Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Lockdown

Italy has just reported 5,372 new cases. I am more concerned about the number Hospitalised than new cases as many are asymptomatic and have been discovered because of the 129,471 swabs performed. At the moment the reports are of hospitals going into overload in Naples and Sicily, and to a lesser degree Rome.

Having said all that it is clear we are on the start of the so-called "second wave". There is also growing concern over the number of deaths not directly Covid related that are due to cancelled or unavailable care, missed chemotherapy, postponed operations, etc.

I feel sorry for people in the UK because you are now starting on the "second wave" without having really come out of the first.

Depends where you live in the UK. Draw a line from the Wash to the Severn Estuary and below that line the first wave ended in June.
The second wave is, so far, largely confined to metropolitan areas above the line.
Will it spread south and east?
No one knows.

This is the picture today, Saturday. .



The scale is "Covid cases per million". Data is from King's College London and Zoe survey.
Why is the North and West regions so badly impacted?
There are no clear answers, so far.

Possibly because they have lumped together a lot of Scotland which contains few people.

Overpopulated.

?

Who do they pay to draw up theses maps? To quote Mark Twain “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

According to the map the remote farming communities of Rum, Muck and Eigg in the Western Isles have a higher lever of infection than Central London and indeed anywhere south of the Severn Wash line.

Is it any wonder people are confused and have a mistrust of statistics and what we are being told.

It's because these are infection rates, not levels of infection - as the rubric clearly indicates. It would possibly be more meaningful to weight the test rates by population density, but then people would have an even harder time deciphering what they are seeing.



I suspect it's got a lot to do with socio-economic differences like average family sizes, ability to spend money on hygiene equipment/face masks etc, overall population density, and ability to understand/willingness to comply with social distancing.

Sorry, I missed it the first time.

Yes, very misleading even if 'technically' correct.
Presumably the problem comes because in the lesser populated but larger geographic areas a small community's outbreak is then shown across the authority's domain. If this smaller community is a low number it is also then, presumably, factored up to the 'cases per million' such that if five cases were identified in a community of, say, 1000 people this would be represented by the 5000 cases pm. colour.
For the map to be truly representative the algorithm would need to factor in densities of population and rationalise the community area boundaries to a level playing field of similar sized samples.
I would assume though that this is being done and that the map shown is just one of many representations prepared for the authorities to understand the problem as this next phase is developing.

You are mistaken. By early August the UK pattern was very low just as it then was in France and Spain. There is some debate as to whether what we are seeing now is simply the result of doing more tests per day than anywhere else in Europe - 250k typically. If you look harder you find more.

An Irish man's view on the situation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrRijSa8494&feature=emb_logo

Interesting that Italy seems to be doing better than most other major European countries. Wonder why.