Updated: Don’t panic. Read this graph

https://www.travellingtabby.com/scotland-coronavirus-tracker/

Thanks to Ann Forbes for sending me this and to Contrary form reminding me! All help appreciated as I approach my 70th year (69).

This is an antidote to many of the other graphs going around which would have you packing you camper van, the Citroen Campylobacter Scenic 409, and heading for the hills.

While it too misuses a line graph to represent accumulated data as in the steep line based on how many cases there are altogether now, it does a great job of putting things into scale.

Go straight to the bottom and look at the line of New Deaths crawling along. Each one a tragedy I know but, hey, it’s not the Black Death.

Just above, in bright orange, even the accumulated total of deaths is put into perspective for us. Comparing this line with the much lager number of cases, we see evidence of how well NHS Scotland is doing to save lives.

And, this graph goes up to 1 400, but there are 5.4 MILLION people in Scotland. If we drew a graph where the vertical axis went up to 5.4 million, all of these lines would disappear.

I know there are probably many more cases of infection not recorded but the quoted 65 000 is still only 1.2% of the population. If we keep on with the social distancing, with the help of NHS Scotland, we’ll make it to the arrival of the vaccine, hurt but still strong in our preference for a more caring more democratic society and with an overpowering desire to run our own show.

We’ve seen how Boris can get it done.

32 thoughts on “Updated: Don’t panic. Read this graph”

  3. John

    I hope we may diverge further from measures and outcomes from the UK government policies. Professor Pollock has this in the BMJ.

    “As a public health physician, I am increasingly concerned about the apparent failure to implement fundamental public health measures to tackle the covid-19 outbreak—specifically, community contact tracing, clinical observation, and testing—and about what seems to be one of the knock-on effects of this failure—the blanket closure of schools.

    Tracing and clinical observation of contacts, isolation, and quarantine are the classic tools in public health to deal with infectious diseases.1 The World Health Organization reports that these have been painstakingly adopted in China in response to covid-19, with a high percentage of identified close contacts completing medical observation2; and they have been strongly recommended by WHO for other countries.

    We lack data in England—contact tracing seems to have been adopted only initially. Modelling conducted by Keeling and colleagues (the authors of one of the papers published by the government last week), indicates that it would enable the outbreak to be contained.3 “Aggregating across all individuals and under the optimistic assumption that all the contact tracing can be performed rapidly, we expect contact tracing to reduce the basic reproductive ratio from 3.11 to 0.21—enabling the outbreak to be contained,” they write. “Rapid and effective contact tracing can therefore be highly effective in the early control of covid-19, but places substantial demands on
    the local public health authorities.”

    The basic reproductive ratio, R0, is a standard epidemiological construct for understanding the epidemic potential of an infection: the higher the ratio, the more difficult it will be to control its spread.4 If R0 is less than 1, an infected person will on average transmit the infection to less than one other person, so the epidemic potential is critically reduced. Based on this modelling, if contact tracing is not being rigorously conducted now, the possibility of critically reducing the epidemic will be missed. The paper by Keeling and colleagues taken together with the New England Complex Systems Initiative critique5 raise serious questions about the validity of the model from Imperial College’s covid-19 response team,6 the apocalyptic numbers of which were used by the Westminster government to justify its approach.

    I am concerned that contact tracing, clinical observation, appropriate testing, quarantine, and isolation have not been exhaustively carried out before taking the blanket decision to close all schools. I have sent the opposition spokespeople for health at Westminster some suggested parliamentary questions that my colleague Peter Roderick and I have drafted.7

    Notably, many areas in Scotland and Wales and parts of England have low numbers of cases, so at this stage taking an area approach to vigorous and meticulous contact tracing and clinical observation and testing should make it possible to contain the disease—in Singapore, the BBC reports that the army has been called in to help with this.8 This would, in time, with other measures, allow local areas to safely consider reopening schools on a school by school basis and thus uphold each child’s right to education.

    One of the major differences in this outbreak is that it is being centrally managed rather than centrally coordinated, with insufficient foot soldiers on the ground. The pandemic is at different stages around the country. Local authorities and directors of public health in England cannot tailor responses to the local situation and are subject to central policy decisions. My colleagues in public health in local authorities say that they have received very little information. This, combined with the devastating cuts to community based communicable disease control and the changes wrought by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 (which carved out public health from health services in England and then further fragmented communicable disease control by removing it to Public Health England) have created a perfect storm.

    I urge the Scottish and Welsh governments to immediately institute a massive centrally coordinated contact tracing and clinical observation and testing programme that is based locally. They should discuss with local authorities, health boards, trade unions, public health and communicable disease control experts, and schools, colleges, and universities how this tried and tested classic approach would, with other measures, enable the blanket school closure decision to be modified in favour of a local strategy.”

    https://www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m1187

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  4. In answer to your question of where the graph came from, I am pretty sure the source is The Grouse Beater blog which has a BRILLIANT section on the Epidemic in Scotland.
    Regards,
    Colin

    Liked by 1 person

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  5. This might also be of interest to you.

    https://www.npr.org/2020/03/25/820595489/why-germanys-coronavirus-death-rate-is-far-lower-than-in-other-countries?t=1585469929685

    The number of covid 19 cases in Germany has increased sharply in recent days along with the number of deaths. Germany has not yet taken measures to lock in everyone and perhaps it may have to do that. What it has done is increase the numbers tested in response. The numbers have gone up from 120,000 per day to 500,000 per day. As a result of the early start to testing and the large numbers tested, the fatality rate in Germany is 0.5%.

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  6. Is this not from the website Ann Forbes linked to John? – it has a lot of very similar graphs.

    I’m wondering, though it’s probably too early to tell after not even a week of lock down, with the much fewer car journeys, and with people taking much greater care (so they are not a ‘burden’ on the NHS) in general, if we might get a significant reduction in deaths from accidents? I worry about the long term effects on people with cancer and other serious ailments though – will there be a delay in diagnosis and treatment? And are people that are on waiting lists to get elective surgery – for instance for hip replacement – getting the medications they need, and how long will they have to suffer in pain after the crisis is over – the backlog is going to be ginormous. But I’m also wondering if the ambulance response to heart attacks has improved (clearer roads, less other emergency calls?) – we know the triage system for saving lives has been working well, prioritising things like a heart attack that needs quicker action – so has this improved further despite all the other pressures? I’m glad I don’t work in the NHS, the difficulties just now, and for the foreseeable future, are huge. If only we could guarantee the uk government would continue to allow free movement with the EU for say at least another 5 years, we could have confidence in boosting the staff numbers we might need.

    If Scotland could gain independence after this immediate crisis – I am expecting that after a major roll-out of a vaccine, which might, could at the earliest, be at the end of this year – and immediately join EFTA (I believe an invitation is there and has been proposed as an intermediate to joining the EU) so free movement is possible, and we could boost the NHS in the short term. The main problems with this is that the SNP have not been putting in place any practicable plans in place for developing an independent nation, and we don’t know how people will react after the crisis (broad shoulders or belief that we could do better by ourselves). I am heartened that there is an SNP-common weal group, but have not seen any output as yet (simple practical plans are needed).

    I note that glasgow is a hot spot of corona virus positives, and I just went out to the shops yesterday in glasgow!! lots of social distancing going on though.

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      3. I have gone out in Glasgow every day since the crisis started – to get my shopping and to go for a cycle or a walk – and, I noticed from the start how well people were trying to keep their distance from each other. The other thing was how many people smile at each other and exchange greetings or even stop for a chat – at an appropriate distance. The lack of vehicles on the roads means that even the main roads are now a pretty comfortable cycling experience, not just because cars give me plenty of space, but because the air quality is noticeably better!

        I have stopped using phrases like SOCIAL distancing and SOCIAL isolation. I am PHYSICALLY distancing – i.e giving people plenty of room – but I am smiling at and greeting more people, because SOCIAL contact is essential for us.

        The number of local self-help groups that have sprung up is very heartening. Every ward in the city of Glasgow has established several local groups. This is a time when the SOCIAL as pect of SOCIAL MEDIA has come into its own as a positive force. The mainstream media focus on the few incidents of antisocial behaviour – such as a boy in Banchory wilfully coughing in a woman’s face – and invite us to generalise this. They have a baleful misanthropic view of the human race. They want us to be socially distant because they fear collective action.

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      4. That’s true Alasdair, all very true. Folk were distancing themselves right from the start – I hadn’t been to a big shop for a week so it’s just more organised and coordinated, but walking about and going to the park is all very civilised – and you are right to say *physically* distancing, folk are still saying hello and smiling. And yes there seems to be tons of things going on to help people – Maryhill has introduced Meals on Wheels (remember that?!) to folk that are in self isolation – just one example

        https://mobile.twitter.com/GradySNP/status/1243869859722735618

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    1. Interesting, and related, piece from Prof Murphy – Boris is spending money on sending out letters to blame us if things get bad:

      https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2020/03/29/boris-johnson-is-spending-5-8-million-to-get-his-coronavirus-excuses-in-early/

      Government response has been extremely poor, the blame lays at their feet, and more people need to start criticising them and realise that we can push government into behaving better, if we stop believing BBC and MSM and voice concerns collectively. Their shit governance has gone too far. People have responded well, and are doing all the right things, wouldn’t it be nice to have more certainty and assurance from those that are meant to be in charge? The stress is doing nothing good for our health.

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  8. This is a typical graph from the Bing search engine Coronavirus update link.
    U.K. stats are given for each constituent part of the U.K. with data from respective NHS sources.
    The only data not given is where the 140 who have fully recovered come from.

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  9. The Medical Director of NHS England,Ms Harries, has stated that “social distancing” is the way to stop the transmission of covid 19.That view is contradicted by other public health professionals in England and by all those who have worked for WHO.

    Here is a tweet on the subject fromAnthony Costello who has worked for WHO.

    “‘Stopping transmission is simple” said Med Director of NHS England. Social distancing is the answer. Er…No. It’s one element of a strategy that includes testing, tracing + quarantining contacts, protecting health workers, community surveillance and mobile IT.”

    It is not as if NHS England is ignorant of what Mr Costello says.See this, please.

    https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spi-m-publish-updated-modelling-summary

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  11. More from Mr Costello

    “China and S. Korea suppressed this phase of the epidemic with #COVID death rates of 57 and 185/mn. The UK is early on in the epidemic with a death rate of 252/m. If we ‘do well’ to keep to 20,000 deaths, we shall have a rate of 5000/m. Might our science/medical advice be wrong?”
    4:50 PM · Mar 28, 2020·Twitter Web App

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  12. And I have to agree with this tweet. Why oh why are people so complacent and accepting of rubbish politicians?!

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  13. Interestingly, according to NHS England’s Medical Director, the only action that can halt the spread, social distancing, is the only action they can have no control over. So only the people are to blame

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      1. You forgot the Chinese.
        ‘Asked on BBC One’s Andrew Marr show why Britain did not have sufficient testing, despite the first case in China being known about in December, Gove said: …“It was the case … [that] the first case of coronavirus in China was established in December of last year, but it was also the case that some of the reporting from China was not clear about the scale, the nature, the infectiousness of this.”’
        Did Marr pull him up on the fact that even if he was correct we still had 2 months to prepare and before that years of warnings in which not only did the UK not prepare but actually conspired in numerous crucial ways to prepare less?

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    2. I am pretty sure the capitalist wet dream is that politics becomes a word that is only about money. And care for people and the environment becomes charity. Tories love food banks and hate it when people like John point out death rates.
      During the worst crises when death occurs suddenly political debate becomes taboo. We sold a weird one there.
      But just imagine if Scotland was performing worse than England? Moronson jumped on that bandwagon based on a lie so imagine if it were true.
      Still we got to get that graph line at a lower angle than England not just at lower parallel. Hopefully we will see some changes in next week and can flatten that curve!

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  14. Thanks for that website!

    Now i know that Gove will today be updating his statement to England doubling its cases every 2 to 3 days from as he very correctly said yesterday doubling every 3 to 4 days.
    Happy birthyear John on your 17 to 70th year!

    Course he could lose the e-mail.

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  15. We are very unlikely to see a drop in new cases for a couple of weeks from the start of physical distancing implementation.
    The infection rate of 3 with 10 levels of contact means one person can infect 59,000 people.
    So we must assumed that there are huge numbers of infected people in the community. Advice seems to be now that it takes a week to show symptoms (although some never do) although in China they were talking about a 2 week quarantine that seems to be outdated. Either way all those infected people will be staying at home and again infecting their household so that may take another week to show and during those 2 weeks numbers will increase, possibly dramatically. That seem logical and if that were all there was to it the numbers should then afterwords, plummet.
    In Iceland they found through mass testing that half of those who tested positive had no symptoms but even then the above should be true as long as people with no symptoms are not complacent. That might be a big ask but one complacent person would have to find 3 complacent people to give it to and on and on.
    https://english.alarabiya.net/en/features/2020/03/25/Coronavirus-Iceland-s-mass-testing-finds-half-of-carriers-show-no-symptoms
    Where are those mass test kits which we told would be days away not weeks?

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    1. It’s astonishing the UK government has ignored all evidence and advice, this from the above article:

      “The key to South Korea’s success has been speed and an early push toward mass testing, rigorous contact tracing, and mandatory quarantine for anyone near a carrier of the virus. The country, with a population of 51 million, tests more than 20,000 people a day at more than 600 testing sites nationwide, while integrating apps that not only track individuals if they have tested positive, but also warn them if they might have been exposed to a known case.”

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