Alan's Place

For some morbid reason I have looked at the Corvid-19 numbers every day since the Pandemic was declared and they started showing them for all countries.

I watched as China, then Italy, Spain and the United States took their turn, at the unenviable position, on top of the leader board. Obviously I also kept my eye at the UK’s position, at first going ahead of Spain and Italy, then those two and France going ahead of us and now back to us being ahead of them.

I’ve just created this little chart plotting the numbers of those countries with above two million reported cases (as of today (22/01/2021). I was curious to see how the numbers held out when you compare cases per head of population and reported deaths to number of cases.

It is plain to see that the USA is at the top and there the UK is in 5th place in terms of cases. Until you look at it from a different perspective:

Yes the USA is still up there leading the world (sorry) when we look at the numbers as a percentage of the population, but the UK goes in to 3rd place just behind France and India drops all the way down to last in this table.

I think the worst figures are the percentage of deaths. Here Italy is in 1st place with the UK in 2nd and the USA down the bottom only just ahead of Turkey. Remember we are not talking about countries with poor heath care facilities; these are countries, in the most part, with arguably some of the best heath care provision in the world.

The last week has seen the UK Corvid-19 attributed deaths per day higher (Above 1,000, and on 2 days above 1,800) than during the worst days of the initial breakout. If this does not go down over the next week, we will see the UK deaths over 100,000 by next Wednesday.

One other thing to remember is that these are ‘soft’ numbers. It is estimated that 1 in 3 people, tested positive for the virus, do not display any symptoms; which means they don’t know they have it until tested. How many people are out there who have had the virus and didn’t get tested because they didn’t know they had it (or were scared of loosing their job).
There is a formula around the number of days between hospitalisation and death that dictates whether the virus is put down as a cause which may also make the number of deaths low.

I’m also going to add my thoughts on the Vaccination. Anyone, who knows what they are talking about, will tell you that a vaccine does not give you immunity from the virus or disease. It helps your body fight it when you are infected which should, hopefully,  reduce the likelihood of any or severe illness. It also doesn’t stop you from infecting other people while your immune system is doing its job.

I don’t have many readers but if these numbers tell you anything it’s that we ain’t finished yet folks.

I promise I’ll get back to a bit of humour in my next post. 

Stay safe and keep everyone else safe by following the lockdown rules.

It was predictable; there we were nicely pushing down the R rate but still looking at between 500 – 600 new virus cases a day – the government decides to loosen up on the rains and let us mere mortals loose – it wasn’t too long before the parties were in full swing and Corvid infections were on the rise again – clearly illustrated in this chart for the UK.

Copied from the Bing Coronavirus trend in United kingdom page today (08/10/2020)

Cases have doubled (roughly) each week for the last three – That big spike on the right is were they found a bunch of tests that hadn’t been moved to the correct place so that they showed up in these statistics.

It looks to me that the politicians are scared stiff about the effect on the economy (i.e. business leaders have loud voices and it was hitting them hard) and they’re scared stiff about the outcome from the virus when it really gets out of control – you can almost see them freezing in the headlights.

I think history will tell the survivors that lifting the lookdown too early cost industry and the country more than it would had the government held it’s nerve a bit longer.

Stay Safe Folks