How many young people die of flu normally?

Data up to 5pm 28th April showed the following figures for the number of young people who had died in English hospitals from covid with or without a known pre-existing condition. Have only been about 8 more <40 deaths since then but haven't seen any information on whether they had a pre-existing condition or not. As yet the number of patients with unknown pre-existing conditions for all age ranges stands at 0 so i guess we are awaiting some data, people will be very busy with the living at the moment. Total number of people under 40 who have had it is unknown, maybe 10%, any exact estimates out there of how many would normally get the flu?

Worth noting that although deaths are the main marker some people do get severely ill for a week or more which will take a while to get over. No idea how the numbers there compare to the flu.

pre-existing?   yes    no   total

0 - 19               7       3      10

20-39            117     28    145

I will definitely be using it, and I strongly suspect the majority will do so.

Maybe I'm being naive. 

For clarity the pre-existing bit should be known pre-existing. The fact a 20 year old dies of covid-19 and hadn't been diagnosed with anything doesn't mean they didn't have something and I'd imagine at least some of the deaths were of those who had an underlying issue which they knew nothing about. Not quite the same but there's an article on the BBC today about a woman who had asthma and was in hospital with coronavirus and during that they discovered she had a serious underlying condition that may well have killed her without treatment.

If she'd died before that was discovered (and ignoring the asthma bit) she would have been logged as no known underlying health conditions.

Whether the amount of undiagnosed is significant or not in terms of the stats is unknown - may be minimal to non-existent or could count for a noticeable percentage of deaths outside the known at risk categories. I'm not sure whether they're doing post-mortems etc. on these cases at the moment which would establish this or not due to not enough capacity. 

On the flu front ONS usually have seasonal flu stats broken down by age I think - I found something along those lines the other day when looking up usual mortality in England & Wales to give some context to the current numbers.

 Did you read what i wrote or just look at the table?

Lifted straight from this Heart web page:

https://www.heart.co.uk/lifestyle/food-drink/mcdonalds-full-list-stores-reopening-delivery/

Clearly the journalist must be writing articles with a mobile device and some overzealous auto-correct.

Scotland

• 26,000 infective people


• Reproduction rate (R number) between 0.7 and 1


• Maybe “slightly above that elsewhere in the UK”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52441428

This is fairly informative.

France also following the centralised model so we're not alone. 

Scotland

• 44 new deaths


• 171 new cases


• 1,656 patients in hospital with suspected or confirmed Covid-19 (down 64)


• 104  in intensive care (up 5)


• 2,847 discharged from hospital after receiving since 5th March

Scotland

• “Almost certain” no significant change to lockdown rules will be possible on 7th May.


• There are still approximately 26,000 infectious people in Scotland, with the number "much too high at present to consider the virus under control".


• Re-opening schools fully at this point would likely see a new spike in infections that would overwhelm the NHS within two months.


• It is considering options for allowing people to leave their homes more often but still in their local area.

From reading about the experience from other countries, apps that require bluetooth opt-in are not particularly useful. We need mandatory bluetooth apps (or at least bluetooth opt out) and ideally the public health authorities need to have access to the GPS and payment card patterns, so they can trace back more easily and fully the contacts of an infected person.

There are of course significant concerns about privacy rights and security, but there are ways to address these issues:

• data should only be accessible for the previous 3 weeks


• only public health authorities should have access to it, no other govt departments or private companies


• they should get the whereabouts of infected people, who they met, where, and for how long. For their contacts, just that there was a contact, where, and for how long.


• Include a time limit to the whole process by defining an end to the epidemic


• All the information gathered should be publicly and freely available in an anonymised format


• Security measures to avoid leaks etc.

Both the centralised (NHS) app and the decentralised one capture Bluetooth data to determine proximity to contacts who have gone on to test positive for Covid-19. The difference is that with the NHS app, the detection of contacts via the Bluetooth data is done at a Data Centre centrally rather than on the contact's phone via a periodic download of the reported infections to the local phone and the file matching

The trade-off is of increased personal data being held centrally versus better control of who gets an alert and also the provision of aggregated data about the rate  and location of new infections in general

It seems to me to be very much a subjective decision whether the risk of additional personal data being misused is more or less important than better control over the pandemic

FWIW I still favour the centralised model

I can see a big problem looming with the unnecessary self-isolation of contacts being in the proximity of known victims but not infected. I don't know what constitutes a "contact" on terms of distance and duration of a bluetooth reading but on a typical walk for an hour or a grocery visit you could rack up hundreds of "hits" and presumably any one of these can lead to an alert. I imagine that the centralised system would be better at fine tuning this outbreak of false positives than the local version

Another advantage of the centralised system would be that for the 18000 people recruited to help with tracing, a central data base of who has already been identified would be beneficial. I guess the 18000 will be focussing on those people not on the app but who are known to the person infected

It will be interesting to see how the IOW Field Trial turns out

Another virologist who thinks Covid 19 might not be as dangerous as feared. - 

https://unherd.com/thepost/german-virologist-finds-covid-fatality-rate-of-0-24-0-36/

Professor Streeck feels that lockdown measures were introduced too fast, meaning that we didn’t have enough time to assess whether the individual components (such as better hygiene and some social distancing) were sufficient to slow the spread.

He also places great emphasis on the viral load that you are initially exposed to as a determinant of how serious your infection becomes, and has noticed the importance of ‘super-spreading events’ in spreading the disease. These tend to be indoor events with bad circulation, and people dancing or being close together, singing, shouting or (in the case of one of the German carnivals he studied) kissing.

This means that, in Professor Streeck’s view, a more feasible approach than attempting to suppress the virus completely until a vaccine (which he is not confident will arrive), allowing the gradual spread of the disease with lower doses, through continued hygiene measures, could lead to a widespread of partial immunity. This would eventually have the effect of downgrading Covid-19 to just another virus that circulates within the human population but, like influenza and other coronaviruses, is a manageable ongoing threat.

Speaker Lindsay Hoyle says it is a “matter of regret” that Boris Johnson will be making a statement about lifting the lockdown on Sunday.

He says such statements should be made to the Commons first so MPs can scrutinise the decision.pic.twitter.com/QFrXtKSUo0

— LBC News (@LBCNews) May 5, 2020

Sorry, perils of posting whilst working and not reading properly. Sorry about that!

Pneumonia & complications of pneumonia are and always have been one of the biggest killers of the elderly. 

If cases were breaking out in Europe back in December almost a month before it became big news in China then nobody would have been tested. If elderly had died of pneumonia it would have said that on the death certificate, or complications from flu or flu like symptoms. 

The daily figures we see now are of people who have died 'with' coronavirus and not nesscerily directly from. 

Here's thing of the 100's of thousands of elderly that die in hospital from pneumonia or complications arising from it each year they don't do studies of exactly killed them. They give a basic screen for certain known pathogens and that's that.. common cold viruses can kill elderly. 

One study on certain human  Coronaviruses basically said the same.. of those in the study that had them around 8% of the cases admitted to ICU died. But it basically said that very little research is done to find the true extent they play in death.. 

Sorry but you are displaying a lack of understanding of the challenges of large IT projects.  It’s the scale and timescales that are the killers.

Aside from that you’re “10x the cost for 1/10th of the result” is just you plucking numbers out of thin air that are about as close to reality as you are to a far off galaxy.

I think Borus thinks he’s president rather than prime minister. Too much time with Donald perhaps.

UK now officially has the highest death toll in Europe. It's amazing how this has happened. It seems only moments ago we were all dismayed at the horrific death tolls in Spain and Italy. Without breaking into a sweat we appear to have overtaken them. Granted we're all a long way from the home straight but there are signs the UK has the legs to keep running ahead. 

The five charts that explain the UK's horrifying death toll

The UK recorded 32,375 deaths up to 24 April - more than the official death tolls of Europe's hardest-hit countries

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/05/ons-data-indicates-uk-past-peak-deaths-care-home-deaths-still/

Detailed article on China's cover up. Now some twerp on here called me "waycist" a few weeks ago for stating the obvious - that we cannot trust the statistics from China.

Enjoy:

https://www.1828.org.uk/2020/05/05/chinas-coronavirus-cover-up-has-far-reaching-implications-for-free-speech/

I get the impression we are providing more death statistics than some other countries though?

Country for country comparisons are difficult because we did not all start from the same point. I have read and heard some people pointing out that we have done better than Italy. However, they (in particular Lombardy) got hit first and so we had time to learn.

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Coronavirus: Virgin Atlantic to axe 3,000 jobs in battle for survival

Quote

Virgin Atlantic Airways is to axe up to a third of its workforce as it battles to secure new funding that would enable it to survive the coronavirus pandemic. Sky News has learnt that the airline majority-owned by Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group is to announce that it is cutting just over 3,000 jobs in a move that will spell the end of its long-running operations at London's Gatwick Airport. Trade unions and staff were being briefed on the redundancies on Tuesday lunchtime, with an external announcement expected imminently, according to one official.

https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-virgin-atlantic-to-axe-3000-jobs-in-battle-for-survival-11983452

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I am a little skeptical that this is true, mostly on the basis that we haven't been overwhelmed like Italy and Spain have. I suspect this has alot to do with the UK being more ontop of the death statistics than other countries. That we would expect Lombardy to revise its death stats upwards.

Country by country comparisons are impossible at the moment, for a variety of reasons. Just take Spain as an example - the death rate in Spain declined much faster and earlier in Spain than in either France or Italy - I can think of no valid reason for that, other than different methods for recording statistics, since the death rate is determined from the point of infection which in most cases is some weeks prior to fatality.

The proper way to look at what happened in different countries is via a detailed statistical analysis of excess deaths, which can only be done weeks later.