Author: Tiago Ferreira

What an interesting week. First, on the 23rd, Boris Johnson fully reversed its original plan to obtain herd immunity and announced a home lockdown, affecting every single activity other than those deemed essential. However, the list of “essencial services” is long and wide. From telecommunications to groceries, a significant part of the economy and the associated workforce will still be out of home every single day. Second, and this is where things get interesting, it’s already known how long it takes for the people getting from sick to dead: 16 days. This means that, when Boris announced the lock down, 335 people had already perished, but because of this delay, 9252 will also not survive until this lock down takes effect. This effect was already confirmed in Spain and Italy, and it does’t even has a relation with the real IFR or CFR. It’s just caused but the fact the current trend can only be altered by measures, and none was taken before. What actually happens right after those 16 days have passed? No one knows. Italy will make its 16th day on the 31st. Then we’ll know. Third, Public Health England recognised it could not keep track of all …

Without knowing where you are, you can’t even start to know where you’re heading to. The last few days’ figures show a very sorry picture of the UK. Yes, the infection grow rate if one of the lowest on Europe, but if you compare that with the number of fatalities, it paints a very clear picture. Infection fatality rate (IFR) now stands at around 5.22%. Why the “around at”, because it’s 11PM and there are no updated figures on the fatalities over the last 24 hours. This can’t be true. It’s not like you need to find people with symptoms to be able to test, or they may simply being staying at home with symptoms. You just’t cannot hide the fact someone died from a disease it was already known to have. On the infection figures, it’s just laughable: infection rate of 10.26% just after a day mandatory stay at home order was issues, an order compliance level is lacking to say the least, doesn’t deserve any kind of credit. Having a 5.22% IFR means that you’re at least underestimating the number of infections by a factor of 4. So, not only you don’t how where you’re heading, you don’t know …

What happens when you start massively testing your population after spending the last 2 months with your head stuck in the sand? You get 8000 newly infected people. And the day is only ending in a few hours on the US. While the UK government still doesn’t have a clue how many infected people are roaming the streets, in the US, and specially in New York and Washington state, people are now being massively tested. Not that those people were just infected that week. Instead, infection was reading all over the place, but due to the lack of testing materials went unnoticed. The result? The US is already the 4th country with the highest number of daily fatalities, and will undoubtedly reach Italy infection number within this week. On the UK, today’s figures are still all over the place. Daily reported newly infected cases dropped to around half of yesterday’s. Now, everyone knows viruses don’t stop during weekends, but people seem to, which renders today’s figures an exercise of futility, specially if you look at the fatalities figures, which albeit better than yesterday, is still the second highest. Looking at the trends, the image is much murkier.  Uk’s fatality rate is …

Today was a terrible day all around, Italy, Spain, Us, and finally the UK. Another 56 people lost their lives. The fact that another thousand people were also reported infected just underlines the looking disaster. Modelling epidemics is an extremely complex and far from accurate science. However, that’s only needed if you want a very accurate result. If you only need broad figures under very exact conditions, that’s easy enough you can use a spreadsheet to calculate it. A new study from the Imperial College underwrites some initial findings from the chinese doctors attending to the initial epidemic. The main findings are: Average time between symptoms onset and a positive detection – 2 days Average time between a positive result and a fatal result – 14 days Then, we can also consider the current figures for the countries initially affected by COVID-19: China and South Korea, which represent opposite ends of the spectrum: On South Korea one can observe what happens when the disease is caught on time, and entire populations are tested against it. In this case, the fatality rate is around 1%. Consider this the minimum obtainable fatality rate on a developed country with the current treatment protocols. …

It may take a few days, but rest assured, the math will always reestablishes its will. So, yes, we lost the capability to understand the overall status, but we can still estimate the evolution of both infections and deaths. In fact, yesterday’s forecasts were dead on, within a 5% margin. I’m always happy when I’m proven wrong, and I’m now a very sad guy. Tomorrow expect around 4560 cumulative infections and 216 cumulative deaths. As usual the source spreadsheet is available here.

Yesterday’s figures were not one off. The number of casualties is ever increasing and it’s now obvious and clear the figures for infected people is but a fraction of the reality. UK’s deceased due to Covid-19 is now 4 times those of Germany, but Germany has 5 times as many infected. The difference is, Germany actually know how many infected are within their borders, the UK doesn’t have a clue, other than the insane number of fatalities. Then, there’s a telltale indicator something is terribly wrong. UK’s fatality rate (new cases vs fatalities) now stands at 4.48%, which roughly means that for each fatality 20 others become infected. However, on Germany, which is testing people, all people, people showing symptoms or people not showing them, has 0.22% or roughly one per 450 infected. Assuming healthcare into the UK is at least as good as in Germany, it means that there are 46800 infected people in the UK, not the infamous 2600 value. This is what sets competent governments from blatantly incompetent ones. Competent governments know how many people  are infected so preparations can be made in advance. Incompetent governments refuse to realize there’s a problem, then that there’s anything to …

Something continues to be off. PHE hasn’t  yet found a fixed time to publish new data. Today data referring to the last 24 hours ending at 9AM was only published at 18:44. To make things worst, it was the worst day possible with 43 new casualties. The UK is now fast approaching Italy’s new fatalities to new infection ratio, at around 3.95%. This value compares to Italy’s 8.5%, Spain’s 4.3% and South Korea (the other country massively testing entire population) of 0.9%. For tomorrow, and the next few days, things will not improve. Actually, until April 4th, expect ever increasing number of daily fatalities. Specially for tomorrow, around 3.5 thousand cumulative infections , and between 138 and 176 cumulative fatalities.   As usual the source spreadsheet is available here.

Well, from now on, NHS updates all results at 9AM concerning the events of the previous day. As such, the values obtained from today are significantly skewed, both in terms of new infections and fatalities, although that will eventually be diluted over time. Even then, and although the number of new fatalities (5) was significantly reduced as compared with the previous day, that reduction was due to the new calculation time, rather than any solid good news. The other change is regarding the testing methods. UK and most northern european countries are now not testing all cases, but only those which are severe enough to need hospital attention. This makes the “new cases” indicator a totally useless figure. This fact has dire consequences. To start, it doesn’t allow the government even to estimate the extent of the epidemics, so it can’t even know to close it is to a potencial herd immunity threshold. Then, the only hard data is is either the number of severely sick, of the number of dead, and those come at a price, other than the human life: delay. It’s not possible to easily measure on the patient was originally infected after being brought in to the …