Coronavirus
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More importantly, the drop in demand for some products would mean that they would be an increased reserve stock, not a glut on the market creating a drop in prices.
Excess fresh milk turned into milk powder. Never had powdered eggs but I do recall they had it during WW2 rationing.
Deep freezing much of the other food produce.
The farming community would later have the opportunity for longer leisure and less work.
Today we see Germany making migrant deals to bring Romanians to pick their harvest, chartering special flights for them.
In the UK those furloughed workers are volunteering to become pickers too. (But I wonder just how many will stay the pace once they discover the back-breaking toil and how martinet field overseers can be)
Another article to read during your enforced lockdown
There is a shortage of eggs because they are also using it to experiment with the new vaccine, but a new study has shown that the Coronavirus can not mutate inside a chicken eggs like others flu an influenza
By week 13 2020
which ends 27<sup>th</sup> march
According to UK office of national statistics
week 13 2020 = 150,017 have died
including 642, by then , covid deaths .
By week 13 of 2018 which ends 30<sup>th</sup> march
Week 13 2018 = 164,625 had died.
This high figure was generally attributed to an influenza outbreak.
[Which actually seemed to run on a bit for another 3 weeks or so
if elevated deaths above the normal for that time of year is any indication.]
Anyway by this time in 2018 14,500 more people than now had died ; because of a influenza outbreak.
As covid in the UK does look like peaking
[ using say South Korean data and time frame as a model]
And 7000 have died with it to date.
It is highly unlikely that the high 2018 [influenza ] annual UK deaths is going to be exceeded this year.
There was no lockdown in 2018 and who even remembers the flu epidemic?
The ONS data is only available up to week 13. and in that week only 539 people suspected of covid 19 infection died.
And although there is a detailed breakdown etc there were too few deaths by that week to make any firm conclusions apart from perhaps the deaths were a little bit high for that time of year.
And that about 85% of covid deaths were amongst the over 65’s, which is typical from other national datasets.
The ONS are going to include a more detailed breakdown of associated causes of death very soon.
[personal communication]
There is controversy over the encouragement of doctors etc to mention covid on death certificates even when there is uncertainty over it being a cause of death or even a significant contributor.
It is highly likely that there will be another waves of lockdown deaths later that will impact the annual death data.
Eg
Suicides , the annual rate is about 5000 I think , data is often quite delayed. Although there are already reports of spikes in suicide data in the US. They estimate that there are about 70,000 deaths of despair per year in the US [ suicide and drug overdose].
Delayed and postponed necessary medical treatment and delayed early diagnosis
eg cancer treatment
will produce premature deaths.
The NHS will continue to be overloaded for sometime due to backlog.
After the end of lockdown.
And that will continue to cause further deaths.
To say nothing of stuff like delayed hip replacements.
It will obviously much worse in the US as millions more unemployed workers will no longer be able to afford basic medical care for themselves or their family.
The affects on mental health and just general misery of and economic collapse will be incalculable.
And probable incomprehensible to people who have no direct experience of it.
Sweden had no lockdown.
And appears to have almost got through the worst of it without any serious problems.
Just to let you all know, I’m not on lockdown but there is one operating in the capital and the main tourist cities and that resulted in an exodus of work-force back to their home-towns and villages – probably leading to the spread of COVID-19 to mostly unaffected regions
Many provinces have imposed sale of alcohol bans
I am subject to a nightly curfew but I rarely socialised in the evening anyway.
The government is rolling out a scheme to pay about 100 pounds a month to informal workers.
Lets look at the stats you use in a bit more depth
According to UK office of national statistics
week 13 2020 = 150,017 have died
including 642, by then , covid deaths .
By week 13 of 2018 which ends 30<sup>th</sup> march
Week 13 2018 = 164,625 had died.
This high figure was generally attributed to an influenza outbreak.
[Which actually seemed to run on a bit for another 3 weeks or so
if elevated deaths above the normal for that time of year is any indication.]
So far so good
Anyway by this time in 2018 14,500 more people than now had died ; because of a influenza outbreak.
Actually, no. Those are the figures for reporting week 13, which if you look at the ONS site, clearly shows that these were the figures which were extrapolated at the a later date from data that came in at a much later date, when all causes of death were known.
This is not the case now, all deaths have not been reported and analysed at this point, it will be many months before this is complete. Also as your figures only refer to the deaths at week 13, including Covid deaths of 642, the two figures are in no way comparable. There have been an addtional nearly 7,500 Covide deaths since this point
As you say in your stats the flu season in 2018, had by this time produced approximately 14,500 extra deaths. However the flu season was at its peak in week one of 2018, having followed on from the 2017 late flue season peak figures, and by week 13 was pretty close to the end of its impact. Even so that gives a figure of about 1,000 extra deaths per week due to flu in 2018. We are currently experiencing a death rate of at the very least 5,250 per week, as reported in government figures, however that does not include the hundreds, possible thousands of non hospital deaths (deaths in care homes, etc.). To go back to the point I made earlier, when all deaths from Covid 19 are reckoned, ususally weeks and months later, the actual figures are likely to be very much higher.
So where does this leave us in the comparison of flu deaths and Covid 19 deaths. Well we are probably reaching the same figures now as we had for the flu season in 2018, however that has been reached when all of the efforts about social distancing, lockdown, etc. have taken place. Ask yourself this, what would the death rate be like if that HADN’T TAKEN PLACE?
You go on to say
As covid in the UK does look like peaking
Even the most optomistic epidemiologists are talking about a peak being at least 2 weeks away, so what makes you think it is peaking now?
I happy to bet you any sum of money that the death rate in the UK will continue to rise further and that the number of additional deaths is higher than 30,000
[ using say South Korean data and time frame as a model]
The S Korean time frame is absolutely incoparable with the UK outbreak, as the detection and isolation of cases in S Korea was incomparable to the UK situation, the mass testing of South Korean citizens was many, many times higher than the UK and the lockdown and stringency of measures taken by the S Koreans were much more far reaching and earlier than the UK. In fact it looks likely that the S Korean outbreak was in comparison very small, however becasue of the % of tests per head of population, they arrived at much higher figures than that of say Western Europe, where even the most developed testing system in Germany is estimated to have not identified 87% of those infected with the virus.
The ONS data is only available up to week 13. and in that week only 539 people suspected of covid 19 infection died.
And although there is a detailed breakdown etc, there were too few deaths by that week to make any firm conclusions
So why are you trying to make them?
It is perfectly clear that Covid outbreak is in no way comparable to the flu epidemic of 2018. You ask how many people remember the Flu outbreak of 2018, well I remember it well, my mother died in it. But what I don’t remember is that there was any shortage of critical care beds in the ward she was on, I don’t remember doctors and nurses being so vulnerable that they were wearing high level PPE wherever possible, I have no recollection of Doctors, Nurses and Care Staff dying of Flu at that time. Neither do I recall a national lock down to slow down the rapid, out of control spread of flu, in 2018. I do however remember being able to be with her in the hospital as she died, something that would not be possible with Covid 19.
As to the Swedish approach, last week a petition signed by more than 2,000 doctors, scientists, and professors calling on the Swedish government to tighten restrictions and enforce strict containment measures.
“We’re not testing enough, we’re not tracking, we’re not isolating enough – we’ve let the virus loose,” said Cecilia Soderberg-Naucler, a professor at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. “They are leading us to catastrophe.”
I have more faith in professor Soderberg-Naucler’s understanding of the situation, than I have of yours.
missing links
There was nothing disingenuous about comparing the first 13 weeks of 2018 to the first 13 of 2020.
As you say 2017-2018 influenza out break was at its peak around December as usual.
The ONS data was in yearly week one to week 52 spreadsheet type files.
Influenza outbreaks in the UK are supposed to kill 8000 to 30,000 so an extra 14,000 for a 3 month period of the end of a bad outbreak is to be expected.
Post event data correction is good but there is no evidence of anything dramatic here.
Just grumblings from the ONS that 10-15% of death data comes in too late eg more than 2 weeks after the event.
Nobody knows how many of the 5-7000 people who are dying with covid are dying from it.
Nobody, I asked ONS by email I was amazed I sent the email a 8pm got a reply by 10 am next day. I thought they would be busy.
Was planning to use a friend to ask who works on NHS databases and has an NHS email address in the “Manchester area” ; she provides stats to ONS.
She doesn’t believe it either and wants to put her name to a petition.
Doctors or groups of doctors of say 5 in intensive care units having filled out 30 covid death certificates might have and idea now?
We will have a better idea on the 14 april when the next set of UK ONS data comes out.
I really do not know what to expect.
As to peaks
if you look at china one and the italy one they are as a pattern similar
The peak after 3-4 weeks of a start and begin to tail off.
Do it youself!
look to the histograms at the end.
And then uk
Actually that pattern is typical of infectious or fast spreading coronavirus.
It reminds me of that Rockerfeller University guy grinding his teeth.
“ don’t ask me I am a scientist not a psychiatrist”
And bugs and nature dig Gaussian distributions
although it looks more like Poisson to me?
As to its fatality or it case fatality rate over the last 10 days or so it is being revised down even by the protagonists the Imperial college London.
It is now believed by all that its infectiousness or how fast it spreads is far greater than originally believed.
R0 and Rt numbers etc.
What that means is that as they know roughly when it started in any location they can extrapolate how many had actually had had it at any point in time.
These are real ballpark figures but that is ok;
they discovered nuclear fusion by using a black bucket of water and a thermometer left in the sun.
Having a guesstimate of how many people died “from” it at that point in time gives you fatality rate.
Hence Neil Fergusson of imperial college London who stampeded the herd has rolled back from 500,000 to 250,000 and to 20,000.
Two thirds of which would of died anyway according to him.
There was a scoffing article in the new scientist on that around 25 march.
The Oxford University team of Sunitra Gupta believes as of 10 days ago said
up to 68% of people had already had it.
There is bad blood there that hit the headlines; what a bunch of shits that work on the imperial team!
This is so fast;talking about stuff at peer review stage!
I have read the abstract.
Of course to do this properly you have to test a large random sample for covid to see how many people had it.
Iceland did it early on.
This corona virus Pandemic data has to be looked at with caution as it is heavily skewed by increasing testing amongst other things.
And that test results are 2-4 days late.
The apparently long incubation time etc etc it is highly unlikely any positive affect of lockdown will appear for another couple of weeks.
The false positive potential of RT-PCR testing you need clean working practices.
That big spike in the china data oops.
I have used it in the past for out sourced testing to pick up mandarin in orange juice and to identify rogue mannitol producing bugs from plant biofilm contamination.
So I can talk the talk even if I don’t do that shit myself.
But it is general to analysis, the test is very sensitive and you have calibration samples sitting around on the lab bench ; who hasn’t done it?
The Swedes , sensible people, have had no lockdown and have peaked and stabilised despite ramped up testing “seek and you shall find”.
In the table they have also sensible used a 7 day moving average to iron out statistical noise.
They are about 4 weeks into it.
7 day moving average deaths and case started to flatten on 5/4.
I believe at the moment, now, that this is highly infectious or very fast spreading and it is killing old and vulnerable people.
I suspect that there will be an extraordinary spike in deaths next week in the ONS UK data.
And that spike will be historically exceptional for April.
And it will be picked up and maybe the next outside the 2Z score or 5% probability of statistical noise or whatever.
Nobody, nobody knows how many of that 5 or 7 thousand in the UK actually died of covid.
Nobody knows how many people are dying of Covid without anyone knowing about it.
But they will be added to next weeks ONS data.
If this covid had started in September or October like the 2017-18 flu it could have equalled it and claimed 30K; I really didn’t and haven’t looked at the late 2017 data just assumed it would be ramping up to a peak at the beginning of 2018.
It is a bit disingenuous using 2018 as it was a bad once in 10 years one and 2019 was fairly good and 2020 started well.
This is the problem as you can’t speak rationally without being accused of being nazi Malthusian.
From 31 March 2020 these figures also show the number of deaths involving coronavirus (COVID-19), based on any mention of COVID-19 on the death certificate.
It is undoubtedly very dangerous for very ill old people.
However my employer across sever manufacturing sites employs 7000 people.
HR informed me yesterday that we had had no covid fatalities.
Yes I know Flu isn’t nice.
Last year around February I had to go into hospital for the first time in 30 years and I wasn’t happy about it as people die in hospitals.
They wanted to keep me in there for a couple of days for observation as things were quiet.
I was amazed I expected to be left sleeping on a corridor.
There was a really nasty influenza virus lurking around at the time but it wasn’t very infectious.
I got it there though and ended up much more ill than I went in.
They tested me after I got worse rather than better.
And was whisked out of the ward I was in to an isolation ward at 4am in the morning as the on site RT-PCR lab, I think it could have been serological, night shift picked it up.
It almost killed me.
Another perverse effect the pandemic and necessary social distancing is having under capitalism — they’ve started pouring milk down the drain again as they always do when production exceeds paying demand.
Of course this time it’s because paying demand has suddenly fallen rather than through overproduction but the reason given is still the same— to protect the price (something that wouldn’t be necessary had this pandemic happened in socialism — other uses could be found for the temporary excess supply).
“Removing the excess distressed milk from the marketplace will help to stabilise the current spot price without causing long-term market distortion.“
Sent from my iPhonePut it this way Dave, can you point to any week in the last 40 years where flu has been recorded as a cause of death on nearly 5,600 death certificares in any single week (rough figures this week) and can you then point to another single week where more than 7,000 have had flu as a cause of death in that week, (which is I suspect roughly the figures to expect next week.)
The main problem with this virus is that it is affecting the rich peoples, the capitalist class and their economical system, otherwise, they would not have cared about the death of other human beings. Every day thousands of children die everything and nobody says anything about it, and peoples continue supporting their leaders who have not done anything for them
Another example of the authoritarian approach to the pandemic
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52244039
“The US has expelled more than 6,300 undocumented migrants on its Mexico border using emergency powers to curb coronavirus spread. The 21 March public health measure lets officials override immigration laws, expediting removal processes.”
But the majority of the Trump supporters will approve that measure, and thousands of children are getting infected in the private ICE prisons
Make of it as you wish
“Christoph Hofinger, told a news conference: “Based on this study, we believe that 0.33% of the population in Austria was acutely infected in early April.” Given the margin of error, the figure was 95% likely to be between 0.12% and 0.76%.
The Austrian chancellor, Sebastian Kurz, who saw initial findings a few days ago, said on Monday that the rate of infection was around 1%. This disproved the idea of herd immunity, which requires widespread infection, as a viable policy option…Commenting on the result, the science minister, Heinz Fassmann, said it indicated a low rate of immunity, which meant that without controls there was a continued risk of an exponential growth in infections.
“The mountain is higher than expected and we are not yet on the safe side,” he said.”https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/apr/10/uk-food-waste-charity-fareshare-donations-lockdown
When it comes to fresh perishable food, the food banks are awash with donations from food companies.
£20m of food with a shelf life of less than three months was at one stage lying in warehouses, according to the Federation of Wholesale Distributors, after the government ordered the closure of millions of hospitality businesses around the country.
The volume of food received every week by the UK’s largest food redistribution charity has more than doubled since the coronavirus lockdown.
But I have read elsewhere , no refrigerated storage and less volunteers to distribute it, they too may well have to dispense with surpluses
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