THE MOST ACCURATE STATISTICS IN THE GALAXY!
Something in the News perchance?
Well, as recently pointed out on Social Media, to myself and others, there’s ALL SORTS of ways statistics may be spun, for instance, yesterday the London Economic and The Independent spotted one of the numerous Daily Covid-19 updated charts to claim that the UK had THE HIGHEST DEATH RATE PER CAPITA IN THE WORLD at 4.54 deaths/million compared with Sweden next at 4.51 and Brazil at 4.4. That’s all well and good, but these figures are daily produced by the Our World In Data exhaustive statistical website and there’s a spectacular number of ways to produce data. What my good buddy does (my namesake Chris M) is check a bunch of these things sometimes to put a sensible balance on things (he pointed out to me the very high “death rates” reported by Belgium a few weeks ago, which are discussed below on this blog).
ANYWAY, the data referred to above is what happens when you take a rolling period (they take daily, 3 days, 7 days etc) and average the figures out. On this occasion, they found that using 7 days figures up to May 25th, you could get that the UK’s figures headed that particular table. The “rates” figures have always been rather unhelpful in my opinion, as they can, as had lured me, lead to inappropriate headlines in the Press.
So again using the US respected resource the Johns Hopkins Dashboard, the TOTAL figures (NOT rates) are as follows today 28th May 2020:
USA 102,000 deaths 309 deaths/million pop.
UK 37,500 552
ITALY 33,000 547
FRANCE 29,000 438
SPAIN 27,000 580
BRAZIL 25,500 121
BELGIUM 9,500 810
MEXICO 8,500 67
GERMANY 8,500 102
CANADA 7,000 179
INDIA 4,500 3
CHINA 4,500 3
The huge mortality per population of Belgium still seems to remain an anomaly, and other than debating the data as provided by Belgium as discussed in a previous entry below, there’s no other logical reason for it.
Thus (I hate overuse of the word SO especially at the start of a sentence), though you cannot specifically say that these figures are right and those are WRONG, assembling data into rates of all shapes and sizes can be misleading. The rolling figure average is arbitrary, and the headlines attracted are not too helpful.
UK GOVERNMENT MISLEADING US ABOUT TESTING
Talking about misleading us, the Government was on a mission to deliver 100,000 tests PER DAY. What did that mean and did they do it?
Aharrrrrrrr, yer Swabs……
It was generally understood that Matt Hancock and Boris Johnson wanted the British Public to know that after starting off with less than 2000 tests for having the virus per day, that we had soared to 100,000 people plus being tested. These to remind you Dear Reader are the:
PCR SWAB (or Antigen) TEST (nose and throat, pic above, my buddy Richard had one last week..) Results back in between 8 hours and 4 days, in some cases.
According to all the sources available (and confirmed by the BBC and Sky this morning), the NUMBER of NEW PEOPLE being tested has NEVER reached 100,000 a day, the maximum being 75,000. Why is this? Because the figures provided on a daily basis now include the Home Test Kits and the number SENT OUT on a daily basis. These have been in short supply by the way, and many had to be thrown away because the Return Labels hadn’t been included! They also include tests being done on the same person more than once for technical reasons. This test REMAINS as the most reliable test for detection of the virus currently in the person.
RAPID PCR SWAB TEST This is actually called the “Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP)” test. This is a new test giving results in 20 minutes, which is being trialled in a few places in the UK currently, and should be available in good numbers by mid-June apparently.
THE ROCHE ANTIBODY TEST If you’ve actually HAD the virus, and hopefully, but not for sure, possess long lasting immunity antibodies so that you can’t catch it again, then this 100% reliable test is finally available from Roche and from Abbott Pharmaceuticals. The UK government has bought 10 million of these tests so though we’re months behind countries like South Korea and Germany, finally millions of people should get to start having regular tests for this virus. These will be available in June, and require a blood test (not a finger prick, which the much more unreliable tests available worldwide have required)
There are in fact 100s of “Home Antibody Tests” available worldwide…I’ve counted about 20 in the UK alone where you pay between £49 and £129 and you get the results back in a few days. Thing is, these tests are not the absolutely reliable ones, and have been used in Europe and the Far east as a bit of a rough guide to who’s had the virus within a professional company or private healthcare facility. The Roche/Abbott tests will be the real deal.
TREATMENTS and VACCINES update
Loathe him or loathe him, Mr Donald Trump certainly does like to talk. And play golf. A lot of golf. This last week, the drug that he has admitted to be taking daily (he also apparently owns shares in one of the companies which produces it), which is the anti-malaria drug Hydroxychloroquine, has been rejected as a result of initial global trials, due to the fact that it has been giving people certain heart problems and has even increased the death rate amongst some smaller trials. The WHO have therefore advised that tests have to be halted. So much for it being the wonder drug according to some conspiracy theorists. Oh well.
There’s whole hosts of drugs for treatment and prevention of spreading of the virus going on around the world. UK company Synairgen is testing an inhaled version of Interferon and 100s of other companies have different products alone and in combination in test as we blog.
As reported here, the anti-viral drug (it was used against the Ebola virus) Remdesivir has been given the all clear as a drug to help people with the virus recover. Northern Ireland is already treating patients with it with success in reducing recovery times from 15 to 11 days. It may not be much more effective than that, according to numerous Doctors. Google it!
As for vaccines, trials continue in the US and the UK, plus in Germany and Italy for initial candidates of vaccines. A good read for progress in these for those REALLY into this kind of stuff can be found here: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/05/26/coronavirus-vaccine-update-may-26
Thing is, the Ebola virus vaccine took 5 years to produce approximately. Even though all manner of companies and medical research labs are doing the trials, this is purely guesswork as to when and if a vaccine will be found.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-020-00073-5
There are five out of 75 approximately which have reached trial status. A further 10,000 people are being recruited currently for instance by the University of Oxford for phases two and three in their trials for the Vaccine currently known as ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. Phew. The Drugs company AstraZeneca has agreed to manufacture initial millions of the vaccine from September onwards ????? This seems extremely difficult to contemplate. In the US, they have trials at the Kaiser Institute in Washington DC for Moderna’s mRNA-1273, and Pfizer and German company BioNTech are together trialling their own mRNA vaccine in partnership.
Finally, it seems someone called Dominic Cummings MAY or MAY NOT have been visiting GlaxoSmithKline in Durham, UK recently! There are confirmed reports that the companies Johnson and Johnson, GSK and Sanofi are all about to start trials on vaccine candidates developed in the last three months, so who knows what might eventually come out of Durham?
Comments hugely welcome as usual! More soon……
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality
https://www.statista.com/chart/21578/covid-19-tests-conducted-uk/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/05/27/coronavirus-test-antibody-uk-covid-19-superdrug-buy/