The scale of the mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis in both the UK and USA is now becoming very apparent. John Burns-Murdoch is easily the most reliable source of data on this issue now, charting it regularly and with clear explanations supplied. These are his latest charts:
As he says, what is notable about the first chart is that everyone else is succeeding in curtailing covid-19 now. We are not.
If the UK current trajectory continues - and as we run out of medical facilities that is a reasonable assumption for the next week or more - then deaths of more than 10,000 a day are likely in little more than a week if the rate of growth seen yesterday continues.
The truly horrific scale of this crisis has yet to emerge, and because of the attitude the UK and USA have taken towards it the chance that we will eventually suffer the most seems high. And that will not be by chance. That will be by choice.
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[…] is killing right now. And it's going to get worse. But we will […]
The key factor for the UK in my view, not yours clearly based on this alarmist rant, is whether you run out of medical facilities. John Burn-Murdoch and his clever graphs are interesting but don’t tell us about this.
Alarmist rant?
And why the sudden interest from China?
You are displaying the classic troll-like characteristics
You began with praise (trolls often do) and four comments in are called me an alarmist
I think your time here is over
I realise that this is no time to be reopening old, or even existing, wounds, to be personalising things, or to be fighting past battles, but I do genuinely and personally worry that the government response to the virus seems to share some of the essential characteristics of the Brexit campaign – exaggeration, misrepresentation, lask of realism. Even this morning BJ speaks upliftingly about increased testing without detail and, crusially, without specifing which of the two different types of tests he is referring to, which would each indicate different strategies.
The early reliance on behavioural scientists and mathetical modellers to the virtual exclusion of conventional professional and experienced public health advice (see https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/01/absolutely-wrong-how-uk-coronavirus-test-strategy-unravelled) sounds horribly like a Dominic Cummings wheeze – an ill-informed confidence that past wisdom and practice could be overturned.
Hope you are fully recovered.
I feel recovered – but with a cold now coming….I guess the protective shields were down
I agree with your comment
My thought too though I see a different parallel. For Brexit and austerity before it, the government was very selective about the economists it cited. Usually the City gang plus the mad Patrick Minford. There were plenty of economists who disagreed.
In the same way they have been been very selective in the ‘science’ they have cited and arguably have misused it. Plenty of scientists, most scientists globally, have disagreed. I fear that it will discredit science as a whole in the way that economists have been discredited, even the good ones.
The ideological obsession, arrogance, incompetence and dishonesty of this government has to be unique in U.K. history. It is irredeemable.
And we still have no Opposition to speak of…
I do not doubt that the Government has not handled the provision of testing, ventilators or personal protective equipment well; indeed this already seems difficult to refute. It is quite likely that this is a direct function of inadequate planning, the reckless obssession with austerity , and the wanton misuse and misallocation of the nation’s resources that were available – or could be made available – to Government over the last decade (in turn consequences of the prevailing and excessive laissez-faire, neo-liberal ideology); but we knew that, or should have known that. To use an old Scottish east coast expression; we ken (know) now.
I must also confess that I do not fully understand what the epidemioligists are saying; clarity of strategy seems to me, to remain subtly elusive. I am not a statistician, and therefore must acknowledge ‘up front’ that I make no claim to special or informed insight, but I think it is fair to say that epidemiology cannot offer the same level of rigour in its use of statistics that is accessible, for example to physicists using statistical mechanics in physics; which means we cannot look for the same level of certainty in the predictions of epidimiology: therefore the command to ‘follow the science’ here does not necessarily offer the degree of certainty that people either assume is available or crave, when the think of the abstract power of ‘science’.
At the same time I do have one modest, tentative question I would ask of epidemiological statisticians to consider, at least for the longer term, when we can look at this crisis from the perspective of reflection; could it be that epidemiology has too closely embraced the formative strictures of that profoundly influential ‘small sample’ statistical innovator of the early 20th century, Ronald Fisher’s ‘5% philosophy’ of statistical significance?
“epidemiologists”. Bumbling butter-fingers….
“deaths of more than 10,000 a day are likely in little more than a week … And that will not be by chance. That will be by choice.”
Alarming indeed and if it happens the government should be held to account.
But if it does not will you apologise for spreading unnecessary alarm in a time of crisis and admit that you were wrong? For the only thing certain right now is that the government won’t be following your advice and so whatever happens won’t have been influenced by you. Largely because the government is too busy actually doing things to listen to someone who has no expertise in this area.
Of course you won’t apologise. It isn’t in your nature.
I have merely extrapolated an exponential function
It’s a reasonable thing to do
I’d love to be wrong
Why did you think I will be? Please explain, especially given that the NHS is now at near capacity?
Based on your comments you clearly have no understanding of what exponential growth means. Its fairly basic maths. Deaths are doubling roughly every 2.5 days. That suggests over 9,000 daily deaths in 10 days time. That rate will accelerate as the NHS becomes increasingly overloaded as is clearly happening – ask the doctors and nurses in hospitals, chronically short of resources.
The government has consistently pretended otherwise – its on the record.
Through complacency, ignorance, arrogance and incompetence it ignored the evidence and recommendations from the bulk of other countries and scientists. It has left lock downs until late and failed to build up testing and ventilator capacity, let alone have them in place in advance. It has starved the NHS of resource over the last decade – I suspect you will have voted for this. As a result it has ensured that the UK has one the fastest accelerating rates of infection and death in the world. Up there with Italy and Spain.
The consequences are patently predictable. All Richard has done is state the obvious. Even the government’s most sycophantic media are coming to similar conclusions – check the Mail and Telegraph – as they realise that the government has behaved disastrously – and fatally for many. And its their readers that are most at risk.
So My Watson, if you are able to set your sycophancy aside for a minute, what hard evidence or analysis do you have to offer to show that Richard is so wrong? It is the job of the opposition, commentators and media to hold the government to account. Not to cover up for them
To give some indication of the scale of concern – in one hospital near me all (I mean all) cancer operations are now cancelled
There is no ITU for cancer
People will die as a result
But coronavirus is coming first
The cancer deaths will not be recorded as form coronavirus, but they will be, indirectly
That’s how bad this is going to be – cancer no longer matters, and it kills
Ive just come off the phone – a member of my wider family is the consultant in charge of COVID response at a very large London hospital. He is brutal about the lack of resources and government response. And the consequences.
Alarm is entirely justified. And sycophant covering for a failing government is not.
Actually he’s wrong about US and UK rate if increase in deaths going up. If it was, the number of days to double would be going down but it isn’t for either country. See my visualiser at https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/ngoddard/covid19. I’ve pointed this out to him. Both countries seem to be on a very slow decrease in rate of increase of deaths, or equivalently very slow increase in days to double.
Have a look at the “Outcome of Cases (Recovery or Death) in the United Kingdom” in this link, then compare them with any other country. In the UK, 95% of confirmed cases are resulting in death rather than recovery;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/
In Germany, the death rate is less than 5% with 95% recovering;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/germany/
In Italy the death rate is 44%.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/
In Spain, the death rate is 29%;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/spain/
In China, the death rate is 4%;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/china/
In France, the death rate is 27%;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
In South Korea, the death rate is less than 3%;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/france/
In Iran, the death rate is 16%;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/iran/
You can check the death rates for many other countries via this link;
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
Why is the UK death vs recovery rate so much worse than other countries? Part of the reason is that the UK is not testing enough people so the number of cases and the number of recoveries are grossly understated but there’s another factor at work here. My strong suspicion is that medical intervention in the UK is occurring too late because of the advice to self isolate and not trouble the NHS. The number of deaths in the UK is also grossly understated as a result of the lack of testing. In summary, the UK statistics are about as much use as a chocolate teapot.
If each country is measuring differently and they are nine of these make much sense
What does make sense is that cases and death rates rise almost the same in every country in the days after their 100th case
There is almost any variance, except the UK and US are not flattening and others may be
It sounds as if things are going to get unpleasant in Sweden too https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sweden-defies-lockdown-trend-bets-citizens-acting-responsibly-n1172781
Well, COVID deaths in the UK in the last three days were 563, 569, and 684. Daily deaths are still going up, but thankfully not at a third a day, and not yet reaching 1,000 per day, so there is some cautious scope for optimism. Let’s see what the weekend brings.
I am not the only one who simply does not believe the numbers
They simply make no sense