tomo, thanks for the suggestion.

Meanwhile I found an Imperial College London website suggestion that in high-income countries, the IFR is about 1.15% (it's supposedly much lower in low-income countries - I assume the difference is down to higher-income countries having an older population on average).

Assuming that IFR figure is correct, and extrapolating from it, it might suggest that something over 9 million people have been infected in the UK so far - so quite a way to go to any thoughts of "herd immunity" after all. I fear January is going to be grim.

Just now the Telegraph reports that the scientists have modelled that 1 in 5 people in England have had the disease. I'm guessing that it would be lower in the other regions? London would be higher than England as a whole. Only another 40-60 million to go before herd immunity.

We're at about 80,000 deaths now with about a thousand people a day. We've reached the spring peak. A percentage of people who caught covid over the last 2 weeks are now doomed. If deaths follow cases then the current levels of deaths could double in that time, give or take the vaccine kicking in and/or hospitals running out of care. It's too hard to say if cases are now responding to lock down.

These figurd tie in with a cfr of 1.3 at the start and a fall to about half that now. Non covid excess deaths will also start ramping up too. Very grim.

Oopse, I meant 40-60% to go

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9127059/One-FIVE-people-coronavirus-modelling-suggests.html

Hmmm, the DM has more information about the study and it's not a government result. Not necessarily any less rigorous but the conclusions about herd immunity are not so solid. The article inadvertantly points out that those areas supposedly almost at herd immunity are 'struggling'. OK some of that may be due to taking cases from other areas but then again it might not. Infection levels might be arrived at quicker in London but herd immunity will also be much higher. Proximity and mixing mean that the disease can spread more easily.

The research also makes the mistake of assuming that mortality is the same for different races and that appears to be not the case. So an area with a lot of BAME might have a higher death rate but appear to be further through the pandemic.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if we're rapidy getting to 20%. But 20% is not herd immunity. Typically there are lies that the 'official' figure is much lower, only using the tested total. Nobody from government has suggested that the tested positive figure is the same as all the cases but it does indicate a direction of travel. Because of the complexity, the government only releases the figure for those it estimate have had it about every month or so. A lot has happened in the last month or so.

Just eyballing the death chart, the second wave is now bigger than the first. If the chances of dying have halved and in the summer 6% were supposed to have had it then 6 + 2*6 = 18%.

Of course the DM was the same paper that told us the second wave wasn't going to happen. Then it said it wouldn't reach the same level as the first wave. Despite the lock down brake, the wave will probably reach at least twice the first.

When in hospital with Covid I joined a huge investigation into the benefits (or otherwise) of different medications by taking one of several medications or possibly a placebo. This is billed as the Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy (RECOVERY) Trial:the largest trial in the world to find effective treatments for patients in hospital. Today I received a letter thanking me for my participation in the trial and providing me with some of their early conclusions.

Of interest to some of you here was what they have concluded about hydroxychloroquine. Apparently in June the information about this treatment was reviewed and it was concluded that (I quote) the “drug did not reduce the number of deaths or the length of time patients with COVID 19 spent in hospital, or benefit patients in any other way, As a result, hydroxychloroquine was removed from the RECOVERY trial and guidelines for doctors have been updated”.

I report this without comment.

Lopinavir-ritonavir was also considered to be ineffective.

Thanks for letting us know AK and for agreeing to be a lab rat :-)

Apparently recovered patient plasma is no use to late stage victims either. Sad. However they've found lots of other things that do work.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/952280/Weekly_report_mortality__w2.pdf

Latest excess deaths report and they've caught up with Christmas and the New Year. The report is just up to the end of first week in January so the spike hadn't reached the height of the first one.

Pleased to learn that studies have been done to track immunity.
One study reported 44 re-infections out of 6164 medics who have had the virus. However, in the detail, it said those 44 comprised 2 "probables" and 42 "possibles" which doesn't seem very solid. I wonder if they could be picking up false positives from the original tests.
A newspaper article (the i) reported PHE as saying that having the bug gives better immunity than the Oxford vaccine.

Thanks for the feedback AK.

Matt Ridley mentioned something similar in a recent blog article:
"Recovery is what told us dexamethasone helps in patients on ventilators and hydroxychloroquine does not. A similar trial led by Imperial College and Utrecht University has now shown that the immune-suppressive drug tocilizumab also saves the lives of those in intensive care."

Wrt hydroxychloroquine, my understanding is that its use was advocated as a prophylactic and for those with early symptoms - before hospitalisation. The whole issue got completely derailed by Trump's comments, the fake study promoted by the Lancet, etc.. We will probably have to wait until things have settled down before the whole story comes out. One key will be whether people taking HCQ for medical conditions (arthritis?) showed any greater resistance to infection.

Mike, I look at HCQ this way - Trump an his buddies still caught the disease and Trump wasn't treated in hospital with it.

Some argue that it should also be taken with an antibiotic but there is some evidence that this is driving antibiotic resitance in bacteria. So not a good plan.

I doubt that it's possible to immediately work out the true impact of covid (and lock down) but the scope will become more obvious in years to come. We know that there have been two significant spikes in deaths so far. This may quickly be accounted for in reduced deaths in the vulnerable. However there might be two wrinkles in that. a) Younger people may permanently or temporarily be aged by the disease and thus fill the space left by the covid deaths. b) Covid variations probably will continue and we may return to mid last century death rates because each winter covid kills. Trimming improvements in life span. There will also be impacts on lifespan due to lock down and the financial impact but it will be hard to work out how much impact could have been avoided if we'd had a raging pandemic and no lock down to slow the spread.

Tiny; I hope you are right and we will get a true and accurate accounting. However I struggle to be optimistic. That is partly down to the sheer complexity as well as complicating factors such as the attribution of cause of death being left to care home managers. My main concern is that there will be a powerful cohort of vested interests who will want to make sure that no blame atteches to them.

On HCQ, I wouldn't use Trump et al as a case reference. Do we even know he really took it? Maybe with a shot of bleach!!
There have been papers published in many countries but, as with the above, it will be better to wait for the dust to settle.

https://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/1385623/jeremy-corbyn-news-Covid-vaccine-boris-johnson-coronavirus-UK-latest

Corbyn is all for giving our vaccines away, before even the vulnerable are vaccinated. In all probability, any spare will be offered but that will be a while yet and even longer if the virus mutates too much and requires a new vaccine. It follows the policy that the Left has dangerously followed of seeing Brits as the undeserving poor and that it's our legacy to suffer to pay for the past (regardless of any good we did in the past, like inventing vaccines). I'm yet to determine what Starmer will do to demonstrate that Labour has the public's back.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9161125/Test-trace-consultants-earning-average-1-000-DAY.html

Now you know that at one level it's a putrid scam

Who to believe?

BBC today:

Overall, the total number of deaths reported are more than 40% above what is expected at this time of year, although delays registering deaths over the festive period are thought to have contributed to some of the rise.

Daily Telegraph:

According to some figures, the second wave is five times less deadly than the first wave. This is in spite of the fact we have a new variant which is between 50 and 74 per cent more infectious.

To get a real feel for how the waves compare, it is necessary to look at excess deaths rather than crude reported deaths.

According to the Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI), set up by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, there have been 72,900 excess deaths from the start of the pandemic in March to the end of December.

Some 60,800 of those occurred in the first wave, but just 12,100 in the second. It means that, unlike the first wave, huge numbers of people included in the coronavirus death figures would have been expected to die of other causes in the past few months.

Look at Office for National Statistics (ONS) graphs showing deaths over time and this becomes startlingly clear. While there is a mountainous peak in April as deaths soared over the average, now we are trending a little above the five-year average line. On some days towards the end of December, we were actually below it.

Dr Jason Oke, of the Centre of Evidence Based Medicine (CEBM) at the University of Oxford, said it was difficult to understand the pandemic from the graphs published on the Government’s daily coronavirus dashboard.

While the “deaths within 28 days” graph appears to show that the second wave is as bad as the first, the “weekly deaths by date registered” shows no such correlation.

“If you look at the 28-day graph and the hospital data you could well believe it is as bad as the first wave,” Dr Oke said. “The first graph suggests we are now at the same place as the first wave (and due for worse) whereas the second graph tells a different story – half the first wave currently and no increase in December.”

The CMI also reported that during week 53, from December 28 to January 3, there were 19 per cent fewer deaths registered in England and Wales than would have been expected if Standardised Mortality Rates had been the same as in week one of 2020.

These December figures will undoubtedly rise as more deaths are registered, and have suffered from the Christmas and New Year holidays when fewer deaths than normal were recorded. But they are not likely to rise so significantly as to take us back to the extraordinary excess deaths of April.

This week’s Monthly Mortality Analysis from the ONS also makes this point very well. The report states: “Although mortality rates due to Covid-19 have increased between October and December 2020, these remain significantly lower than in April 2020.”

In fact, in England, age-standardised mortality rates (ASMR) were 62.5 per cent lower in December than April. They have fallen from 623.2 per 100,000 people in April to 233.6 per 100,000 in December.

The same is true in Wales, although to a lesser extent. In April the ASMR was 495.1 deaths per 100,000 people, and it was 374.4 per 100,000 in December, a 24.4 per cent decrease.

From the Spectator website:
"A cheap antiparasitic drug, ivermectin, may reduce mortality by up to 75% in patients with Covid-19. The University of Liverpool, which conducted the study, said that results were encouraging but further studies were needed to provide regulators with robust evidence."

This seems bizarre. The potential of Ivermectin was reported on Jo Nova's website in May/June of last year, including reports of its use in some countries. From the US:
"In some cases, doctors reported just one dose of ivermectin markedly improved a patient’s condition. U. S. patients received a single oral dose, and some of them received a booster dose seven days later. The FDA-approved dose for parasitic infections was used."
Further, it is a long-established drug which has been in widespread use for years to treat a variety of parasitic ailments. Hence it is already tested and regulated for human use.
So why is this only appearing now and why would further studies be necessary? It's known to be safe, why not give it a try?

From the Spectator:
"Belgian health officials inspected a factory producing the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine yesterday at the request of the European Commission. They were accompanied by colleagues from the Netherlands, Italy and Spain who together will produce a report on whether delays in vaccine delivery are due to production difficulties, as AstraZeneca has said."

I'm baffled as to why the EU thinks A-Z would delay deliveries for any reason other than genuine difficulties. Given the nature of the beast, I will not be surprised if they do concoct something - it's pure arse-covering.

From the same source:
"French pharma company Valneva has begun mass producing a new inactivated coronavirus vaccine in Livingston, Scotland, ahead of its approval by the MHRA. The firm is due to deliver 60 million doses to the UK in the second half of this year after the government agreed its deal – including funding to expand the Livingston site – on 20 July last year. The European Commission concluded ‘exploratory talks’ ahead of a possible contract with the firm a little more than two weeks ago."
So we agreed a deal and provided funding last July while the EU has yet to get into serious discussions.
Yet more proof that the EU's problems with vaccine rollout are of their own making.