, but it may backfire if students socialise anyway, and the school closures might mean children spend more time with susceptible grandparents, or disrupt their parents ability to work.
And looking further forward, with the caveat that I know next to nothing about virology, might school closures also have the potential to reduce the nation's chances of developing long-term herd immunity in an age group that is apparently free of serious disease?
"Flattening the curve" to avoid overwhelming the NHS as our country is apparently attempting to do is admittedly conceptually sound because it theoretically means that other common diseases and conditions can be adequately treated. However, if the epidemic does overwhelm the health system and these extreme measures have only modest effectiveness, flattening the curve could make things worse by crippling the NHS for longer instead of a short, admittedly acute, period of time.
The bottom line is that we simply don't know how long lock-downs and social distancing can be maintained without irreversibly crippling our economy, and destroying the fabric of society for generations, possibly even to the extent of civil unrest and long-term mental health issues.
The very minimum we need right now is unbiased prevalence and incidence data, and that means not prioritising testing for those suspected of infection, but a true random population sample so that governments can make evidence-based decisions, not ones based entirely on theories and models.
The most pessimistic scenario I've had on my TV this week, and one that my maths mean I really don't subscribe to, is that Covid-19 might infect 60% of the population before we develop a herd immunity and if only 1% of infected people die, there'll be more than 40 million deaths globally. And since that would make Covid-19 as deadly as 1918's Spanish Flu (although in this case the deaths would be mainly the elderly or people with pre-existing conditions), this is the justification for lock-downs and social distancing, making them not just desirable, but imperative.
Hopefully, rather like back in 1918, life as we know it can continue, at least in something resembling civilised societies, but lock-downs of months and years have consequences we can only guess at, and the lives of billions, not just millions, will be impacted, so we really ought to have some data before continuing with these plans to jump off the cliff just in case there is a chance of actually landing somewhere safe.
Thursday, 12 March 2020
Sanity and Sanitisers
A friend of mine has asked if I'll send him some hand sanitiser as all the shops where he lives have run out, and there is still some on the shelves in my local ASDA. At first, I didn't think he was serious as he's way too intelligent to get caught up in the Coronavirus panic, but apparently not: he genuinely wants me to post him as many bottles as I can get.
It may be that his family are pressuring him, but mine are far more grounded, as are all my friends living locally. Maybe it's a Yorkshire thing? Maybe we'd rather risk death than pay inflated prices for scented squirty soap? Or maybe as my daughter put it, Yorkshiremen would rather die than suffer the embarrassment of being thought panic shoppers?
I accept that Coronavirus (Covid-19) is a pretty virulent virus, but not in the contagious-imminent-danger-to-everybody's-health way.
As I type this there are 125,743 confirmed cases worldwide, almost 81,00 of which were or are in China, and 3,169 deaths in China plus another 1441 elsewhere in the world. So 4,610 deaths in total and half the planet is in lockdown.
Why? What has driven this hysteria? Two years ago, all the way back in 2017-18 the Office for National Statistics recorded 50,100 ‘excess winter deaths’ but it was business as usual. The explanation (for the deaths, not the lack of hysterical reaction), according to the ONS, was probably ‘the predominant strain of flu, the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, and below average winter temperatures’. Across the pond where Donald Trump has just announced a flight ban from mainland Europe and the golf I'm watching on TV is discussing the ban on spectators from tomorrow onwards, according to the US-based Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, over 80,000 died.
In both countries most of the victims were geriatric, many with compromised immune systems, as is the case with the UK Coronavirus deaths - or as I prefer to refer to them as a statistician, deaths of people with Coronavirus (not necessarily from, due to their age, health and underlying conditions)
And seasonal flu? According to an estimate by the CDCP, it causes somewhere between 291,000 and 646,000 deaths globally a year. To put it another way, if the number of deaths from coronavirus rises a hundredfold in the next few weeks or months, it will only have reached the lower bound of the estimate for existing strains of flu. How many of us wear face masks because of winter flu? How many planes and trains are cancelled? Does the stock market slump?
There is some justification for being more wary of Covid-19 than the flu as the former is an unknown quantity which we've not evolved with and don’t yet have a vaccine. But we know more about it by the day, its death rate is under 3 per cent and it is mostly killing people with pre-existing health conditions.
And probably more importantly, if it can, or does, spread quickly and easily, why don't we all have it already? In the past week, I've been on 8 trains (all crowded) and four buses (two full), attended a conference, a rock concert and a football match (1000, 2000 and 30000 people respectively) and been to the gym where nobody has cleaned down anything, sanitised between exercises, or avoided personal contact four times. And I'm ok. As is everybody I know and know of, but if the virus is virulent then surely this wouldn't be the case?
So where is the evidence that closing large gatherings of people makes anyone safer or slows the spread of disease? Is it logical to assume that Covid-19 can be passed on easier at a football match or the now-cancelled Australian Grand Prix than in a gym?
Maybe I'm missing something about Coronavirus and the attitude of people like me will only compound the problem, but it feels like this is just the latest "end of the world" phenomenon to trouble the populations of developed countries along with other apocalyptic portents such as climate alarmism, nuclear Armageddon and financial collapse.
At the end of January, Brexit had just been completed (sort of anyway) without incident, the standoff between the US and Iran had fizzled into nothing, the Australian bush fires had largely gone out, so did the media need something else to worry us about?
Reactionary hysteria has taken hold all over the world. Saudi Arabia has suspended religious pilgrimage trips to Mecca (oh the irony that the praying won't make the most devout any safer!), the Italian Prime Minister has ordered the lockdown of the country’s northern region, Ireland has closed schools and colleges, and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said today it was 'inappropriate that we continue as normal' and will recommend the cancellation of gatherings of more than 500 people to protect front-line services from Monday. She didn't supply any information as to why Monday and not tomorrow if the measure is so necessary, or why allowing gatherings at the weekend was appropriate, but common sense does seem to be in short supply.
As the great Homer Simpson once said "you can prove anything with facts" so why haven't the governments of the world provided some which justifies their extreme actions?
Or is that there aren't any and this hysteria is the result of a media frenzy which has caused the "leaders" of some countries to be scared of not being seen to "do something" whether or not it makes sense?
It may be that his family are pressuring him, but mine are far more grounded, as are all my friends living locally. Maybe it's a Yorkshire thing? Maybe we'd rather risk death than pay inflated prices for scented squirty soap? Or maybe as my daughter put it, Yorkshiremen would rather die than suffer the embarrassment of being thought panic shoppers?
I accept that Coronavirus (Covid-19) is a pretty virulent virus, but not in the contagious-imminent-danger-to-everybody's-health way.
As I type this there are 125,743 confirmed cases worldwide, almost 81,00 of which were or are in China, and 3,169 deaths in China plus another 1441 elsewhere in the world. So 4,610 deaths in total and half the planet is in lockdown.
Why? What has driven this hysteria? Two years ago, all the way back in 2017-18 the Office for National Statistics recorded 50,100 ‘excess winter deaths’ but it was business as usual. The explanation (for the deaths, not the lack of hysterical reaction), according to the ONS, was probably ‘the predominant strain of flu, the effectiveness of the influenza vaccine, and below average winter temperatures’. Across the pond where Donald Trump has just announced a flight ban from mainland Europe and the golf I'm watching on TV is discussing the ban on spectators from tomorrow onwards, according to the US-based Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, over 80,000 died.
In both countries most of the victims were geriatric, many with compromised immune systems, as is the case with the UK Coronavirus deaths - or as I prefer to refer to them as a statistician, deaths of people with Coronavirus (not necessarily from, due to their age, health and underlying conditions)
And seasonal flu? According to an estimate by the CDCP, it causes somewhere between 291,000 and 646,000 deaths globally a year. To put it another way, if the number of deaths from coronavirus rises a hundredfold in the next few weeks or months, it will only have reached the lower bound of the estimate for existing strains of flu. How many of us wear face masks because of winter flu? How many planes and trains are cancelled? Does the stock market slump?
There is some justification for being more wary of Covid-19 than the flu as the former is an unknown quantity which we've not evolved with and don’t yet have a vaccine. But we know more about it by the day, its death rate is under 3 per cent and it is mostly killing people with pre-existing health conditions.
And probably more importantly, if it can, or does, spread quickly and easily, why don't we all have it already? In the past week, I've been on 8 trains (all crowded) and four buses (two full), attended a conference, a rock concert and a football match (1000, 2000 and 30000 people respectively) and been to the gym where nobody has cleaned down anything, sanitised between exercises, or avoided personal contact four times. And I'm ok. As is everybody I know and know of, but if the virus is virulent then surely this wouldn't be the case?
So where is the evidence that closing large gatherings of people makes anyone safer or slows the spread of disease? Is it logical to assume that Covid-19 can be passed on easier at a football match or the now-cancelled Australian Grand Prix than in a gym?
Maybe I'm missing something about Coronavirus and the attitude of people like me will only compound the problem, but it feels like this is just the latest "end of the world" phenomenon to trouble the populations of developed countries along with other apocalyptic portents such as climate alarmism, nuclear Armageddon and financial collapse.
At the end of January, Brexit had just been completed (sort of anyway) without incident, the standoff between the US and Iran had fizzled into nothing, the Australian bush fires had largely gone out, so did the media need something else to worry us about?
Reactionary hysteria has taken hold all over the world. Saudi Arabia has suspended religious pilgrimage trips to Mecca (oh the irony that the praying won't make the most devout any safer!), the Italian Prime Minister has ordered the lockdown of the country’s northern region, Ireland has closed schools and colleges, and Scotland's First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said today it was 'inappropriate that we continue as normal' and will recommend the cancellation of gatherings of more than 500 people to protect front-line services from Monday. She didn't supply any information as to why Monday and not tomorrow if the measure is so necessary, or why allowing gatherings at the weekend was appropriate, but common sense does seem to be in short supply.
As the great Homer Simpson once said "you can prove anything with facts" so why haven't the governments of the world provided some which justifies their extreme actions?
Or is that there aren't any and this hysteria is the result of a media frenzy which has caused the "leaders" of some countries to be scared of not being seen to "do something" whether or not it makes sense?
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