Day: 1 August 2020

Dr Rudolph Kalveks FT 29/7/2020: "Europe battles to contain surge in Covid-19 cases. Experts surprised at how fast the lifting of restrictions led to a rise in infections." Telegraph 1/8/2020: "The virus warning light is flashing." Let us see what the “Canaries in the Mine” (i.e., the coronavirus death statistics, courtesy of Worldometer) tell us about the actual development of the epidemic in Europe and other parts of the world. First of all, bearing in mind the usual caveats about reliability, we should recap the death statistics in our selection of countries. These are summarised as time series in Figure 1 below, where a logarithmic scale has been used. (An upward sloping straight line on such a graph would indicate an exponential growth rate). Figure 1. Cumulative Death Statistics for Selected Countries (July 31, 2020).Cumulative coronavirus deaths, expressed as a % of country populations, are plotted on a logarithmic scale, as time series up to July 31, 2020. Source: Worldometer. The curves show that when the penetration of coronavirus in a country reaches a ceiling, typically represented by a fatality rate below 0.1% of its population, its spread slows to a standstill, with few further fatalities arising. This certainly appears to have been the case in mainland Western Europe, where the average daily death rates from the coronavirus have now ...

At the start I was quite surprised that Australia seemed to be taking a fairly calm approach to the virus. It is, even in normal times, an over-regulated nanny state. Anyone who has seen the almost fanatical obsession with speed limit enforcement here knows the Police love handing out fines for the smallest infraction. After shutting the borders to filthy overseas travellers there was much back slapping and self-congratulations from the State Governments that they were going to eradicate the virus like St. Jacinda of NZ. Of course all they did was delay the inevitable like a few heretics dared to suggest. A few weeks ago there was the start of an increase in positive cases, it would appear spread by untrained security guards engaged by the Victorian Government to guard quarantine hotels. There were reports of people being let out, poor hygiene/infection control and even a couple of stories of these security guards having sex with quarantined travellers!! The number of positive cases has risen somewhat and has been bumping along at 300-500 new cases per day for a couple of weeks now. This coincided with a dramatic change in the atmosphere. The other States shut borders with Victoria if they weren't already shut, the mainstream media went into full panic porn mode and has only got worse since ...

Northern Lockdown Triggered by 14 Extra Cases. Or is it Five? Matt Hancock receives the news from Chis Whitty: "14 extra cases you say? Right, let's lock up four-and-a-half million people." Was the "surge" in cases in the North West that prompted the Government to impose a local lockdown on more than four million people due to 14 additional people testing positive? It certainly looks that way. The ONS infection survey data showing that the number of infected people had risen from 0.05% of the population to 0.07% (still below the level of an epidemic), was based on just 59 people testing positive out of 116,026 swab tests over a six-week period. In the previous period, 45 people tested positive out of 114,674, which means the tipping point for a northern lockdown may have rested on only 14 extra positive tests. That's well within the confidence interval so it's perfectly possible that there's been no increase at all and next week the numbers will fall. If you compare the most recent week's ONS data it shows 24 people testing positive out of 28,325, compared to 19 out of 31,542 the previous week. So a total increase of five. Is this "the data" Matt Hancock referred to in his Twitter thread on Friday night when he announced the new restrictions? No ...