“Guided by the science” In a previous post Owl revealed aspects of a discussion about Coronavirus held with trusted friends knowledgeable in health matters. Here is an extension of the discussion:
With a novel virus there is so much we don’t know that health scientists have to resort to modelling using what little is known and filling in the gaps with assumptions. As soon as real data becomes available from an infected population, there needs to be priority given to collect them and use them to refine the modelling. That is a true scientific approach.
In a document reported here:
The government’s position is spelled out:
- The health service cannot cope with the sheer number of people with symptoms who need to be tested because laboratories are “under significant demand pressures”.
- From now on only the very seriously ill who are already in hospital and people in care homes and prisons where the coronavirus has been detected will get tested.
- Testing services are under such strain that even NHS staff will not be swabbed, despite their key role and the risk of them passing the virus on to patients.
We don’t seem to be collecting data on the number of people “self-isolating” either. So from now on we appear to have no real idea of what is happening accept in terms of hospital admissions yet the government keeps telling us the majority will have only mild symptoms. So how will we know when its all over? (Owl’s experts thought that there might be clever statistical sampling that could be employed but there is no evidence of that).
Here is better informed debate on the subject: from today’s Guardian:
Anthony Costello, a UK paediatrician and former director of the World Health Organization (WHO), said he had written to Whitty asking for testing to continue in the community.
“The key principles from the WHO are intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”
This was how South Korea, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan had brought their case numbers down.
“You can really take people out of the population and make sure they are quarantined. That is vital – before you get to social distancing.”
However, the UK government is stopping tests outside of hospital. “For me and the WHO people I have spoken to, this is absolutely the wrong policy. It would mean it just lets rip,” he said.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO’s director general, expressed his concern on Friday at the end of testing and contact tracing in Britain and some other European countries. “You can’t fight a virus if you don’t know where it is,” he said. “Find, isolate, test and treat every case to break the chains of Covid transmission. Every case we find and treat limits the expansion of the disease.”
As a result Owl does not intent to publish any infection rate data for Devon as is published, for example, on DevonLive. Unfortunately these data are simply unreliable.
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