I've just finished watching this:
Pandemic Podcast streamed today with Joel Smalley. Highly recommended. I'm not sure if it's cheered me up (it has certainly reinforced my doubts) but if it gets in the way of the roadmap out of lockdown.....could be bad news. (Does that make me a sociopath?)
Unlikely to be countenanced by the mainstream - but between these chaps and Imperial College, I know who I would trust!
Ah yes, seasonality is the general alternative theory
Alternative theory? You mean the same alternative theory the UK govt used to plan through this and Jenny Harris today talked about when mentioning no masks in summer but might be needed in autumn?
The same "alternative theory" that correctly modelled last summer?
The same alternate theory that all other respiratory viruses follow?
Maybe you could explain to us why SARs2 would behave entirely differently to all the other HCoVs and 200 or so respiratory viruses?
After that maybe you could explain last year and this years data globally showing identical wave patterns in infections completely independent of the NPIs of the country?
Maybe then you can explain North v South Dakota and the same?
I've just finished watching this:
Thank you so much for this Jane! Joel Smalley is a professional and far more rigorous and detailed than an aged amateur such as me. I have been onto this new year peak for four weeks now and I can only find vaccinations as a plausible explanation.
I strongly advise anyone who takes issue with my charts here to watch this. It is thorough and the explanation is very clear. The comments that Joel make are very guarded and cautious, but he is tending towards the same explanation.
For example, the chart for 16 day lag using ONS daily figures as posted above is:
cases-deaths-16days.jpg
It looks very nice around the peak 'cases' around 1st January - but what about earlier on in the year?
We may have a few ducks here. No curves match exactly. Above, I have shown that the cases/deaths ratio does not have any consistency. And last week, I demonstrated how the vaccination curve looks like it has a correlation. It could form part of the explanation for spikes in death that the OP requested, but more investigations would be needed.
It's a variable lag. For small data sets, such as those now being examined, a fix lag is made to best match the event the event that is being examined. Physically variable lags occur when a changing measuring device is used to perform the measurements; for example using an elastic tape to measure length. Such variable lags are very well known in geophysical data processing, for example measurements may be made on drill pipe which stretches quite a lot.
For the infection/death data set there could be any number of reasons for the lag varying; the most obvious being that busy hospitals may have shorter lags.
While I respect your investigations into the death rates and vaccine it is not good working practice to reject good correlations just because the data set does not correspond to a particular model, in this case fixed lag.
Watch UK column news. They discuss this at length. Live broadcasts Monday, weds and Friday or catch up on their site or You Tube.
