COVID-19: The Coming Peak in the UK & Beyond.	April 9, 2020
Tags: COVID-19, ethics, science
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The UK government is now talking more in it's daily briefings about what will come "next", that is after we have seen the number of diagnosed cases & deaths continue to grow, plateau, and then fall. It will plateau & fall, so long as we all keep staying at home and limiting our social interactions. If we do not, we risk the virus spreading out of control again.
When Will the Peak Be?
My estimates so Do Not Trust At All
First of all, there will be two peaks. First the number of new cases a day will peak and then, about 8 days later, the number of deaths per day will peak. This is because of the average gap between being diagnosed in hospital and succumbing, for those unfortunate enough to do so.
The number of deaths a day looks to me like it will peak around April 20th, at somewhere between 1,200 and 1,500 a day (see below why I think tracking deaths is more reliable than case numbers and why case numbers are a poor metric). We will know that peak is coming as, if the lock-down measures have worked as intend, their effect will result in a plateauing and then drop in new cases during next week ( April 12th-18th). We might be seeing that plateauing already. Deaths will plateau (stay steady) for maybe a longer period than cases due to the fact that the gap between diagnosis and recovery or death is variable. That period will be something like April; 20-27th
If we follow the same "curve" as Italy and Spain, the number of new cases will slowly start dropping but not as sharply as early models indicated. Deaths will also drop, about 8-10 days later. What happens then I have no idea really, it depends on how well the current social distancing measures work and if people continue to stick to them as spring progresses and people want to escape confinement.
A disproportionate number of deaths in this peak will be from our health services and critical works – people working in shops, bus drivers, refuse collectors, GP's, teachers – because they are the most exposed. The care industry workers and lower paid people in our society will be hardest hit, which seems monumentally unfair.
The plan of pretty much all national governments so far is the same:
Isolation of all people who are non-key workers
Expand the respiratory Intensive Care capabilities of the health services as much as possible
Look after as many of the wave of people already infected & becoming ill as possible
As I've covered in prior blogs, if the government's measures work we are then we are left "sleeping with the tiger". The virus is in our population, it will be slowly spreading still, and when social isolation measures relax there is a real risk of the illness and deaths exploding again because most of us are not immune. This is know by all epidemiologists studying this, it is a situation that China, Italy, Spain, and most other countries will face.
The big question is – what comes after the peak?
I'm going to cover three four things:
Why we cannot go on "Cases" the number most often graphed and discussed. We have to go on deaths, and even then there are some confusing factors.
Why the Infection Fatality Rate is key – and we do not know that yet
A "test" or "vaccine" is not a black and white thing, it's grey, and especially for a Vaccine, it is not coming soon.
How we might manage the period between either a reliable vaccine or herd immunity. Both currently look like at least 18-24 months away.
Why Case Numbers Cannot Be Relied On.
Case Numbers do not tell you as much as you may think
Case numbers (the number of people who have been confirmed as having Covid-19) are the most commonly reported figures, many of us track if things are getting better or worse by them. But they are a very poor indicator really and they certainly cannot be used to compare between countries.
First of all, how are the diagnoses being made? Most countries are using the WHO-approved test or a very similar one, called a PCR test. I won't go into the details here, I'll put them in the section of the post on testing, but the test is accurate if done in a laboratory. Why in a lab? because any cross-contamination can give a false positive and if the sample or test chemicals are not kept/handled correctly, can give a false negative.
Not all countries are using just PCR tests. China made some diagnoses based only on symptoms. I'm not sure if other countries are making diagnoses from symptoms only and including them in official figures.
More significantly is who is being tested. In the UK the test was originally only being done on seriously ill patients in hospital. It is now being done on a few NHS staff and certain key people (like Boris Johnson!). In South Korea and Germany, many, many more people were tested, so there will be more cases identified. Add on to that the number of tests a country can do.
In the UK are testing rates have been very poor
In the UK we were limited to a pitifully small number of tests per day, less than 6,000 until March 17th and we only reached 10,000 test a day at the start of April. You cannot detect cases in people you have not tested.
Case numbers will also vary from country to country based on the country's population! The UK is going to have a lot more cases than Denmark as we have over 10 times as many people.
The final confusion is that even in a single country, what counts as a day for reporting can vary and it can take time for information to be recorded. The UK sees a drop of cases against the prevailing trend on Sunday and Monday. As the cases are for the prior day and it seems like the data is not being as well processed at weekend.
Estimations of how many people really have Covid-19 at any time, as opposed to validated Case numbers, vary wildly. In the UK I doubt we are detecting even 1/3 of cases.
So, all in all, Case Rates are pretty poor as an indicator of how many people are really ill.
Infection Fatality Rate and Tracking Deaths Not Cases.
As I mentioned in my previous post last week, what we really need to know is the Infection Fatality Rate (IFR). This is the percentage of infected people who die. It is not the same as the Case Fatality Rate (CFR), which is the percentage of known cases that die. As the number of known cases is such an unreliable number (see above!) then of course the CFR is going to be rubbish. This is a large part of why the CFR varies so wildly from country to country. France has a CFR of 8.7%, almost as bad as the UK at 10.4%. The US has a CFR of 2.9% (but they will catch up).
As I also covered last week, we cannot calculate the IFR until we know the number of people who have been infected. For that we need a reliable antibody test and one does not exist yet. Yes, they are being sold, but the reliability is poor. Last I knew the UK NHS had reviewed several candidates and none were reliable enough to use.
Scientist have suggested many Infection Fatality rates. I feel 0.5% is a fair estimate. It is vital we know this number with some accuracy as if we have an Infection Fatality Rate we can flip the coin and calculate the number of people who have been infected from the number of people who have died.
IFR * deaths = number immune
You can go from a graph like the example one I show (either from a model or, after the peak, from real figures) and as you have the number who died (say 20,000 to keep it simple) and the IFR of 0.5% you know that 4 million people (minus the 20,000 who died) had the disease and are now immune.
Of course, once we have a reliable antibody test we can verify the exact value for Infection Fatality Rate and the percentage of the population now immune. But we only need that information from one country and it can be used, with minor modifications for population age and capacity of the health services, to estimate how many people are immune and thus how many are still at risk from Covid-19. In my example, about 62.5 million people in the UK would still be susceptible to Covid-19. Which is why this will be far from over after this initial peak.
There is one huge caveat in respect of the IFR. If in the UK the NHS is over-run, we will have extra deaths. People who would have survived with treatment die as too many people needed treatment at the same time. This is the whole "flattening the curve" argument, we have to protect the NHS from being over-run to limit this extra, avoidable deaths. In effect the IFR is elevated due to the limitations of the health system.
Countries which do have a poor health service or other aspects of their society that block them from the health service (cultural bias, fear of crippling debt) or more likely to have an elevated IFR, as are countries that allow Covid-19 to run unchecked through their population.
There is another aspect to the IFR and measuring progress of Covid-19 via the death rate. The number of deaths is a more reliable measure. I know that sounds callous, but as we have seen, the Case Number is totally reliant on how you do your testing and there needs to be a huge testing capacity to keep up. Deaths are simpler:
There are fewer deaths so fewer tests are needed (to confirm SARS-CoV-2 was present in the deceased, if not already tested).
Deaths have to be recorded in a timely manner.
Deaths are noticed. There are going to be people who are seriously ill and would be tested if they went to hospital but don't, they get better and it is not recorded. They are "invisible". Dead people invariably get noticed.
A country that wants to hide the active level of Covid-19 can do so by not testing, under-testing, or not reporting honestly on the tests. It's not impossible, but it's hard to cover up a significant increase in the number of deaths.
I stress that is is not a perfect indicator though. There is no clear distinction made as to whether the patient dies of some other illness but SARS-CoV-2 was present; whether the patient was likely to die "soon" anyway – again due to other illnesses; patients who die outside hospitals are not counted in the UK daily figures yet. (If you follow me on Twitter you will have possibly seen me querying the figures last Monday – and people pointing out the reason!)
Reported deaths will also suffer from spikes and dips due to how the reporting is done. The UK and some other countries I checked (France, Italy, Spain) show a dip in all figures, against trend, on Sunday or Monday (or both).
There is a really nice article on all of this this by New Scientist which is itself partly based on this paper by the lancet that gives an IFR of 0.66%
There is also a whole plethora of graphs and information on ourworldindata.org/coronavirus , as well as text explaining in more detail what I have said here. It is well worth a look and you can change which countries appear on the graphs.
Test are Not Black And White
There has been a lot of talk in the UK and elsewhere (including the USA), about not doing enough testing. On the other hand their is a constant stream of media reports about quick home tests, both for if you have Covid-19 or have antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 and so are immune. So what is the reality?
A test is only any good if it is reliable as used. For something like a deadly pandemic, it needs to be really reliable. Let me explain why.
Let's say a company is selling an antibody test and someone uses it, it says they are immune, and they stop self-isolating. But the test is 75% accurate. 75% sounds good, yes? No. it means 1 in 4 people who take that test and it says they are immune are not – and they have now gone out, spread the disease to their aunt Mary and she dies. Plus infecting a large number of people and keeping the whole sorry mess going.
{Update – as a friend reminded me, when you are testing for an "unlikely" event, which being immune to C-19 is right now, even a 95% accurate test will give far more false positives than real positives across the whole population – I'll try and do another blog to explain why}.
And that is if they take the test properly – companies are most likely to give you the best, under-ideal-conditions accuracy rate as they want to sell more kits than Sproggins Pharma selling a similar kit which they claim is 73% accurate.
If you are reading this, you are probably the sort of person who will read the instructions, follow them carefully, not put the swab down on a table, not let the dog chew it. And you note the bit on reliability. Most won't. They will do the test quickly, it says they are immune and they will believe it, especially if the quoted reliability rate is high.
Any home test that can be used by the public has to be both very reliable (less then 5% false positives) and utterly idiot-proof. I'm really concerned that countries that put money first will allow companies to sell tests that do not meet these criteria and it will make the situation a lot, lot worse. It might even result in the pandemic running out of control.
Test For Being Infected – PCR test
PCR stands for Polymerase Chain Reaction. The WHO-approved test for Covid-19 is a PCR test and has been fully described since the end of January. You can even download the details of the test and methods from the WHO page I link to.
A PCR test is a genetic test. A primer is added to the sample to be tested and that primer latches on to a very specific DNA or RNA sequence. A biochemical reaction is then used, called a Polymerase Chain Reaction, to make copies of that DNA/RNA, doubling the number in the sample. These steps are repeated 30 to 40 times to make millions of copies of DNA/RNA. With an old-style PCR test you would then need to run the processed sample through a second process to detect it, like a Southern Blot – you get a square of gel with black lines on it. The PCR test for COVID-19 should be a real-time PCR test. With this the new copies made are attached to a florescent dye so that it can be easily detected as soon as there are enough copies in the sample, say after 30 iterations not the full 40, saving time.
If the original sample contains even just a few pieces of the DNA/RNA you are testing for, you will detect it. The process takes a few hours.
The RNA of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was sequenced (read) back in January and the WHO identified sequences that were unique to the virus, and these are used to make the primers. As I understand it most countries use the WHO identified primers but the USA had some "discussions" between commercial companies over which primers they thought should be used. I won't suggest there was an element of these commercial companies looking to make a fortune from this, i'm sure it was all about identifying an even more unique RNA sequence to target.
The test has to be done in laboratory conditions. Because the test is so sensitive any cross contamination can give a false positive. e.g the sample taken from a patient was done by someone with COVID-19 themselves or there was SARS-Cov-2 virus in the air from another nearby patient. If a swab is used to get a sample from the back of the throat, it has to be put into a sealed tube as soon as it is used.
If the sample to be tested has not been looked after properly (kept cool, not kept for too long etc) or the chemicals for running the test are similarly not kept in a laboratory environment, you may fail to detect the RNA – a false negative.
Finally, the virus RNA has to be there to be detected. A patient early in their illness may not be shedding virus at a high enough level for the swab to pick up some of it. Once a patient's own immune system has wiped out the virus (or almost wiped it out) again the swap may not have any or enough virus in it to be detected.
Done right a PCR test is a powerful, incredibly reliable (over 99%) diagnostic tool and is used for detecting many viral diseases, including HIV, Influenza, and MERS.
How a simple yes/no infected test might work
You can probably now understand why creating a PCR test for Covid-19 that can be used at home or in the ward and gives a result in minutes is a bit of a challenge.
Some companies are trying to create a different sort of test. These depend on creating a chemical that will bind to the virus itself, probably one of the viral surface proteins. That chemical or part of it will then react with something else, a marker chemical, to give a visible change, much like a pregnancy test. You put the sample in a well or spot where the detecting chemical is. Fluid is then dragged along the strip carrying the thing to be detected (the virus in this case) and the detecting chemical. Any detecting chemical that did not bind will be left behind. When the fluid goes past the marker chemical, if there is enough detecting chemical, it will change colour. Neat!
Best I know at time of writing, no one has come up with such a test that was reliable. I'm pretty sure someone will, in a few weeks or months. It should be accurate but no where near as sensitive as a PCR test. I must stress, to actually be of use in handling Covid-19 as a nation, the rate of false positive would need to be very low. False negative, though not good for the individual, is nothing like as big a problem in containing the pandemic).
An Antibody test will show if you have had Covid-19. It will not show if you currently have it, or at least not until the very late stages. This is because it is testing for the natural ability for your immune system, via antibodies, to recognise and attack the SARS-Cov-2 virus.
We desperately need an antibody test as it will allow us to identify people who have had the disease and are now immune. This is vital for 2 reasons:
Someone who is immune does not need to be restricted by social distancing. See my prior post on why this is vital and how we might identify such people.
We can find out how many people have had the disease and compare it to the number of people who have died of the disease and get that very useful Infection Fatality Rate.
Unfortunately, making an antibody test is not easy. Some are in trials and I think the UK government have tried some – and none have proven trustworthy.
An antibody test is simply not simple. What you need to do is design something that an antibody reacts against, so let me just describe something about antibodies. Before I go any further, I must make it very, very, very clear that of all the biological things I have touched on so far, antibody technology is something my academic background hardly touched on and most of what I know comes from popular science magazines and a few discussions with real experts last year when my work life touched that area.
Your body creates antibodies when it detects something to fight, an invader in our tissues. This is usually a viral or bacterial infection. It also includes cells that "are not our own", which is why we reject organ transplants unless they are both "matched" to us and we take drugs to dial down our immune response. Our antibodies recognise bits of the invader, in the case of viruses that is (usually) proteins that are in the coat, the outer layer, of viruses. Usually it's the key proteins, the ones that give them access to our cells. Our immune cells learn to recognise these proteins and attack anything with them on it.
Anyone infected with SARS-Cov-2 who survives (which is, thankfully, most of us) now have antibodies that recognise the virus. There is no guarantee that what Dave's immune system recognises SATS-CoV-2 by is what Shanti's immune system does. It will be a bit of the virus, but not necessarily the same bit!
So an antibody test has to include proteins or fragments of proteins that most human immune systems that recognise SARS-Cov-2 will recognise. And as that will potentially vary from person to person…. Oh dear. Thus a good antibody test probably needs to have several proteins or protein fragments in it to work. This is why it is complex.
Again, the tests will come but the first ones will almost certainly not be specific/reliable enough to really trust.
The bad news? Despite all the media hype and suggestions in government announcements of creating a vaccination in 18 months (maybe sooner), it is very unlikely. Sorry. It is very, very unlikely. Don't get me wrong, I would love us to have one right now, or in a month, or even in 6 months. But unless there is a medical miracle, we won't and by suggesting to everyone that we might, I think the powers that be are storing up a lot of anger, frustration and other issues
A vaccine needs to do something similar to the Antibody test. It needs to contain something that either is part of the virus or looks like part of it. This is usually:
An inactivated version of the virus
a fragment of the virus
One of the key proteins on the virus
Rarely, a related virus that is much less harmful (for example cowpox for smallpox vaccine).
The vaccine is administered and the person creates antibodies to it. Now, when the person is exposed to the real virus, the immune system is ready to attack it. Neat!
Influenza Vaccine is often less than 50% effective
Creating vaccines is a long process. You need to come up with something that is safe to administer, prompts our immune systems to create the antibodies, and the antibody reliably attack the virus the vaccine is for – and nothing else! (Occasionally a new vaccine is found to prompt some people's immune system to attack other things – like the healthy, useful protein the virus actually attacks). And you have to produce a LOT of that thing if you are going to administer it to a large number of people, such as most of the UK population.
The vaccine has to work on most people as you need 60-70% of people to be immune to SAR-CoV-2 get herd immunity from Covid-19 – the higher the better. The influenza vaccine is often much less effective than 50%, especially in older people.
You are giving the vaccine to healthy people and to lots and lots of them. It has to be really, really, really safe. If it seriously harms 1 in a thousand people (which might sound reasonable at first glance, for treating something as bad as Covid-19) – well, that is almost as bad as Covid-19 itself. You would be harming hundreds of thousands of people.
With a drug you use to treat the ill, you can afford for it to be less safe – as you are only giving it to people who are ill (so a smaller number) and they have more to lose. The risk/reward balance is more likely to be positive for a drug. Even if a drug for a life-threatening illness harms 5% of people but cures 50%, it is worth (with informed consent) using it.
We have never, ever created a vaccine in 18 months before. I'm struggling to get a scientific reference as searches are swamped with talk pieces (like this one!) on why it will take a long time. However, this video by an American doctor Zubin Damnia who does social media about medical matters explains better than I can and this history of vaccines makes it clear at the top it often takes 10 years.
The bottom line is, much though I want to be wrong, the often stated aim of having a suitable vaccine in 18 months or less will need a medical miracle and a huge amount of work.
After The Peak And With No Vaccine – How Do We Cope?
After the peak, most people are still at risk from Covid-19. As I said earlier, if the Infection Fatality Rate is 0.5% then for each person who died there will be 200 people who are now immune, so if there are 20,000 deaths that is 4 million people immune. 6
If there is no vaccine then we have, I think, four options:
Continue social isolation measures as they are to keep the virus from spreading.
Relax isolation a little and let cases creep up but held as steady rate, but within the capacity of the NHS.
Relax isolation quite a bit, monitor number of admissions to ICU (or something similar) and re-impose strict social isolation at the current level if things start getting worse.
Relax isolation a lot and massively increase testing and case tracking – copying the South Korea/Singapore approach.
Option 1 to hold us all in isolation is, I think, untenable. People will stop doing it and the impact on our economy must be massive. The impact on our society will also be massive, especially if this continues into the next academic year.
I don't think we can manage option 4 in the UK yet.
So I think we will see an attempt at option 2, relaxing some social isolation rules (such as allowing restaurants to open and small gatherings) but then option 3, tightening social isolation if numbers of new cases start to build.
Option 4 could become a reality in a few months, especially if we can get people to use mobile phone apps to track movements and aid identifying the contacts of people who become ill, but not everyone has a mobile phone and I think a good percentage of people will not agree to be tracked.
At present, without a vaccine, we will be living with some sort of social until we reach herd immunity, with at the very least 60% of us immune. How long will that take? 60% of the UK population is 40.5 million people. That equates to 202,500 deaths from Covid-19 to get there (remember, see the bit on IFR above).
This current peak of Covid-19 will last about 3 months, from the start of March to the end of May. It remains to be seen if we exceed the NHS expanded capacity. If we allow 20,000 deaths a peak with 4 million people becoming immune each peak, that's 10 peaks, so 2.5 years.
A better option could well be to aim for a steady rate of new cases and deaths from Covid-19, say 1000 a week. At that rate herd immunity will take just over 200 weeks, 4 years. If we allow 4000 deaths a week than we could be there in a year, but our NHS would have to be handling the many, many thousands of ill patients that would entail.
Of course, in reality, our treatment of Covid-19 patients will get better over time, so fewer people will die from it, but it will still be a horrible thing to go through. And, if we DO get a vaccine sooner rather than later, many of those people will have died needlessly.
So, as you can see, we are in this for a long while.
The expanded health services, better knowledge of what social movement restrictions work, improved testing (including home testing), even my idea of cards for those immune, would all make life easier, it is not all doom and gloom. But I just wish all of what I have put here was being discussed and shared with people (preferably in a shorter form than this blog!) in a clear and constant message. I think if more people understood where we are and what is likely to to happen (or not), we will save ourselves a lot of issues weeks/months/even years down the line.
I honestly don't know what the answer is – I don't think anyone does. Which is why all of this talk about an "exit strategy" results in lots of hand waving and no clear plan.
As ever, if you think I've got something wrong, you know of a good academic source covering this, or you simply have a comment – let me know.
1.	David Harper - April 10, 2020
The problem with using the infection fatality rate (IFR) to infer the total number of infected people is that the IFR is a small number, hopefully below 1%, so the difference between an IFR of, say 0.5% and 0.25% makes a huge difference to the inferred number of infected people. And it also assumes that we have an accurate tally of the number of deaths caused by the virus. There is a disturbing report in this morning's Guardian that hundreds of deaths in care homes are not being included in the "official" death count. When you combine two quantities which have very large uncertainties, the result may be no more reliable than a roll of the dice.
mwidlake - April 10, 2020
Thanks David – Sorry, I'm not sure where you are coming from here? You say "the problem with" and then make points that are valid – and I cover in my blog. That the numbers are deaths in hospital only (and only if validated by a positive SARS-CoV-2 test); that there are delays in reporting; that the IFR at present is an informed guess that scientists can't agree on.
The deaths outside hospitals are a known issue, the ONS track them and add them to the total weekly (I think) but they do not update the historically published figures, which for tracking we don't want them to. I don't want to sound callous, as each 1 added to the number is a real person,someone's relative or friend, but the number of deaths in hospital are an order of magnitude higher than in the community in the UK at present. I suspect co-morbidity is much more of a confusing factor and I don't know how the experts will allow for that.
For calculating IFR we do want to know all deaths. For tracking, we need the tracking metric to be produced in a consistent manner. Even if it is lacking a section of data, so long as that section remains missing (and stays at about the same percentage of the total) then it is still a valid metric and far from using any gambling materials, including cube-based ones. Case rates are pretty inconsistent over time in one country and very inconsistent between countries.
David Harper - April 10, 2020
I'm referring to the line in your post where you say "if we have an Infection Fatality Rate we can flip the coin and calculate the number of people who have been infected from the number of people who have died".
There are only three quantities in the equation: IFR = total number of deaths/total number infected.
You can either calculate the IFR from the total deaths and total number infected, if you can determine those two numbers accurately, or you can take the total number of deaths and an assumed IFR, and infer the total number infected. But in the latter case, how do you determine the IFR? From the experience of other countries? That may not be reliable due to a range of country-specific factors including differences in demographics, smoking habits, overall health of the population, quality of the healthcare system, accuracy of tests to determine whether people have been infected, political pressure to massage the published death rates, and many others that make comparisons between countries difficult.
So you then have a range of IFR values, all of them small quantities below 1%. The difference between an IFR of 0.25% and an IFR of 0.5% doesn't seem that great, but the total number infected that you infer from the two values will differ by a factor of two. It may be the difference between inferring that 40% of your population has immunity and that 80% has it.
David, I treat you as someone with intelligence, please do me the honour of reciprocating. I'm not a mathematician but I know how A=X/Y works.
I make it clear that the IFR is questionable at the moment – "As I also covered last week, we cannot calculate the IFR until we know the number of people who have been infected"
I said in the article that we need to get an accurate IFR and, though there are widely varying estimates, we will not really know until we get an accurate antibody test. Until then, the best we can do is use a value to give an idea. I do not calculate the IFR, I look at what different scientific papers suggest and go for a middle value and then use it as an example. I clearly say "Scientist have suggested many Infection Fatality rates. I feel 0.5% is a fair estimate". Note, Estimate. Of course if the IFR is 0.0025 rather than 0.005 then the number of people who are immune based on the number dead is twice as much.
I also say "But we only need that information from one country and it can be used, with minor modifications". A large elderly section to the population, high levels of chronic illness, possibly levels of existing conditions such as diabetes varying between countries, would modify the rate. I say "Countries which do have a poor health service or other aspects of their society that block them from the health service (cultural bias, fear of crippling debt) or more likely to have an elevated IFR".
This is not like you David, you seem to be correcting things that are not wrong in the post and yet you are really diligent at looking at content. I'm absolutely sure there WILL be wrong things in the post – as I have said on all prior posts, I'm an armchair epidemiologist, I am not a real one – but this post is mostly just amalgamating stuff from scientific sources, some of which I link to.
Martin, I'm really sorry if I've offended you. It wasn't my intention. I certainly don't question your intelligence. I've known you far too long to do that. I was simply asking the kind of question that I'd ask of any academic colleague.
2.	sydoracle1 - April 11, 2020
I think it is probably better to monitor current ICU cases than deaths. The number in ICU will be more accurate, and can be expressed as a percentage of available beds as a valid comparison internationally. Plus you are directly monitoring against
your capacity constraint. You can also use the number of patients on ventilators and/or the number occupying hospital beds.
The drawback is that it works only up to 100% capacity. But at that point you aren't really going to benefit from any numbers for forecast modelling. In six or twelve months time, we will be able to look back on total deaths and compare with previous years to get an strong idea of the toll (again, something that can be compared internationally). As 'data' people, we run the risk of focusing on numbers as a purpose in its own right, but we don't want to be in the position of wasting testing resources on those who have already died just to get an accurate number
Australia is currently in a fortunate position that we are still below capacity in ICUs, but any attempt at using case numbers or deaths for modelling or forecasting is useless because over half our cases are from overseas (significantly cruise ships) and so don't reflect the prevalance of the disease in the country
Our current status is https://www.health.gov.au/news/health-alerts/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-health-alert/coronavirus-covid-19-current-situation-and-case-numbers
Thanks for that. I think in the UK nearly all our cases are home-grown and, sadly, we have an ever growing number.
ICU numbers are critical as it is when we can't deliver oxygen therapy that things will become dire. I've been surprised that in the UK press briefings they have gone from "we will certainly not run out of Oxygen" to "Oxygen is not currently a problem". It seems the issue is not supply but getting it to enough beds in the quantity needed. Work is being done on making ventilators more efficient.
I still feel that, for tracking the likely trajectory of Covid-19 (so estimating when relaxing social distancing can be tried) deaths are the better metri. And deaths per 100,000 population can give some indication of how each country's measure are helping (with many confusing factors of course). I think the US us a particular challenge as their response varies so much from state to state.
I really hope the antipodean countries continue to hold the illness at bay in the way they have so far, I think countries early in their trajectories can learn from the measures taken in the Australia and New Zealand
3.	Aman.... - May 24, 2020
Where do you think India will stand in this pandemic with its 1.3 billion population? Right now, we are in lock down #4 with lots of ease given i.e. limited flights, trains are allowed. Shops and businesses are allowed and this is when after almost 60 days of lock down, we are sitting at 132,000 cases(total), 3867 deaths and 54,441 recovered.
Aman….
mwidlake - May 24, 2020
Hi Aman,
I'm afraid I have not been following India and nearby countries. Looking at the figures now, you are on a strong upward trend, so your R(E) (effective R number) is well above 1. I don't have the skill to just look at the graphs and tell you what your R number is but it is a lot lower than US and European countries at their worst. Deaths are doubling every 16 days and cases every 13-14 days, so ignoring oddities in testing, expect deaths to surge a little. I think you have a way to go before you get over your first peak.
Your deaths per million population are really very, very low (3) and yet you have had the disease recorded at significant numbers (over 100 cases) since only a week later than UK, for example. India is a totally different culture to the UK though, with a massive population split between high density and very low density areas. I don't think you can really use the UK or other European countries for a comparator and maybe look at the US which also has a massive range in population densities. Mind you, they have done a terribly poor job of handling this.
Also, and I am not sure how accurate I am here (or simply showing a level of racism on my part – sorry) but given we have had issues with data accuracy in the UK and other western countries with a health service industry that reports robustly, I am not sure how accurate and timely the stats for Covid-19 cases and deaths are in India. I would suspect considerable under-reporting so you could have a lot higher figures in reality and, on the positive side, be closer to your peak that it seems.
Even better news, a study I read today suggest people from your part of the world seem to naturally be more resilient to the onslaught of the disease. You get is just as much, but don't get as ill (as a group, individuals will vary!).
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