No, 708 deaths yesterday so it’s dropped today

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Then stop praising Boris - be bloody consistent , the argument works both ways Beasty Boy 

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 Think you missed my point or didn't read my posts.

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While we are being lectured by Hancock to "follow the rules" , Scotland's Chief Medical Officer travels to holiday home...

Coronavirus: Police warning over Calderwood's second home visit

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-52171694

 

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There is no way that we should hit 1000 deaths per day. That is real benchmark. Only the worst handled countries where the government have been complacent or were in denial get to that level.

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A lot higher , lets see what impact that has further down the line 

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I read earlier that the eccentric Lord Bath had died after catching CV. He was 89 though.

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Beast was referring to the drop in deaths so I assumed that was what you were responding to. If you’re referring to the increase in cases then that is due obviously to the increase in testing. We are still only testing hospital admissions and NHS so there will hundreds of thousands, if not millions who have caught the virus and never been tested. Hospital admissions/deaths are the key measures we should focus on as they are what we know.

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Thanks Joe.

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I would read very little into percentages without knowing the profile of those being tested/targeted for testing. It may be completely invalid to draw any conclusions on that basis, we just don’t know.

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Avoidable deaths of people who don't do any work anyway :

British workers 'among worst idlers', suggest Tory MPs

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-19300051

We all know that Billionaires are the only people who create wealth.

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2012?

From the BBC:
"Treat these figures with caution. Both last weekend and the weekend before that, reported deaths fell on the Sunday only for the backlog of reporting to come through in a Tuesday spike. So we should wait a few days before reading too much into these figures".

Deaths is not a reliable stat at the weekend as has been pointed out elsewhere. Unfortunately it is due to a "backlog" developing. See BBC. Also the Scottish stats have been deflated due to a change in the counting process today. See Sturgeon. Wrt testing we need to see NHS workers broken out to be more confident about what is happening. My concern is the UK is not at the peak of the summit yet. I hope I am wrong.

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I agree it doesn’t look good for death rates in a week or two to come.  However, if hospital admissions are down, it’s likely they have tested a lot of NHS staff and possibly a lot who are asymptomatic, or have mild symptoms.  In which case it isn’t quite as grim as it looks.

There’s little point getting hung up on the daily figures because we simply don’t know what they represent.

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You have to wonder. My Dad and Mum  are about that age.  Mum has a congenital  heart   defect and Dad is diabetic -  I thought they were both on the list (it seems daft to me they aren't, I don't think they would stand any chance if they got it ) which is why I was so indignant about supermarkets not delivering to them but Dad told me this morning that, actually, neither of them are

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Can't link to the piece directly so here is the text:

Treat UK figures with caution

Robert Cuffe

BBC head of statistics

Both last weekend and the weekend before that, reported deaths fell on the Sunday only for the backlog of reporting to come through in a Tuesday spike. So we should wait a few days before reading too much into these figures.

It is the second day in a row of below-trend growth. The long-term trend has been a doubling every three-and-a-half-days, which would put us above 900 deaths on Sunday. Any number below that is welcome, but we won't know for a few days whether it's a real fall or delays in reporting.

There has also been a consistent slowdown in the growth of confirmed cases since last weekend. Saturday's number of new cases even fell slightly. But they have risen again in the latest figures.

Scientists have warned that these figures could rise again this week, but that could be because of how we test for cases as opposed to an increase in infection rates.

Up until the end of March, testing was largely limited to patients in hospital. As the government tests more and more NHS staff, we could expect to see more confirmed cases even if the number of people sick in hospital with coronavirus goes down.

We'll only get a clear picture of what's happening "if the government report the number of new confirmed cases in NHS workers separately from cases in patients", says Keith Neal, an epidemiologist at the University of Nottingham.

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Can't really disagree with this. It's easy for people who are either or both comfortably off and/or have big houses with large gardens to be sanctimonious preachers at the moment.

 

I'll be blunt, there will come a point I'll do what I feel I need to do for my well being and if HM Government say you can't go outside your house for a walk or a cycle that will be the point I cease making the effort to be compliant. I'll also start travelling about to do various jobs that I can get paid for instead of sitting around hoping the government furlough scheme pays out before I'm joining the herring gulls searching the park for worms! 

Put the army on the streets and the people will be on the streets too and it won't be pretty. 

I think that some of us are still getting too hung up on the point of whether or not it was ever going to be humanly possible to keep Covid-19 out of the UK completely for the duration. As I've mentioned before, I don't think that would have been possible in view of the way it has affected literally the entire world, and I don't think even MM has tried to argue that it was either.

The way that I think about it is like this: If I had been in Boris Johnsons' shoes as Prime Minister in charge of a government faced with the coming of a crisis like this, I would like to think I and the government I led were as proactive a possible in trying to ensure that the virus had the least bad impact on this country as was possible, both in terms of the human cost and damage done to the economy. In my view, the goverment was at least a month too late before they began to warn us of the dangers of the virus to this country. That has been and still is my main criticism of their actions.

We know that the first cases of it in the UK were confirmed in York just before the end of January. That, IMHO, was when HMG should have first sounded the alarm about the threat that the virus posed to the UK based on what was known about events overseas. As I said in a previous thread the other day, it may have been the case that COVID-19 had already reached the UK sometime before this; there again it may not have been. We shall never find that out now one way or the other now. Like I said the other day, the government could only act on what was known and not on anything else.

My own view is, as an ordinary person on the street, is that if the government had acted in early February and taken appropriate steps to, for example, prevent people from this country travelling to Italy and other places for a holiday at half-term where the virus was getting out of control at that time and taken steps to bring back British people from affected countries overseas by way of specially chartered flights and then those people put into quarantine/self-isolation upon their return, it might have made the task of trying to control the spread of the virus in the UK a bit easier than has proved to be the case. In case anyone thinks I am trying to be part-political in any way, believe me I am not. If this horrendous crisis had arisen at any time in the period between 1997 and 2010 when the Labour government led by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were in power, I would have been every bit as critical of them had they responded in the same way as I have of the Johnson government.

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JFF model update. Today's 5903 new cases was high but both the periodicity ('big jump day') and testing incoperated variations are consistent with this large increase. I've included the testing accounting variation here as that now seems to be the best variation of the model.

 

You will recall that I said that the model predicts today will be the peak. That is true assuming the testing remains at a fairly constant level. However given that the govt is projecting 100k tests by the end of the month,I've accounted for this. Simply put I've assumed a linear increase in tests every day such that on the 30th April 100k people will be tested.

The effect of this is to push the peak back from today until the 12th April.

It also increases the total number of confirmed cases from 80k to 197k

 

However I should enphasise the basic model parameters have not changed. This is not like earlier versions where I changed the basic parameters to better fit the data. All I have done is incoperated a predicted testing ramp up. If the testing does not ramp up to 100k by the end of the month the peak will  come earlier.

Nevertheless the JFF model is predicting that today is the peak if the testing does not continue to go up.

 

Should go without saying, though, that this is just my model. It can still be very wrong.

 

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One of my brothers is diabetic and he isn’t on the list.  Another brother who had his spleen removed 55 years ago, is on the high risk list.  He had a letter and a phone call from his GP and medication for added protection against pneumonia.

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China must pay Britain £351bn in coronavirus damages - report calls for UN to step in
BORIS JOHNSON should pursue China for a coronavirus compensation package worth £351billion, according to a leading report into the global health crisis.
An investigation by the Henry Jackson Society has concluded China could have mitigated the worldwide economic impact of COVID-19 and indicated there is evidence the Chinese Government breached international healthcare responsibilities. The British foreign policy think-tank estimates the spread of coronavirus, which has infected more than one million people globally, has cost the G7 group of nations including the UK, US and Japan a huge £3.2 trillion.

We should go after them. There is a blame game going here but don't forget it's China who is responsible and the one who should be held to account.

Matt Hancock will be holding todays press conference at 16:00

What exactly, qualifies the Henry Jackson Society, a bunch of Libertarian froot-loops, to comment on this?

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Absolutely.

Other governments, including that of the UK, can be and are being criticised the the way they responded to the coming of the crisis and how their prepared their respective countries for it. What they cannot be blamed for though was for the damn thing arising in the first place. The Chinese authrities bear primary responsibility for that and for the way this whole sorry saga has developed.

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