27th January Stats

chrismisterx said:
agree with everything said, my main point of concern atm is how these stats have been spun depending on your point of view. Some media outlets have been terrible all through out this time.

But to my untrained eye there is some simple things which just cant be avoided and surely if you have an ounce of common sense you have to admit ( using you to define us all as a population and not to describe yourself )

The hospitals struggled to cope because of covid, not just because of covid itself but the problems caused with extra PPE being needed, the fact you had to keep covid people away from none covid, that point hasn't been stressed enough, the simple fact of having different wards had to be a logistic nightmare.

We need a quick and easy way to describe to the public how serious this pandemic was, the daily figures worked very well for this and helped drive the public to take care and get a jab, but like I said above starting to feel the tool is doing more harm than good now. These quick and dirty figures couldn't really show the true ins and outs, not many people die of just one cause as i understand it, it tends to be cause and effect, serious lung infection can cause the patient to die of multiple reasons, maybe heart failure brought on by the stress of the lung infection, so its as you rightly say all linked, i dont work in the field to know how its recorded, but a look throughout history shows a lot of deaths caused by AIDS was missed as the secondary cause the reason for death was recorded but the underlaying cause the fact the person had aids was missed, so pneumonia and such like ended up on some death reports and AIDS wasn't mentioned, read a few accounts that many more people died with / of AIDS early days as Doctors didn't just know.

I think there's a lot of confusion around with Covid down the same lines, if you die f a heart attack, that heart attack could have been caused by covid and the person could have been fine if they didn't have covid, lots of ifs and maybes but I think most people understand that its all link and its a tiny amount of people who are in the covid figures who shouldn't be, just by the way it works, i think I read the health bodies think its around 5-6% non covid deaths thats been counted.

Its an interesting subject and i have learnt so much more about human nature and perceived dangers and how we react, take the 4 big killers in this country year on year out people just dont worry about them until it hits home, even flu never known a single person worry about the dangers, but have a death count and ram it home daily and the mental change is quite something, which brings me to the next point, the next big drain on the NHS imo is going to be in the mental health of the staff, for 2 years these staff members have been on the front line working flat out, when it goes quiet I feel we will see a crash and end up with staff suffering from a PTSD effect, I dont trust our Government to have in place protection for that.

vaccines have had an overwhelming positive effect, even an untrained eye like myself can see the drop between deaths and vaccines is linked, hard lock down also have a massive protection value before the vaccines kicked in, cant understand how people can even debate this. I also have believed since mid December that we are entering the end of the pandemic and moving towards endemic, its what the experts hoped for, large scale vaccine up take and a weaker variant, we have both now and think its only a mater of time before the rest of the world catch up.

Sorry for the scatter gun ramblings but I do find the subject interesting and as a non educated person ( no degrees or such like here ), have learnt so much and went out and sourced information the best I can, its the one good thing to come out the pandemic for me, a better understanding of a lot of different subjects in this field.
Click to expand...
The main factor for me in the with and not covid is the ventilator numbers.

Unless Omicron is ridiculously different then people who were dying of covid would be put on ventilators so unless Omicron kills people very quickly then most of the deaths reported will be normal deaths instead of covid deaths. The ratios do not fundamentally change unless the disease has fundamentally changed.

last time ventilator beds were this low (mid July) deaths were around 40 a day and even some of those would have with covid.
 


Harry Angstrom said:
The main factor for me in the with and not covid is the ventilator numbers.

Unless Omicron is ridiculously different then people who were dying of covid would be put on ventilators so unless Omicron kills people very quickly then most of the deaths reported will be normal deaths instead of covid deaths. The ratios do not fundamentally change unless the disease has fundamentally changed.

last time ventilator beds were this low (mid July) deaths were around 40 a day and even some of those would have with covid.
Click to expand...
My thoughts exactly, but I couldn't think how to put it without getting banned...so well done.
 
Harry Angstrom said:
The main factor for me in the with and not covid is the ventilator numbers.

Unless Omicron is ridiculously different then people who were dying of covid would be put on ventilators so unless Omicron kills people very quickly then most of the deaths reported will be normal deaths instead of covid deaths. The ratios do not fundamentally change unless the disease has fundamentally changed.

last time ventilator beds were this low (mid July) deaths were around 40 a day and even some of those would have with covid.
Click to expand...
I don't think it's that simple to be honest, although I do appreciate the reports that Omicron possibly appears less likely to work it's way to the lower respiratory tract.

Covid deaths aren't always due to respiratory problems like acute respiratory distress syndrome. There's plenty other ways it kills, many of which won't require ventilation.
Things like brain inflammations, heart attacks, damage to blood vessels, clotting problems, strokes, kidney failure, other heart problems, multisystem inflammatory syndrome etc.

There's also other things to take into account like the very elderly being less likely to receive invasive ventilation.

There's also been a change in treatments and a move towards high doses of supplemental oxygen via CPAP or high flow nasal cannulas rather than invasive mechanical ventilation which is the number reported daily. Again I think it's a case of headline stats looking good, but they aren't a true reflection because of other changes.
 
Last edited:
rudd said:
I don't think it's that simple to be honest, although I do appreciate the reports that Omicron possibly appears less likely to work it's way to the lower respiratory tract.

Covid deaths aren't always due to respiratory problems like acute respiratory distress syndrome. There's plenty other ways it kills, many of which won't require ventilation.
Things like brain inflammations, heart attacks, damage to blood vessels, clotting problems, strokes, kidney failure, other heart problems, multisystem inflammatory syndrome etc.

There's also other things to take into account like the very elderly being less likely to receive invasive ventilation.

There's also been a change in treatments and a move towards high doses of supplemental oxygen via CPAP or high flow nasal cannulas rather than invasive mechanical ventilation which is the number reported daily. Again I think it's a case of headline stats looking good, but they aren't a true reflection because of other changes.
Click to expand...
I do get all that but the ratio between ICU/ventilation and death should be the same all things being equal.
 
Harry Angstrom said:
The main factor for me in the with and not covid is the ventilator numbers.

Unless Omicron is ridiculously different then people who were dying of covid would be put on ventilators so unless Omicron kills people very quickly then most of the deaths reported will be normal deaths instead of covid deaths. The ratios do not fundamentally change unless the disease has fundamentally changed.

last time ventilator beds were this low (mid July) deaths were around 40 a day and even some of those would have with covid.
Click to expand...
I do agree to an extent, i think the ventilator numbers the last few weeks have been much more important than cases for example, but as @rudd rightly states its not that simple, but it is a very good indicator and much better than cases numbers now, imo omicron is a game changer and a way out of the pandemic towards endemic, reason I have been much more positive since the SA numbers in mid Dec starting to show it wasn't such a bad thing this variant.

Things change and so does the advice, maybe something bad may happen down the line but we have to live life with what we know not with what might happen or we will end up paralyzed with fear.

I have high hopes by this summer the world will be in a much better place, I think the UK will be a couple f months ahead and hope as soon as the spring we see an end to daily figures and we move to stage two, living with a new endemic virus, coping like we do atm with flu.
 
Harry Angstrom said:
I do get all that but the ratio between ICU/ventilation and death should be the same all things being equal.
Click to expand...
Well, aye. If nothing changes then everything stays the same :lol:

I'm not sure what value a ventilation:death ratio would have or why you mention it? Happy for you to educate me on it though.

One the 26th of Jan the 7 day average of your ratio is about 3 which is the value that we saw Dec 2020 and Jan 2021. Does that mean things are equal? What does it tell you?
 
chrismisterx said:
I do agree to an extent, i think the ventilator numbers the last few weeks have been much more important than cases for example, but as @rudd rightly states its not that simple, but it is a very good indicator and much better than cases numbers now, imo omicron is a game changer and a way out of the pandemic towards endemic, reason I have been much more positive since the SA numbers in mid Dec starting to show it wasn't such a bad thing this variant.

Things change and so does the advice, maybe something bad may happen down the line but we have to live life with what we know not with what might happen or we will end up paralyzed with fear.

I have high hopes by this summer the world will be in a much better place, I think the UK will be a couple f months ahead and hope as soon as the spring we see an end to daily figures and we move to stage two, living with a new endemic virus, coping like we do atm with flu.
Click to expand...

I think the figures are getting more confusing now with the disconnect we are seeing. I get what @Frijj means about the primarily covid data being misleading however the figure has gone from 75% with Delta to under 50% now so even though we cant use it as an absolute reference point the change does indicate something is happening now that is different.

I had 2 deaths with covid in my patients and neither would have shown on UK stats as they were on ITU for 6-7 weeks before they passed. Its a bloody awful brutal illness when it really hits folk.

Locally in this wave we have had an increase from 11 patients to 58 in hospital but only gone from 4 on ITU to 7 so this wave is very different.

The issue is still we are seeing services cancelled. Loads of folk off on the sick is affecting every part of life in this wave which we didnt see. Im also getting way more calls from people with ongoing longer term symptoms than I had before I presume just from the fact its everywhere. Testing here cant cope so they have largely given up so case numbers where I work are pointless now.

From what I can see things are changing and I agree that the hope is this is the end point for the Pandemic I certainly feel that is the case and the next few months we hopefully should see things return to as normal as we can hope for
 
chrismisterx said:
agree with everything said, my main point of concern atm is how these stats have been spun depending on your point of view. Some media outlets have been terrible all through out this time.

But to my untrained eye there is some simple things which just cant be avoided and surely if you have an ounce of common sense you have to admit ( using you to define us all as a population and not to describe yourself )

The hospitals struggled to cope because of covid, not just because of covid itself but the problems caused with extra PPE being needed, the fact you had to keep covid people away from none covid, that point hasn't been stressed enough, the simple fact of having different wards had to be a logistic nightmare.

We need a quick and easy way to describe to the public how serious this pandemic was, the daily figures worked very well for this and helped drive the public to take care and get a jab, but like I said above starting to feel the tool is doing more harm than good now. These quick and dirty figures couldn't really show the true ins and outs, not many people die of just one cause as i understand it, it tends to be cause and effect, serious lung infection can cause the patient to die of multiple reasons, maybe heart failure brought on by the stress of the lung infection, so its as you rightly say all linked, i dont work in the field to know how its recorded, but a look throughout history shows a lot of deaths caused by AIDS was missed as the secondary cause the reason for death was recorded but the underlaying cause the fact the person had aids was missed, so pneumonia and such like ended up on some death reports and AIDS wasn't mentioned, read a few accounts that many more people died with / of AIDS early days as Doctors didn't just know.

I think there's a lot of confusion around with Covid down the same lines, if you die f a heart attack, that heart attack could have been caused by covid and the person could have been fine if they didn't have covid, lots of ifs and maybes but I think most people understand that its all link and its a tiny amount of people who are in the covid figures who shouldn't be, just by the way it works, i think I read the health bodies think its around 5-6% non covid deaths thats been counted.

Its an interesting subject and i have learnt so much more about human nature and perceived dangers and how we react, take the 4 big killers in this country year on year out people just dont worry about them until it hits home, even flu never known a single person worry about the dangers, but have a death count and ram it home daily and the mental change is quite something, which brings me to the next point, the next big drain on the NHS imo is going to be in the mental health of the staff, for 2 years these staff members have been on the front line working flat out, when it goes quiet I feel we will see a crash and end up with staff suffering from a PTSD effect, I dont trust our Government to have in place protection for that.

vaccines have had an overwhelming positive effect, even an untrained eye like myself can see the drop between deaths and vaccines is linked, hard lock down also have a massive protection value before the vaccines kicked in, cant understand how people can even debate this. I also have believed since mid December that we are entering the end of the pandemic and moving towards endemic, its what the experts hoped for, large scale vaccine up take and a weaker variant, we have both now and think its only a mater of time before the rest of the world catch up.

Sorry for the scatter gun ramblings but I do find the subject interesting and as a non educated person ( no degrees or such like here ), have learnt so much and went out and sourced information the best I can, its the one good thing to come out the pandemic for me, a better understanding of a lot of different subjects in this field.
Click to expand...
I think you're making some pertinent points, and fair play for drawing a positive out of the situation with your learnings.
 
rudd said:
Well, aye. If nothing changes then everything stays the same :lol:

I'm not sure what value a ventilation:death ratio would have or why you mention it? Happy for you to educate me on it though.

One the 26th of Jan the 7 day average of your ratio is about 3 which is the value that we saw Dec 2020 and Jan 2021. Does that mean things are equal? What does it tell you?
Click to expand...
I would expect the number of people in icu to correlate with Covid deaths. All things being equal.
 
SAFCOldie said:
All done in the brain, no spreadsheets etc.
Click to expand...
That explains a lot.
Harry Angstrom said:
I would expect the number of people in icu to correlate with Covid deaths. All things being equal.
Click to expand...
I think there is a much stronger correlation between ICU numbers and deaths but not everyone in ICU is on ventilation so the reliance on ventilation figures to determine the current scale of the problem is flawed.
 
Last edited:
DoctorMick said:
That explains a lot.

I think there is a much stronger correlation between ICU numbers and deaths but not everyone in ICU is on ventilation so the reliance on ventilation figures to determine the current scale of the problem is flawed.
Click to expand...
Not really. The ratios should be the same unless something fundamental has changed.
rudd said:
:lol: Nicely avoided.
Does this mean Jan 2022 and Jan 2021 are equal despite 4-5x deaths in 2021? There's massive differences between then and now.
Logon or register to see this image
Click to expand...
No I mean between July 2021 and now.

I'm not trying to get one over on anyone. It just seems a fairly simple ratio. Number reported on ventilators v deaths.
 
Last edited:

Back
Top