Corona Virus
A series of write ups on the virus

Coronavirus Tracking,

07/06/2020

Care homes

The government stopped publishing figures "by the old method" which was deaths in hospitals on May31st.  I was able to subtract that figure from total deaths to get deaths in care homes.  It was never too accurate in the short term as sometimes this resulted in negative deaths in care homes! But in the long term it gave a good indication.

When the data stopped deaths in care homes were running at 711 per week, and the trend was for this to reduce by around 2% per day (See graph 3)

Graph 11 shows the care home daily death rate up until 31st May

The U.K.

The UK data is now shown by separating out the four nations. Graph 1 shows the  deaths per week (7 day rolling average) taking into account the population for the last couple of weeks. There is a steady decline for England and Scotland but Wales' reduction seems to have stalled.

As the actual numbers get smaller, these rate of change graphs vary wildly. Hence the very choppy appearance of graph showing Northern Ireland where numbers are down to a few a day.

The disease is still spreading in the community with almost as many people catching the disease as those that recover or die.

Restrictions have been loosened as of 1st June and any changes in the death rates will not be apparent until mid June.  At the same time demonstrations are taking place in the USA and the UK over racial equality and this will exacerbate the spread. It will also make it impossible to point to any reason for a change in infection rates.

The test and trace system is not working according to the folk employed in it, but it is going fine according to the government.  As expected the phone app will be delayed and may be out by September.  This will make it more difficult to find the disease carriers in the hot spots.  There does not seem to be any strategy for dealing with localised hot spots either.

Other Places

Spain's data is not listed as it is not reliable  - see the problem here.

The USA seems to have stalled, with the number of deaths remaining steady.

Germany and Italy are improving at the same rate of about 5% per day, but Germany is about 4 weeks ahead.

England (and therefore the UK as it dominates) is improving at about 3.5% per day which puts us 5-6 weeks behind Italy.

Of course all of this relies upon the data being fairly accurate.