Fascinating Story in the FT

A further case of someone on a forum believing they know more than scientists.

I am certain that, when all is said and done, the reaction to this virus will be said to have been incredibly over the top. That won't mean that it was wrong to respond as we are, you have to play it safe and you have to be prepared to be told you were wrong. If this reaction is proven to be wrong - there won't be any gloating from anyone, this is public health and people are dying. The reality is that we have to deal with the situation as it is, get the best scientists all over the world to do their work and this time next year we'll have full knowledge of what went on, why, and how it can be stopped in future.

I am hopeful that governments all across the world will have a safeguarding plan in place for the next virus which crops up. Nobody can say this is totally unexpected, Bill Gates spoke about it years ago (I only know because the video has done the rounds recently). You can't always predict what you're going to need, stockpiling ventilators, for example, might have been the wrong play. The world needs to learn the lessons. Ebola was a warning shot, Covid-19 is the plague.

Bakero said:

[MENTION=4019]Triggaaar[/MENTION] Isn't there a small part of you that thinks the scientists might know more than you?

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I usually assume that there's good merit in what they say, but when the conclusion seems at odds with common sense I'll often put a bit more thought into it, and if I'm confident they're wrong, I back myself. And when that happens, I'm usually right. Like when the government's own experts said we should allow our population to gain herd immunity through infection, I said they were wrong. And they were.

It's good to have a critical eye but take a step back. I'm guessing the guys at Cambridge and Kent unis who are to start working with the Oxford bods this week don't think it's "a load of crap".

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I'd love them to be right. But I suspect in a few weeks you'll know they weren't.

Badger Boy said:

A further case of someone on a forum believing they know more than scientists.

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I did last time. Let's hope this time they're right.

I am certain that, when all is said and done, the reaction to this virus will be said to have been incredibly over the top.
...
Ebola was a warning shot, Covid-19 is the plague.

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They seem like conflicting views.

Bakero said:

[MENTION=4019]Triggaaar[/MENTION] Isn't there a small part of you that thinks the scientists might know more than you? It's good to have a critical eye but take a step back. I'm guessing the guys at Cambridge and Kent unis who are to start working with the Oxford bods this week don't think it's "a load of crap".

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Like others, what I can’t wrap my head around is the fact that if a virus which emerged, in China, approx. 3 - 4 months ago has already infected half the UK population (situated some 5,000 miles from its origin), how did the rest of China avoid such an exposure?

Let’s say, through the intervention of a lockdown, we end up with a death toll of ‘only’ 10,000 in the UK. Extrapolate that to China, with its one billion plus population, there should have been well over 200,000 deaths. If you trust there hasn’t been some major cooking of the books over there, they’ve had nearly 100x fewer than that. It doesn’t compute.

On the flip side, I’m happy to admit that the chaps at Oxford are likely to be a tad brighter than I am, and I’d expect some kind of mathematical sense-check will have taken place. Furthermore, this is a theory which we’ll be able to either verify or fundamentally quash in relative short order. It just makes me think, why would you leave yourself open to such public humiliation if you weren’t reasonably confident in your analysis?

Are we mere mortals simply missing something above our intellectual comprehension? I can’t see how, I really can’t, but I bloody well hope I’m wrong.

If they believe half of us have had it why have we only started seeing deaths over the last few weeks... this was my thinking but then i thought maybe we did see the deaths but was just believed to be flu. hmmm

Triggaaar said:

I usually assume that there's good merit in what they say, but when the conclusion seems at odds with common sense I'll often put a bit more thought into it, and if I'm confident they're wrong, I back myself. And when that happens, I'm usually right. Like when the government's own experts said we should allow our population to gain herd immunity through infection, I said they were wrong. And they were.

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I was also highly sceptical of the herd immunity tactic but that was based on what we could see happening in Italy. I wasn't questioning the science, per se. It was just the fact that overwhelming the health service and sacrificing senior citizens seemed a little misguided. Of course they pretended they were unaware of the Italy situation

The Oxford study may well be wrong. That's how science works. But the fact this study is from a highly reputable institution and hasn't been dismissed by people who know a lot more than me means I'll wait and see.

Triggaaar said:

I usually assume that there's good merit in what they say, but when the conclusion seems at odds with common sense

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hang on, there is no "common sense" to apply here. unless you are a epidemiologist, biologist, data scientist or similar, we know nothing more than being pushed out by media and maybe the top link on google if we dig that far. the point of the article is that this information may be incorrect.

beorhthelm said:

hang on, there is no "common sense" to apply here. unless you are a epidemiologist, biologist, data scientist or similar, we know nothing more than being pushed out by media and maybe the top link on google if we dig that far. the point of the article is that this information may be incorrect.

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This.

Mellotron said:

50% sounds a bit high, but the studies in Italy and China certainly hint that a far, far, far higher number of people will get this asymptomatically than was previously thought.

However, how does their 50% theory tally with the fact there has only been 8,000 odd confirmed cases from the 30,000 or so completed?

Article is behind a paywall.

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It would be great news, we can hope.

On the 8,000 out of 30,000, remember those tests are for virus present in the body. Some of those 30,000 may have tested negative in the same way that someone who has recovered tests negative. We need the antibody tests to be sure.

I don't know nearly enough about anything to comment on this meaningfully, but a couple of thought experiments (to assist me in my strong desire to be optimistic).

Why the number of deaths now if it's been around for a while? Well if we accept the proposition that infact the virus kills many many fewer of the people it infects, and we would probably have to accept the proposition that it is far more contagious, then it isn't that hard to understand. For example, at the time we currently assume there were roughly 100 cases, and there was 1 death, perhaps there were infact 1,000 cases. Today, we likely assume that there are (let's say) 100,000 cases in the UK, and we are looking at approx 1,000 deaths (1%). Perhaps there are 1,000,000 cases. My point is (if I am thinking about this correctly), the number of deaths now does not contradict the idea presented in the article. The problem would have been that the first noticable deaths would have taken time to show up, because under this model, even when we had, let's say 10,000 cases, there would have been only 10 additional deaths from pneumonia around the country. That could easily be missed, especially if they are mostly in people with existing conditions or older people. Maybe 1 out of the 10 did not conform, nobody would notice that.

I'm not sure if I'm making sense here (or if I am even being logical) but I (think I) can see how you could have the death rate and timescale we have had, and the suggestion of many more cases in the article could still be correct.

I'm not sure about 50% of the population, because that would mean what, 32,000,000 cases, which seems huge. But I would imagine that it's possible that we have 1,000,000 cases, and if we did, that would reduce the death rate considerably (0.1%).

Also, there are a fairly large proportion of people who (today) get sick enough to be hospitalized, but don't require critical care. I'm not sure exactly what their condition is, but it might be that they are hospitalized in part because they are at risk of becoming critical, and in part because they need seperating from the general population. I'm sure I've heard of patients in hospital having pretty mild symptoms (I'm not clear on what it means to be severe but not critical tbh), but still being admitted once they "qualify" for a diagnosis (persistent symptoms for 7+ days). Those cases would not have been picked up before we started testing, they would likely have just been very poorly at home, and only a small proportion of them would have progressed to hospitalization.

Not sure if all that makes sense. I'm tired and stressed (I have no idea how I am going to get through 12 weeks or more of this tbh) Anyway, I'm sure we would all be very releaved to discover that this virus is more common and less deadly than we thought.

Also, one additional point, this thing didn't start in January. It started in November. If you are asking yourself how it could be possible that there are so many more cases than we have been assuming, I have a very reasonable question for you. How could it be possible that cases only started in the UK at the end of January? On Jan 31st there were just under 10,000 confirmed cases in China. Those were the confirmed cases, so we can assume there were more than that, maybe it would even be reasonable to assume 50,000 if 4/5 are mild cases. With all the international travel between China and Europe, nobody had shipped it out already? How much travel do you imagine there was between China and Europe over Xmas and New Year? Those are peak times for international travel I would have thought. And those numbers would be the numbers to use for this question if the rates are what we have been thinking they are and the FT article is wrong. It wouldn't make any sense to me that we had our first case at the end of January.

Food for thought(?)

beorhthelm said:

hang on, there is no "common sense" to apply here. unless you are a epidemiologist, biologist, data scientist or similar, we know nothing more than being pushed out by media and maybe the top link on google if we dig that far.

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That's not true. For a start we do know more than what we see on the news, because we can speak to people we know around the world who can tell us more. And you don't need to be a data scientist to work out basic information from the data available. If you want to just believe what you're told, that's fine. I'm not sure how you resolve when the scientists you listen to contradict one another, maybe you just shrug your shoulders. But I've read their article and think their conclusion is nonsense. We'll see whether they were right soon enough.

Bakero said:

I was also highly sceptical of the herd immunity tactic but that was based on what we could see happening in Italy. I wasn't questioning the science, per se.

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The government thought that was the best way to keep the total number of deaths down. You (it seems) disagreed with them. That is questioning the science.

The Oxford study may well be wrong. That's how science works. But the fact this study is from a highly reputable institution and hasn't been dismissed by people who know a lot more than me means I'll wait and see.

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No problem. I shall also wait and see, and hope they're right and I'm wrong. I just don't think it's credible that half of us have had/got it.

dingodan said:

Also, one additional point, this thing didn't start in January. It started in November. If you are asking yourself how it could be possible that there are so many more cases than we have been assuming, I have a very reasonable question for you. How could it be possible that cases only started in the UK at the end of January? On Jan 31st there were just under 10,000 confirmed cases in China. Those were the confirmed cases, so we can assume there were more than that, maybe it would even be reasonable to assume 50,000 if 4/5 are mild cases. With all the international travel between China and Europe, nobody had shipped it out already? How much travel do you imagine there was between China and Europe over Xmas and New Year? Those are peak times for international travel I would have thought. And those numbers would be the numbers to use for this question if the rates are what we have been thinking they are and the FT article is wrong. It wouldn't make any sense to me that we had our first case at the end of January.

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I wouldn't be at all surprised if we had cases before that.

The paper is here if you want to read it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Model (13).pdf?dl=0

Bakero said:

I was also highly sceptical of the herd immunity tactic but that was based on what we could see happening in Italy. I wasn't questioning the science, per se. It was just the fact that overwhelming the health service and sacrificing senior citizens seemed a little misguided. Of course they pretended they were unaware of the Italy situation

The Oxford study may well be wrong. That's how science works. But the fact this study is from a highly reputable institution and hasn't been dismissed by people who know a lot more than me means I'll wait and see.

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1 It isn't a study it is a model. Pedantic, but quite important here. You would expect a study to test its datasets against various models, before drawing any conclusions.
2 Science reporting through the press in this country is often a bit shit.
3 Depressing how many of our politicians are ex journalists

A theoretical scientist has published a model to describe how the spread of the virus could progress.
It is marked as a DRAFT paper and notes that the conclusions may change.
The model can and very likely will improve with better inputs.

Seagull27 said:

As much as I'd love this to be true, I can't see it. It would be a massive coincidence otherwise that the first few sick patients we discovered were all ones who had been to Italy or other infected countries, or been in contact with those who had.

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Could you elaborate? They were discovered because we targeted them due to their existing contact with known infected people.

Seagull27 said:

As much as I'd love this to be true, I can't see it. It would be a massive coincidence otherwise that the first few sick patients we discovered were all ones who had been to Italy or other infected countries, or been in contact with those who had.

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Of course, with no test, people could have had it without anyone knowing.

That raises an awkward question about how we managed mass transport to work, gigs and football matches without a "peak" of the disease occurring - instead the peak is happening after a gradual ramp down of gatherings.

Wouldn't this kind of analysis be relatively easy to either pick holes in, or not.

It looks like a few equations and various inputs, nothing complicated?

It doesn’t really make sense that up to 50% of the population could have had it and not known when less than 10% of people with sever symptoms have it (as shown by testing).

I share the scepticism (might even go as far as incredulity) about this report. The key term in the article posted by [MENTION=17583]The Camel[/MENTION] begins the second paragraph, which is the word 'If'.
It's speculative, but it's also important to say that most approaches to Covid-19 are also speculative (this is how emergent science works, we are trying to develop a knowledge of a global phenomenon that we knew nothing about three months ago, beyond its similarity with other CVs). But what should make us deeply sceptical about this one is that it bears diddly squat resemblance to Wuhan, Italy/Lombardy, Spain, France, Germany, Iran, etc. In other words, where we the deaths in January. In that report, it also indicates that the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 in the UK was late February, whereas we in Brighton & Hove ought to be aware that there were identified cases earlier that month.

yxee said:

Could you elaborate? They were discovered because we targeted them due to their existing contact with known infected people.

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If the research is correct, barely any of those people would have developed any symptoms at all. I'd like to think our health professionals and scientists would have noticed that and reported it.