Week 15: Up, up and away! (with apologies to PanAm slogan!)

Well, it had to happen. While Boris’s pygmies struggle with crazy, old strategies like putting all arrivals into quarantine - Rome burns, and soon all will be clear.

 

Looking back on our government’s ‘strategy’ for dealing with the pandemic crisis, it was ‘too little, too late’. So while the official government website still claims that R values are well below 1, others have been more open with their fears: Dr P. Birrel says “all regions are straddling 1’, Dr Sebastian Funk of LSHTM says the same, and even Sir P. Vallance himself says ‘there is little room for public manoeuvre, R is on the cusp of 1’.

 

We do not know, and cannot prove, that superspreaders are responsible for the general deterioration in our present position, but it is clear in countries far from the USA, as our figures show. We show that the US has certainly experienced a serious deterioration, but also countries such as Germany, Norway and Finland have experienced changes in the same direction, which may or may not lead to definite changes.

 

Here is an extremely worrying image from the FT’s new gizmo, of rates per million for new cases of covid-19. It can be seen that the US has joined Brazil as a country with an increasing rate per million, and who can doubt that we will not be following in a few weeks time?  The justifiable anger of the crowds about the murder of Floyd, superspreaders have undone much of the previous good work of the populations in lock-down (see Blog 12).

                                                              

The situation is much worse than even this, since even countries such as the UK and Canada can be shown to be experiencing an upswing of new cases, as our table shows.

 

                   

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This is not to say that they are all going to experience a serious recurrence, only to draw attention that they are all experiencing a change in the wrong direction, even those like UK and Canada that are not yet showing up.

 

US states that are also clearly showing as heading  for a recurrence are Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Ohio, Georgia and California; but by no means all are showing this.

We cannot be sure just how bad the situation is going to be: to hope for little damage cling to the notion that most of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations occurred outside, but on the other hand plenty of events were inside. In sheer size, the US is likely to be hit earlier and more completely than other countries, but it seems likely that other countries will also have their own problems.

 

 

                  Number of new cases of covid-19; rates/M

              June 11                 June 24             Difference

 

USA                   6043                     7090                    + 1047

 

Canada              2513                     2701                    +  108

 

UK                     4273                     4510                    +  237

 

Germany            2213                     2285                    +    77

 

Norway              1581                     1614                     +    33

 

Mexico               1001                     1614                    +  405

 

Finland              1270                     1291                      +   21

 

 

Apology and retraction: In my last blog (No 14) I said that Chile should be seen as a country now heading for a second upswing. After cold shower, I must concede that this was wrong – the increase in prevalence has never stopped. Think of this as something that happens when the population stops believing what the government tells them to do: non co-operation is easy to understand. Unfortunately there will soon be places other than the USA to show the real thing: a new take-off after a period of stability

 

 

David Goldberg

28^th June

117 days served, no real prospect of release unless  a dramatic breakthrough produces an effective vaccine fairly soon.