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    Belgium is the 35th country to report more than 100,000 cases and has recorded 9,944 deaths. It's death rate remains high, at 857 deaths per million population, probably still affected by the fact that Belgium reports suspected Covid-19 deaths as well as confirmed cases.

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      Blended learning is the mixture of face to face and online teaching

      It's a pre Covid term, and since Covid has been used to describe different kinds of activities in different countries and contexts from the situation ad hoc describes to lots of online classes and use of virtual learning environments.



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        Originally posted by ad hoc View Post
        What's being meant by blended learning here? Part face to face, part online? Or something else? My daughter is at school every other week and doing homework (effectively) during the off weeks. That's not my understanding of blended learning but I am wondering if that's what is being implied here
        This pretty much. Half in school, the other being online and homework mix.

        That's my understanding. Especially as many children don't have Internet access.

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          The US virus mortality rate now exceeds that of the UK, a high bar effortlessly cleared.

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            I know I posted this already, but someone needs to show this analysis to those compliant journalists above...

            https://twitter.com/ReicherStephen/status/1306895400075485189

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              Originally posted by Nocturnal Submission View Post
              The US virus mortality rate now exceeds that of the UK, a high bar effortlessly cleared.
              Yep, 615 per million for the USA, 614 per million for the UK.

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                Mexico has reported more than 1,000 new deaths in the last two days.

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                  Why does this Carl Heneghan guy keep getting airtime to push his herd immunity views? I read an awful lot of Covid scientists on twitter, and he is very much an outlier, however much he goes on about being "evidence based".

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                    Originally posted by Jimski View Post
                    Why does this Carl Heneghan guy keep getting airtime to push his herd immunity views? I read an awful lot of Covid scientists on twitter, and he is very much an outlier, however much he goes on about being "evidence based".
                    because it's in the interest of the governement.

                    (ditto not reporting the ONS evidence Reicher has just retweeted)

                    Stephen Reicher was originally on the SAGE committee but resigned when his advice was ignored and it was evident what a farce it was.

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                      Qatar has the highest confirmed rate of infection in the world at 43,858 cases per million population, or 4.39% of the population confirmed to have been infected. Qatar has a pretty good healthcare system and was possibly better prepared due to previous experience with MERS. It has carried out lots of tests and has a relatively low death rate (just 74 deaths per million population, only 209 deaths in total). The outbreak has been brought under control through an early lockdown (schools and universities closed on May 9th, nearly two weeks before the UK) and simple, strict guidelines that have never been implemented in the UK (mandatory mask wearing in all public places, at one point occupancy of any moving vehicle was restricted to two people, for example).

                      But still, fewer than 5% of the population has been confirmed to have been infected so far. If we assume that Qatar captured all existing cases, then letting the virus run through the remaining 95% of the country would lead to a further 4,180 deaths. Qatar only has a population of under 3 million people. If the same death rate was applied to the UK, we'd be looking at a total of about 100,000 deaths.

                      Though, to be fair, I can see certain UK politicians looking at those numbers and saying, hmm, 100,000 deaths, mostly old people, we can handle that, let's just take it on the chin.

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                        A question on the curfew thing, of pubs closing at 10pm. Won't that just make the people who normally come out at 9 and drink from 9-11 come out at 8 instead, and drink from 8-10? Thereby coming into contact with more people?

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                          Australia seems to have got its second wave under control again. Active cases have dropped from nearly 9,000 to just over 2,000. New deaths have been lower than 10 per day for the last 10 days (down from a high of 59 deaths on September 4th).

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                            The UK is one of the only countries in the world that doesn't report an active case number, so it's hard to tell how many people currently have Covid-19 here.

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                              New cases in Australia have also dropped from a high of 721 on July 30th to just 13 yesterday.

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                                One of the reasons that we're seeing a second wave in the UK is because 1,000 new cases per day was treated as a success, instead of still an alarmingly high number that should have been brought down further.

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                                  Originally posted by pebblethefish View Post
                                  A question on the curfew thing, of pubs closing at 10pm. Won't that just make the people who normally come out at 9 and drink from 9-11 come out at 8 instead, and drink from 8-10? Thereby coming into contact with more people?
                                  Or, they'll just spill out onto the streets and keep drinking stuff from home.

                                  It's almost like the 10pm curfew isn't a well thought out policy.

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                                    Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post

                                    Or, they'll just spill out onto the streets and keep drinking stuff from home.

                                    It's almost like the 10pm curfew isn't a well thought out policy.
                                    The virus only enters pubs after 10pm - hadn't you heard?

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                                      Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post
                                      27 deaths in the UK today. 118 deaths in the last week. The previous week had 77 deaths.
                                      With another 27 deaths yesterday, the week on week trend is now even worse. 136 deaths this week vs 74 the week before.

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                                        Originally posted by Evariste Euler Gauss View Post
                                        Considering the data suppression in Turkey, Iran (by tens of thousands of deaths), Turkmenistan and god knows where else, it seems that the true global death toll from COVID is almost certainly already well over a million.
                                        Actual death toll is probably nearer 2 million by now. While hunting around for excess deaths data, I found this historical BBC article which says that the UK had 51,804 official Covid-19 deaths by 5th June 2020, plus 12,729 other excess deaths not directly attributed to Covid-19.
                                        https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/world-53073046

                                        Whereas now, the official Covid-19 death toll in the UK is only 41,759.

                                        So, it's not only Turkey, Iran, Turkmenistan, etc that are undercounting. I'd say most countries apart from Belgium are undercounting, some more deliberately than others.

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                                          More on how seriously Australia is taking this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-54223977

                                          "Melbourne has started to ease its restrictions, saying it will lift the curfew and exercise limits on 26 October if there are fewer than five new cases per day." (My emphasis).

                                          That's a sensible approach. Not "R is lower than 1 so even though we're still recording over a thousand new cases a day, we'll open everything up and actively encourage people to go to restaurants and offices".

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                                            Whenever my kids go back to school physically, the proposal is to do what's called the blended model upthread, in my school district it's called "Paired-Days Hybrid Learning Model", which is probably a bit more descriptive but doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
                                            What it is is that the kids get 2 days per week of in class learning, and 3 days of at home learning, so four days a week half the school is present on campus. It's not clear to me how exactly this will work, so far the district seems to have approached things in a sensible manner so I'm optimistic that it won't be a complete disaster.

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                                              Today I caught up with some friends who spend winter in their holiday home in France. Instead of coming back in March they came back in mid-August instead. They filled out all the covid-19 forms and handed them to UK Border Force when they drove out of Eurotunnel so they knew where they would be for their two weeks self isolation. UK Border Force told them they didn't want the forms and they were an issue between them (my friends) and the British government. It is beyond belief!

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                                                Originally posted by Balderdasha View Post

                                                Actual death toll is probably nearer 2 million by now. While hunting around for excess deaths data, I found this historical BBC article which says that the UK had 51,804

                                                Whereas now, the official Covid-19 death toll in the UK is only 41,759.
                                                The UK changed the definition of a covid 19 death from being anyone who has died and has tested positive to testing positive within the last 28 days. The reason for this is because people were having covid 19 recovering and then dying of other causes e.g. heart attack, car crash etc. To be a road traffic fatality in the UK you have to die within 30 days of the collision and when the EU standardised the definition of a road traffic fatality 20 years ago, they used the 30 days rule. In France you had to die within 6 days of the collision and in Spain you had to be declared dead at the side of the road.

                                                They may be more reductions as they go through and start sorting out which deaths were actually caused by covid-19 and those where it happened to be present. This happens with road traffic statistics where if you suffer a heart attack and crash your car it goes down as natural causes, but if you crash your car and then have a heart attack and die this goes down as a road traffic fatality. In other words the heart attack was caused by the collision.

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                                                  396 cases in Ireland today (no deaths), of which 241 were in Dublin. 36 in Cork, 19 in Donegal, 12 in Galway, 11 Meath, 11 Kildare, 9 Monaghan, 7 Louth, 6 each in Clare, Offaly and Waterford, 5 in Wicklow and 27 across 11 counties.

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                                                    Originally posted by Paul S View Post

                                                    The UK changed the definition of a covid 19 death from being anyone who has died and has tested positive to testing positive within the last 28 days. The reason for this is because people were having covid 19 recovering and then dying of other causes e.g. heart attack, car crash etc. To be a road traffic fatality in the UK you have to die within 30 days of the collision and when the EU standardised the definition of a road traffic fatality 20 years ago, they used the 30 days rule. In France you had to die within 6 days of the collision and in Spain you had to be declared dead at the side of the road.

                                                    They may be more reductions as they go through and start sorting out which deaths were actually caused by covid-19 and those where it happened to be present. This happens with road traffic statistics where if you suffer a heart attack and crash your car it goes down as natural causes, but if you crash your car and then have a heart attack and die this goes down as a road traffic fatality. In other words the heart attack was caused by the collision.
                                                    Depends on what you mean by the UK. The government changed the rules in that way, but the ONS uses a different measure, which has deaths at over 50 thousand. And the excess deaths are over 60 thousand - that's the usual way of attributing deaths from epidemics, so I don't see why there should be an exception here.

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