UK Covid dashboard showing ‘zero deaths’ but also flashing warning signals

[Northerner]

For those who are urging the government to push ahead with easing of lockdown restrictions later this month, Tuesday’s announcement of ‘zero deaths’ in the UK will be cited as further proof of the necessity to end the delay.

Certainly, the country has come a long way since the new year Covid surge, when the daily number of infections reached a peak of more than 68,000, and the number of people in hospital would later rise to almost 40,000. Daily death tolls of more than 1,000 were common during the bleakest weeks of winter.

The vaccination programme, perhaps the only unqualified success of the entire pandemic, has changed the calculus again.

But we are already seeing echoes from the situation last summer.

The number of Covid patients in hospital plummeted to 700 or so, before an inexorable rise fuelled by an easing of restrictions and the spread of the Alpha variant, first found in Kent.

UK Covid dashboard showing ‘zero deaths’ but also flashing warning signals

Analysis: vaccine programme could sever link between infections and deaths but there are reasons to be seriously doubtful

www.theguardian.com

Potentially worrying The government has backed itself into a corner with the June 21st date and raising expectations - if things do take off again I can't see them. politically, being capable of re-imposing restrictions It's still weeks before everyone will have had their second jab, and weeks more until full protection comes from those jabs. Because the government have only had one success - the vaccination program - they perpetually speak of it as though it has already done its job and people have been given a false sense of security

 

[Ljc]

I think it’s worrying too. Opening up too fast when not everyone who wants the vaccine has been vaccinated plus this virus is able to mutate rapidly.
Tbh I believe BJ has never stopped going for herd immunity. Hence the delays in starting things and then opening up early .

 

[Robin]

The press picked up and went to town on he fact that there were 0 deaths yesterday, but Monday was a bank holiday, and death registrations are always down. After the Mayday holiday at the beginning of the month, there was 1 recorded death. and then 20 the next day, which was double the usual amount at that time, Will be interesting to see how many there are today and tomorrow.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

Zero! That's less than the number of vaccine deaths.

For one day (the day after a bank holiday) it was zero. (The rolling average seems to be single figures which is still really low.) And it's zero at least partly because of people having been vaccinated.

I'm not aware of any vaccine deaths yesterday, either.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

I read that. Just an observation that the balance is shifting between risk and reward.

According to the models, we can expect it to shift back. Deaths are very low, but hospital admissions are largely flat (a bit less than 1000 a day [EDIT: that figure's the number of people in hospital, the number per day is more like 100]), and cases are increasing. So as cases start to rise faster we can expect hospital admissions to start rising again, and (maybe) deaths will rise.

I'm not sure I believe some of the models. It seems very hard to believe that we could really get 10000 deaths over the summer, for example.

But people ending up in hospital is also bad: this isn't something we want lots of people to get to that severity.

On the other hand, while hospitalisations are flat, they're flat at a vastly lower level than in (say) January.

And yes, it may be that for an individual the risks from a vaccine will be higher than the current risk from the disease, but that's kind of how vaccines always work: if everyone else has had a vaccine, there's not so much benefit in me getting it (all risk, really), but if everyone thinks like that then we're screwed.

Fortunately that doesn't seem to be how people are thinking in the UK. The surveys still suggest that (for adults) the vast majority (over 90%) have either been vaccinated or are likely to be vaccinated.

 

[nonethewiser]

Time to move on & worry more about cancer deaths & delayed treatment, vaccine program is in full swing & is effective so let's concentrate on more urgent health issues.

 

[pm133]

I have no idea why people keep making comparisons with what happened last summer.
We have vaccines now. Working vaccines. Nearly every vulnerable person has had 2 jabs and official figures show that deaths and hospitalisations have been as good as eradicated within those groups. Younger age groups are now seeing most cases but virtually none of those are resulting in deaths or hospitalisations. I would hope that everyone would agree that those are indisputable the facts. If you don't agree with this then I'd be interested to see your figures showing that the official data is wrong.

A few weeks ago the same people were making comparisons with India. A country with almost no vaccinations and a broken healthcare system and rampant corruption throughout all levels of society.

It's almost as though some people simply want to ignore all the good news and find the negativity in all of this.If they can't find any negativity they simply make it up - a couple of months ago we had an advisor to the Scottish Government on Twitter wittering on about how our vaccines were ineffective against the South African variant. She got herself into a lot of hot water over that and eventually retracted that position.

We are so far ahead of the bulk of the rest of the world that really only Israel provides a worthwhile comparison.

 

[pm133]

The press picked up and went to town on he fact that there were 0 deaths yesterday, but Monday was a bank holiday, and death registrations are always down. After the Mayday holiday at the beginning of the month, there was 1 recorded death. and then 20 the next day, which was double the usual amount at that time, Will be interesting to see how many there are today and tomorrow.

It doesn't matter.
Statistically, 20 deaths out of 65 million is still pretty much no deaths and there's absolutely no justification for shutting everything down for that sort of number.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

I agree, yes from the outset, but cirucmstances change and medical advice should take that into account, shouldn't it? Shouldn't doctors say (independant of what governments say) look, there is this chance of dying or suffering an adverse serious or long term reaction from a vaccine and there is currently this chance of dying from covid, that with your age and overall risks, the tiny benefit is not worth taking the risk.

What would such a calculation look like?

We think the risk of a short term serious adverse reaction from the vaccines is really small (though for one kind of vaccine it seems to be higher for younger people, especially women (maybe)).

Long term risks? I don't think there's any signs that there are any. I'm not aware of anyone serious proposing a mechanism for long term reactions. Maybe they'll be some, but without some idea of what it seems hard to put an estimate on it.

And while the current risk of the disease might be very low nobody's expecting it to stay that way. So should everyone who isn't already vaccinated wait until it's more dangerous again?

 

[Bruce Stephens]

So about 1 in 100,000. If I understand correctly that's of the population as a whole (so will vary when prevalence changes). Another figure I've seen (from last year, so things are perhaps a bit better now) is IFR of about 0.1% for people under 40 (so if we assume everyone under 40 gets infected, for those unvaccinated the risk of death would be about 1 in 1000). (Those don't include morbidity. At least some people who survive infection report significant long term effects. Unfortunately we don't seem to have good numbers for that.)

And what's the risk from one of the vaccines?

 

[pm133]

How dangerous is it to those under the age of 60? Let's have a look at the government data.

Dark blue line those 60 and over.
Light blue line those under 60.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/deaths?areaType=nation&areaName=England

You make a decent point.

Whilst there are cases of apparently healthy people dying or being hospitalised with covid, the virus is almost universally affecting unhealthy or elderly, vulnerable people. Once those people are doubly vaccinated we should in theory be done and dusted. Beyond that I'm not persuaded of the necessity of vaccinating people who are not at risk of hospitalisation or death.

I'm leaving aside "long covid" because I don't trust any figures on that at all. Some figures stated there were about a million sufferers. I don't believe a word of that because it was based on people self-diagnosing and we are a nation of hypochondriacs and liars. If there's credible evidence that long covid is affecting young, healthy people in significant numbers then those people should also be offered a vaccine.

I'm of the opinion that the lower the prevalence of the virus, the lower the likelihood of someone vulnerable who has been doubly vaccinated getting infected anyway. For this rason I can see why they want to ramp up vaccinations amongst care staff, NHS staff and younger people.

So vaccinating people outside the vulnerable list is more about protecting vulnerable people rather than protecting those getting the vaccine.

BUT, the virus has been known to wipe out younger healthier people and I suspect the risk of this is still considerably higher than being killed by the vaccines.

 

[pm133]

As reported there were no deaths reported this week. The vaccines were only authorised for use under a national emergency. I don't think we are in that position anymore.

I agree that we're not under a national emergency any more and in fact we haven't been for some time.
Someone should tell Boris because it's still against the law to go inside shops without a mask - an emergency power.

 

[Docb]

The bank holiday effect has sorted itself out and there was an increase in deaths yesterday to compensate for the zero on Tuesday.

What is interesting is that cases are increasing but the hospitalisation rates and death rates are not - it is the trends that are important, not individual data points. I put this down to a string of things. The really vulnerable were hammered in the last two waves and those that were not are now vaccinated; the infections are now in the unvaccinated young who are less vulnerable in any case; hospitals have now worked out protocols to cut cross infection and improve treatment so that the conversion rate from hospitalisation to death has been cut and people are generally more wary about indulging in risky activities.

If there is one statistic missing then it is the number of people with long term consequences of having had the infection. Difficult to collect I know, but I suspect there are many who simply do not want to know because they might not make pleasant reading.

 

[Amity Island]

The bank holiday effect has sorted itself out and there was an increase in deaths yesterday to compensate for the zero on Tuesday.

What is interesting is that cases are increasing but the hospitalisation rates and death rates are not - it is the trends that are important, not individual data points. I put this down to a string of things. The really vulnerable were hammered in the last two waves and those that were not are now vaccinated; the infections are now in the unvaccinated young who are less vulnerable in any case; hospitals have now worked out protocols to cut cross infection and improve treatment so that the conversion rate from hospitalisation to death has been cut and people are generally more wary about indulging in risky activities.

If there is one statistic missing then it is the number of people with long term consequences of having had the infection. Difficult to collect I know, but I suspect there are many who simply do not want to know because they might not make pleasant reading.

Yes we could also do a comparison between self reported adverse reaction numbers on vaers and self reported long covid see below.

So for yellow card scheme for vaers for all vaccines we have this number of reactions reported. But again, some are stating only 1% of reactions are actually reported.

Pfizer 175,673
AZ 676,083
Moderna 5,567
Other? 2,158

total reported reactions = 859,481

For long covid we have around 1,000,000

Official reports on covid19 vaccines - suspected adverse reactions

Hi All, For those interested, these are the latest official reports submitted to the yellow card scheme, called Vaccine Analysis Profiles. If you scroll down to bottom of each document it gives totals...

forum.diabetes.org.uk

Prevalence of ongoing symptoms following coronavirus (COVID-19) infection in the UK - Office for National Statistics

Estimates of the prevalence of self-reported “long COVID” and the duration of ongoing symptoms following confirmed coronavirus infection, using UK Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Survey data.

www.ons.gov.uk

 

[mikeyB]

There was one Covid death reported yesterday in Scotland. I've got no data on age, vaccination status or pre existing conditions. There are 114 people in hospital with confirmed Covid 19, 10 of them in intensive care.

I wonder if the media will report that death as part of the UK figures. If you like such figures, that's a 100% increase since yesterday😉

 

[pm133]

Thanks @pm133 Ok, let's have a look at the official current data.

See data panel below. Death rate for covid19 is currently running at 1 in a 1,000,000 (or 0.1 in 100,000)

Latest data from VAERS yellow card scheme is: Now it's difficult to assess the real figures as only a tiny fraction of adverse events are even reported, some say as little as 1%.

Pfizer vaers deaths currently stand at 382
AZ vaers deaths currently stand at 806
Moderna vaers deaths stand at 4
Other? vaers at 21

So in total 1213 deaths reported from total of 39 million people vaccinated.

That equates to a vaers reported death rate from vaccination at 1:32,151 compared to 1:1,000,000 death rate from covid19.

Official reports on covid19 vaccines - suspected adverse reactions

Hi All, For those interested, these are the latest official reports submitted to the yellow card scheme, called Vaccine Analysis Profiles. If you scroll down to bottom of each document it gives totals...

forum.diabetes.org.uk

UKHSA data dashboard

Showing public health data across England

coronavirus.data.gov.uk

Please check my figures, if I am wrong I will update accordingly.

OK so the problem with your numbers straight away is that they are not confirmed to be deaths due to the vaccine. The very first report states that on the front page (1st paragraph).

For now, it's better tocompare the number of people who have died in the UK from covid with the number of people who have died as a direct result of taking a vaccine in the UK. Even if your numbers are correct (which they are not), you'd be looking at about 140,000 : 1200

If we want out of these restrictions, people really should take the vaccines when offered but I'm not going to try and coerce people into doing so.

 

[pm133]

If there is one statistic missing then it is the number of people with long term consequences of having had the infection. Difficult to collect I know, but I suspect there are many who simply do not want to know because they might not make pleasant reading.

I think it's more that it doesn't matter in the context of forcing continued restrictions on an entire country.

I'd also suggest that the issue right now is dealing with covid, not post-viral syndrome. I know the two will be related but it's a good idea to keep them separate for the purposes of lockdowns etc.

We can't keep a country locked up because some people suffer post-viral syndrome, regardless of the numbers involved.

 

[pm133]

There was one Covid death reported yesterday in Scotland. I've got no data on age, vaccination status or pre existing conditions. There are 114 people in hospital with confirmed Covid 19, 10 of them in intensive care.

I wonder if the media will report that death as part of the UK figures. If you like such figures, that's a 100% increase since yesterday😉

You've given 3 figures. Which one are you saying is a 100% on the day before?

 

[pm133]

Hi pm133,

Nothing wrong with the numbers. It's what you want to make of them. I made it clear, these are reported deaths via yellow card scheme. No more no less.

I can't force you to read the front page of the first report but if you do you'll see them explicitly stating that these deaths are not confirmed as being as a result of the vaccine.

They are "suspected" cases that's all.
That's why it's called a yellow card system and not a red card system.

Please don't over-interpret data like this. It can lead you to false and potentially very dangerous conclusions. Life changing conclusions if you decide to refuse a vaccine because of it and then catch covid.

 

[Bruce Stephens]

We can't keep a country locked up because some people suffer post-viral syndrome, regardless of the numbers involved.

No, but we could delay (or slow) reopening a bit. Israel is reporting about 10% of the cases per million that we are. Presumably because they have a higher proportion of the population vaccinated.

If we thought long term effects of covid were common enough or serious enough, we could surely wait a month or two until we had similar levels of vaccination. (I guess we might need to aim for higher levels given the delta variant which I think isn't common in Israel yet. Even so, it wouldn't be restrictions forever.)