5 ms·

It had no real affect on R, you can see it in the data. R shot up only during two events. Schools opening and Universities opening, and you can see this clearl

It had no real affect on R, you can see it in the data. R shot up only during two events. Schools opening and Universities opening, and you can see this clearly on this graph someone else linked: https://reproduction.live/world/GB https://reproduction.live/world/GB I can understand schools opening, but the devastating double peak when universities opened (Freshers week and then the 2nd/3rd years the week after) was totally avoidable. There is minor peak at the end of August, but that is in my opinion actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, as otherwise it would have been a month long peak.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
Correlation is not causation. Because of the UK's testing policies around only testing symptomatic individuals, it's very difficult to answer questions like this effectively. See here for example, where it suggests that restaurants are one of the highest risk activities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3
- mattmanser 6y ago
  Three peaks which line up perfectly with three national level mixing events? That happened in all regions round the country? Bullshit. If you want to play with simulations that clearly do not reflect real life, go ahead, but to me the Real World data is presently showing opening unis killed 10,000s people. And it makes sense too. Eat out to help out you stayed in your local area. The time periods were short, often outside, and many of the people mixing were already exposed to each other. Opening universities meant 100,000s of people moved around the country, met in big groups during induction, lots of mixing of new geographic regions. The time periods were long, often inside, and all the people mixing had never been exposed to each other.
  - rwmj 6y ago
    All the students are going to be sent home soon to visit their old folks at Christmas, what could possibly go wrong?
    - mattmanser 6y ago
      Yes, an absolute disaster and they're going to blame it on Xmas instead of the actual cause, sending the students home. And then, they're going to let them go back again 2nd week of January :'(. And not a single newspaper is reporting about it. The media should be shouting from the rooftops day after day that the 2nd wave was caused entirely by universities reopening and yet instead they regurgitate these releases from ONS blindly. We could have reopened schools and accepted the small increase in actual cases, kept unis online only. But by reopening schools and universities, with the two events so close to each other they compounded and caused the 2nd wave. As a small ray of hope, I know people who work in both the unis here in Notts and they're taking it very seriously and doing mass testing before they send them home, as well as staggering them being sent back. Hopefully other unis are too. I've heard that one of the reasons Notts infection rate shot up so high compared to nationwide is because Nottingham University were aggressively contact testing with their own labs and found many more asymptomatic cases than the national government's shambolic track and trace system is presently achieving.
      - bencollier49 6y ago
        That's interesting - your final paragraph implies that there's a perverse incentive for local authorities to discourage testing to avoid being locked down..
      - im3w1l 6y ago
        Thats really interesting, but I dont see how staggering helps. Seems better to use entry/exit quarantine. Like, online learning during the first week and last week of the semester.
        mattmanser 6y ago
        Staggering helps a bit as it will mean some people who were asymptomatic become symptomatic before they go home, and they can't realistically police a quarantine of something like 60,000 - 80,000 students, of which something like 70% live off campus. I'm not sure of the exact figures, I think Nottingham Uni has like 45k students and Nottingham Trent has about 25k. The other thing is that the official "Nottingham City" boundary is actually quite small and has only 320k residents and I'd happily bet at least £50 that the official government figures don't include the students as residents which is why Nottingham has such a high "cases per 100,000" because the true population count is something like 25% higher than the the "official" one, artificially inflating the proportional cases count.
  - magnostherobot 6y ago
    "Fresher's flu" is the name given to the phenomenon of nearly everyone at uni getting a cold when returning for the new academic semester; everyone congregating from across the country/planet brings their own strain and gives it to everyone else. We know that this happens every year, so we knew that it would happen this year too.
- cameronh90 6y ago
  We actually have an ONS-run surveillance program where they test you every week. I know because I'm in it.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    Could you look the details? How many people, where they are, what the project is called so we can see the project stats?
    - spzb 6y ago
      This is the ONS survey methodology : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... And this is the most recent set of data : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/26november2020#covid-19-infection-survey-data https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
      - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
        Thanks, appreciated.
- sampo 6y ago
  > Correlation is not causation. The main problem in the "Western approach" to the pandemy has been the logic: The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist. All your inputs are uncertain information to varying degrees, yet you still have to decide something. And the correct strategy is not to sit put and decide nothing. http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/trisha-greenhalgh-will-evidence-based-medicine-survive-covid-19 http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/trisha-greenhalgh-wil...
  - tremon 6y ago
    This sums up the climate change policies as well.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    > The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist. There's a great article on the BBC news homepage fighting this effect now about Vitamin D. The TL;DR is the government says "Vitamin D cannot be said to help coronavirus infections, but we strongly recommend everyone take vitamin D supplements, and it's so important we'll even give them out for free"
riffraff 6y ago
> actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, isn't this alternatively of a case of holiday makers infecting each others in droves while vacationing in all the same places in Spain? R was lower in Spain in July and August than in the UK.
- rienbdj 6y ago
  Airports and flights mix people from many different regions in close proximity.
cm2187 6y ago
Schools and universities open in fall, respiratory diseases usually come back in fall. Doesn't mean they are related. This virus looks fairly seasonal.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago

Correlation is not causation. Because of the UK's testing policies around only testing symptomatic individuals, it's very difficult to answer questions like this effectively. See here for example, where it suggests that restaurants are one of the highest risk activities: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2923-3

mattmanser 6y ago
Three peaks which line up perfectly with three national level mixing events? That happened in all regions round the country? Bullshit. If you want to play with simulations that clearly do not reflect real life, go ahead, but to me the Real World data is presently showing opening unis killed 10,000s people. And it makes sense too. Eat out to help out you stayed in your local area. The time periods were short, often outside, and many of the people mixing were already exposed to each other. Opening universities meant 100,000s of people moved around the country, met in big groups during induction, lots of mixing of new geographic regions. The time periods were long, often inside, and all the people mixing had never been exposed to each other.
- rwmj 6y ago
  All the students are going to be sent home soon to visit their old folks at Christmas, what could possibly go wrong?
  - mattmanser 6y ago
    Yes, an absolute disaster and they're going to blame it on Xmas instead of the actual cause, sending the students home. And then, they're going to let them go back again 2nd week of January :'(. And not a single newspaper is reporting about it. The media should be shouting from the rooftops day after day that the 2nd wave was caused entirely by universities reopening and yet instead they regurgitate these releases from ONS blindly. We could have reopened schools and accepted the small increase in actual cases, kept unis online only. But by reopening schools and universities, with the two events so close to each other they compounded and caused the 2nd wave. As a small ray of hope, I know people who work in both the unis here in Notts and they're taking it very seriously and doing mass testing before they send them home, as well as staggering them being sent back. Hopefully other unis are too. I've heard that one of the reasons Notts infection rate shot up so high compared to nationwide is because Nottingham University were aggressively contact testing with their own labs and found many more asymptomatic cases than the national government's shambolic track and trace system is presently achieving.
    - bencollier49 6y ago
      That's interesting - your final paragraph implies that there's a perverse incentive for local authorities to discourage testing to avoid being locked down..
    - im3w1l 6y ago
      Thats really interesting, but I dont see how staggering helps. Seems better to use entry/exit quarantine. Like, online learning during the first week and last week of the semester.
      - mattmanser 6y ago
        Staggering helps a bit as it will mean some people who were asymptomatic become symptomatic before they go home, and they can't realistically police a quarantine of something like 60,000 - 80,000 students, of which something like 70% live off campus. I'm not sure of the exact figures, I think Nottingham Uni has like 45k students and Nottingham Trent has about 25k. The other thing is that the official "Nottingham City" boundary is actually quite small and has only 320k residents and I'd happily bet at least £50 that the official government figures don't include the students as residents which is why Nottingham has such a high "cases per 100,000" because the true population count is something like 25% higher than the the "official" one, artificially inflating the proportional cases count.
- magnostherobot 6y ago
  "Fresher's flu" is the name given to the phenomenon of nearly everyone at uni getting a cold when returning for the new academic semester; everyone congregating from across the country/planet brings their own strain and gives it to everyone else. We know that this happens every year, so we knew that it would happen this year too.
cameronh90 6y ago
We actually have an ONS-run surveillance program where they test you every week. I know because I'm in it.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  Could you look the details? How many people, where they are, what the project is called so we can see the project stats?
  - spzb 6y ago
    This is the ONS survey methodology : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/methodologies/covid19infectionsurveypilotmethodsandfurtherinformation https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... And this is the most recent set of data : https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/coronaviruscovid19infectionsurveypilot/26november2020#covid-19-infection-survey-data https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
    - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
      Thanks, appreciated.
sampo 6y ago
> Correlation is not causation. The main problem in the "Western approach" to the pandemy has been the logic: The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist. All your inputs are uncertain information to varying degrees, yet you still have to decide something. And the correct strategy is not to sit put and decide nothing. http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/trisha-greenhalgh-will-evidence-based-medicine-survive-covid-19 http://bostonreview.net/science-nature/trisha-greenhalgh-wil...
- tremon 6y ago
  This sums up the climate change policies as well.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  > The effect has not been rigorously proven ⇒ The effect does not exist. There's a great article on the BBC news homepage fighting this effect now about Vitamin D. The TL;DR is the government says "Vitamin D cannot be said to help coronavirus infections, but we strongly recommend everyone take vitamin D supplements, and it's so important we'll even give them out for free"

riffraff 6y ago

> actually holiday makers returning from infection ravaged Spain, isn't this alternatively of a case of holiday makers infecting each others in droves while vacationing in all the same places in Spain? R was lower in Spain in July and August than in the UK.

rienbdj 6y ago
Airports and flights mix people from many different regions in close proximity.

cm2187 6y ago

Schools and universities open in fall, respiratory diseases usually come back in fall. Doesn't mean they are related. This virus looks fairly seasonal.