Latest analysis of the Covid-19 tracker app shows rate of new symptoms being reported has slowed significantly in the past few days.

covid.joinzoe.com /post/covid-isolation

The latest analysis of data (14 April) from the COVID Symptom Tracker app, used by over 2 million people, shows the rate of new symptoms being reported nationally has slowed down significantly in the past few days.  The latest figures estimate that 1.4 million people in the UK aged 20-69 have symptomatic COVID, a fall from 1.9 million on the 1st April. You can read more about our machine learning model to predict symptomatic COVID-19 here.

These figures suggest that the nation staying home is having a big impact on the spread of the virus in the UK. The drop in new symptoms indicates that although the number of hospital admissions and deaths from COVID are currently rising, they should start to fall in about two weeks provided social distancing continues. This two week lag is caused by the delay between symptoms starting and becoming very severe.  

This data from millions of people lines up with what has been reported by NHS digital based on much smaller numbers. They show a decline in the number of calls to NHS 111 with COVID since the 22nd March1. 

While symptoms have been decreasing nationally, in all areas there are still many people with active symptoms of COVID. Therefore this data supports both the success of lockdown, and the importance of maintaining it. It also shows that individual areas vary. Most of the country’s larger cities like London, Birmingham, Glasgow, and Liverpool continue to have very high levels of symptoms in the community, even this far into lockdown. Other hotspots include South Wales. There are significantly higher levels of symptoms across the Midlands, the North of England and Southern Scotland than in the South West of England. 

Developed by researchers at King’s College London and healthcare science company, ZOE, the COVID Symptom Tracker has been used to log symptoms by over 2 million people across the UK, with over 10 million individual reports so far. Members of the public are using the app to track their daily health whether they are healthy or showing potential COVID symptoms. It is also being used by healthcare and hospital workers nationwide so their increased risk can be recorded.

“It is really encouraging to see that the rate of new symptoms being reported is beginning to fall. Even though hospital admissions and deaths are still on the rise, we hope that these figures offer a much needed light at the end of the tunnel. 

We have been totally blown away by the public’s response to the app. On the first day we saw one million members of the public download the app making it one of the most successful first days for an app ever, and already probably the UK’s largest citizen science project. The altruism of the UK public combined with modern technology is allowing us to rapidly collect huge amounts of invaluable data to help us better understand this deadly virus. We would like to take this opportunity to thank every single person who is already participating, and would urge everyone else to download the app and check in every day, whether you are experiencing any symptoms or feeling fine.” Professor Tim Spector, King’s College London 

The research team at King’s College London and ZOE are working round the clock to  analyse the data to generate new insights about the disease and its progression. For example, they have discovered that loss of smell or taste is more predictive of COVID in the population than the classical symptoms of fever and cough. An interactive map allowing anyone to see the distribution of COVID in their area is available at covid.joinzoe.com as well as frequent science updates.

The researchers have developed a statistical model which analyses millions of COVID Symptom Tracker data points, including thousands of people who have had tests for COVID, in order to predict which combination of symptoms indicate someone is likely to test positive for  COVID. This model is then applied to the UK population aged 20-69 and then mapped to the regions of the country accounting for age and gender differences to provide maps over time. The most predictive individual symptoms, in order of importance were: lack of taste & smell, fatigue, shortness of breath, fever and persistent cough. The model estimates that 3.5% of these app users would be positive if tested. As contributors continue to share symptoms, and we link it to other health records, the model will become more accurate and sophisticated.

The app is available to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play here.

“For our homework today we will compare two coronavirus press conferences on different sides of the Atlantic.”

Quentin Letts, Political Sketch writer  www.thetimes.co.uk 

Exhibit one came from London, England, where the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, took questions via the usual televised link.

The dapper Mr Sunak was his usual shimmering self, wanting to make sure everyone was safe and well.

Exhibit two? The free-for-all at the White House in Washington. Did you see it? Amazing. Messier than a Tyson Fury fight. Donald Trump stood at his lectern and pretty much pelted the journalists with cowpats.

He began by showing a campaign-style video which bigged up a certain D Trump, various folk saying what a hero he was and that the press should do more to report that. Mr Trump stood to one side of the stage and nodded in agreement at these stirring tributes to his own brilliance.

When the reporters suggested that a coronavirus press conference, at a time of mass deaths, was perhaps not the place for such a film, the president dropped open his mouth in astonishment at their wetness.

He reloaded his muck-spreader and gave them another prolonged splattering, saying he had played a blinder and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. He told the media they were liars and generally hated by the public. A woman from CBS started to chew his ankle. He tried to flick her off. She clung on. He closed his eyes in disbelief and told her she was a disgrace and a fake.

He also had his science guy, Anthony Fauci, tiptoe up to the lectern to recant apparent criticisms he had made about Mr President’s handling of the crisis. These had been misinterpreted, adjudged Fauci. The CBS ankle-biter wanted to know if Fauci had been forced to say this. Fauci tried pulling a “puh-lease, do us a favour, lady” face but looked more as if he was about to start blubbing. And so it continued. Mayhem. Washington sketchwriters have all the fun.

It remains my duty to return to Mr Sunak’s presentation: a chirrup of country birdsong, the creak of a stationmaster’s barrow, Adlestrop in the afternoon. All right, not quite that peaceful. Mr Sunak was speaking soon after the Office for Budgetary Responsibility suggested we could be looking at a 35 per cent economic hit. That’s shrinkage even worse than what I did to my jumper when I put it on the wrong washing-machine programme. BBC presenters expressed astonishment. The only thing surprising was their surprise. Mr Sunak hoped the hit would be short-term. A rapid bounce was possible. But he was not sure.

“British farmers are being forced to fly in fruit and vegetable pickers from Romania using specialist charter jets to keep up with demand during the coronavirus lockdown.” – First article.

“However, over 9,000 people have answered a call from an alliance of labour providers to the fresh produce sector urging Brits to apply for paid work on farms, while individual suppliers of salad, berries and organic vegetables have begun their own campaigns…. it is difficult to find those who are suitable, in the right location, and not likely to leave as soon as their jobs return.” – Second article.

Graeme Paton, Transport Correspondent www.thetimes.co.uk 

The first charter flight operating between Bucharest and London Stansted will land tomorrow, bringing about 180 farm workers to the UK from eastern Europe. The plane is the first of up to six to operate in the coming months to keep farms staffed with labourers.

It follows warnings from the Country Land & Business Association that travel restrictions imposed to prevent a spread of coronavirus were leaving agricultural companies short of staff. Many British workers who have been made unemployed during the lockdown have applied for farming jobs but it is not believed to be enough to fill all vacancies.

The chartered Boeing 737 will arrive at Stansted tomorrow before the workers are transported by bus to sites across the southeast and Lincolnshire. The flight has been chartered by an unnamed food produce company. Passengers on board the aircraft will be expected to maintain social distancing and will not be allowed to leave Romania if they display any symptoms of coronavirus.

Brits urged to help pick veg

Nina Pullman  wickedleeks.riverford.co.uk 

British people out of work or facing income losses due to the coronavirus outbreak are being urged to apply for jobs on farms ahead of a huge anticipated shortage of European pickers.

Over 9,000 people have answered a call from an alliance of labour providers to the fresh produce sector urging Brits to apply for paid work on farms, while individual suppliers of salad, berries and organic vegetables have begun their own campaigns.

The UK’s biggest salad grower, G’s Fresh, has launched a national recruitment drive called ‘Feed our Nation’ for 2,500 jobs on its farms in Cambridgeshire, East Anglia and West Sussex, after seasonal workers from Central Europe, many of whom return every year, were unable to travel.

The company is appealing to those who may have lost jobs or income due to coronavirus, hospitality workers where restaurants, pubs and bars have closed, as well as school leavers or university students. Jobs include tractor drivers, field workers and engineers, and pay is around £400 a week plus piece work for some roles.

“Every day we’re expecting the borders to close. We’re already facing challenges bringing people over from Romania and Bulgaria,” said HR director, Beverly Dixon. “Like many businesses, we were looking at putting on planes, but people don’t necessarily want to get on them. And they’re looking at the news and seeing the UK is getting worse.

“Our season doesn’t start until 22 April, when we will start picking radish and lettuce, followed by celery and beetroot. The government are rightly focusing on today and tomorrow – this is an issue that is going to hit us at the end of next month.”

The UK is approaching its summer growing season. 

The UK’s fresh produce industry requires around 70,000 seasonal workers a year to help pick seasonal fruit and veg, many of which begin to come into season at the end of next month.

Currently many growers are busy planting for the new season, as well as picking the last of the winter crops, which have had an season extended due to recent warm temperature.

“We’re not slowing down on planting. If anything, we’re looking at where we can plant more. If people aren’t going to be going on holiday in July and August there could be a stronger demand,” said Dixon.

Since launching its campaign on BBC lunchtime news, Dixon said the company’s inbox had been filled and “the phones have started ringing”.

In Devon, organic veg box company Riverford is preparing for the start of the English growing season when it would usually take on around 50 extra seasonal workers. The company also buys from a network of organic growers across the UK and Europe.

Ed Scott, Riverford’s harvest and polytunnel manager, said: “We were due 14 experienced, returning seasonal workers over the next two to three weeks: we’re getting one, we think.

“But there are thousands of UK-based workers who have just had their lives turned upside-down.”

Since putting out a seasonal harvest worker job advert, Scott said he has had no shortage of applicants, including many British nationals, but said it is difficult to find those who are suitable, in the right location, and not likely to leave as soon as their jobs return.

“We put out a generic ‘seasonal harvest worker’ job advert which went live on the website on Friday and so far we’ve had 54 applicants,” he said.

“Some are patently unsuitable, some are desperate, some are from Brighton/London/Manchester. Our ‘experienced’ workers are going to be thin on the ground.”

Dixon said G’s, which supplies major supermarkets as well as Riverford, is still relying on some experienced seasonal workers returning who will be able to help train new recruits.

“A lot of people are potentially out of work. We hope that those who may not have considered horticulture as a job may now think again. It’s physical work, it gets you outside, and we are classed as ‘key workers’,” she said.

It has been notoriously difficult to persuade British workers to apply for seasonal work on farms, as a physically-demanding job that is outdoors in often unpredictable weather.

But Dixon said the outbreak of Covid-19 means “all bets are off”. “With the level of unemployment that is currently out there, there are real opportunities for people to get outside, keep fit, and stay in work,” she said.

A video of yet another cliff fall in Sidmouth has emerged after a pedestrian spotted “a huge cloud of dust.”

No doubt Stuart Hughes will get excited about this again. Cliff falls are a natural event Stuart, that’s why cliffs look the way they do with near vertical faces. Soft sandstone erodes relatively fast and even Owl has witnessed a number over the years. Video can be seen on devonlive link as well as facebook.

Chloe Parkman www.devonlive.com

The footage was shot by Emily Hayter, when she was out walking along Sidmouth town beach yesterday (Monday April 13).

Emily said: “I suddenly saw a huge dust cloud so I could tell it must have been a fairly big fall!”

The red cloud of dust looms over Sidmouth

This particular landslide follows several others in Sidmouth over the last couple of months.

This incident captured by Emily was uploaded and shared onto Sidmouth’s community Facebook page, where other members of the group were quick to share their images.

Fellow group member, Julie Barber, was at the top of peak hill when she noticed the vast red shadow looming over Sidmouth.

Julie said: “I was looking at the view and noticed it.”

One viewer said: “We could see this from Budleigh.”

Back in March, DevonLive reported on Cllr Stuart Hughes, who called for emergency action to be taken due to the ‘risk to life’ that the latest cliff fall imposed.

Authorities urged people to stay away from the cliffs and enjoy them “from a distance.”

Proposed action to be taken involved that of The Beach Management Scheme.

Construction cost of the Beach Management Scheme, being the preferred scheme in order to protect the town and the cliffs, is estimated to cost around £8.9 million, with around £1million still needed to be found by the end of 2020 at the very latest.

The UK government’s urgent efforts to ramp up coronavirus testing are being led by a hereditary peer and former corporate lobbyist who gave money to health secretary Matt Hancock’s failed Conservative party leadership campaign.

“Lord Bethell brings considerable skills, qualifications and experience to the role.”

Soon find out how good he is. 100,000 tests a day by the end of the month is the target.

Harry Davies  www.theguardian.com 

Lord Bethell, a Tory party donor with limited ministerial experience, was hastily appointed last month as an unpaid minister at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) where he is understood to have been made “lead minister” for testing.

Bethell, who until June 2018 ran an influential lobbying firm in Westminster, chaired Hancock’s unsuccessful leadership bid last year and donated £5,000 to the campaign, according to Electoral Commission data. He made a separate donation to the Conservatives later in 2019.

The peer, who now works directly for Hancock, has one of the most important ministerial portfolios in the government’s response to Covid-19 as it races to meet its target of conducting 100,000 tests a day by the end of April. Testing is seen as critical to stopping the spread of the deadly virus and easing lockdown conditions.

In recent weeks, Bethell has steered emergency legislation through the House of Lords, headed the DHSC’s emergency procurement efforts, and held discussions with senior US and Chinese government officials.

The new minister, otherwise known as the fifth Baron Bethell, entered the Lords in 2018 after winning a hereditary peers’ byelection, decided by an electorate of 47 Conservative hereditary peers. Bethell’s peerage was originally bestowed on his great-grandfather in 1922.

Before taking up his seat in Westminster, the peer ran lobbying and public relations firm Westbourne Communications, which advised companies such as the fracking firm Cuadrilla and taxi-sharing giant Uber. According to his LinkedIn profile, he helped Uber by “coordinating [its] fight against the black taxi driver”.

Westbourne, which Bethell sold in 2018, represented businesses with major NHS contracts, such as Ingeus UK and Healthlogistics. In 2017, Healthlogistics boasted how it had made “major inroads into NHS trusts” providing data management services to hospitals.

The lobbying firm was also reportedly behind the launch of Doctors for Reform, a campaign backed by the rightwing thinktank Reform, which advocated opening up the NHS to private healthcare providers and introducing insurance-based funding to the health system.

In a statement to the Guardian, a DHSC spokesman said: “Lord Bethell brings considerable skills, qualifications and experience to the role.”

He added: “The government’s response to coronavirus is based on the latest scientific evidence and we are working with a world renowned team of clinicians, public health experts and scientists around the clock to keep this country safe.”

Bethell frequently posts updates on Twitter on DHSC’s response to Covid-19 and last week shared a picture of himself with the prime minister’s partner, Carrie Symonds, and their dogs. In another tweet, he acknowledged the challenges facing the government: “Hitting 100k tests a day is a massive target. We’ve huge obstacles to overcome.”

Dozens of people who ‘have never done anything like this before’ are helping the Ottery St Mary community cope with the coronavirus crisis.

Philippa Davies www.sidmouthherald.co.uk

A network of volunteers was set up when the lockdown began, to make sure that people forced into self-isolation could have food and medical supplies delivered to their homes.

They are also helping local traders to survive.

Dean Stewart, an Ottery town councillor and chair of the Ottery Business Forum, is a spokesman for the network.

He said: “Part of our volunteer effort is supporting businesses by promoting those that are closed to customers but still doing deliveries, and the traders that are providing a takeaway service, for example.

“It’s also helpful for us to keep track of how our food is arriving in the town and looking at supply networks.

“As the crisis goes on, I think some shops may start to combine supply chains and look at working more closely together.

“We hope that one of the most positive changes after lockdown might be a bigger voice and bigger contribution from the ‘Ottery Women’ – we have dozens of people who have never done anything like this before who have come forward, taken roles with responsibility and really done incredible jobs. I hope we find a role for them.

“Post lockdown, we need think about how we support businesses to secure their joint future – and the town council and others need to get involved in making sure we work on tourism, history, culture, offers and attractions to encourage tourists into town and spending their cash.”

Around 400 people signed up to join the volunteer network in mid-March.

It was set up by Ottery Town Council, the Coleridge Medical Centre and Ottery Help, and has been working in groups, each focusing on a section of the town comprising around 100 homes.

They have been contacting the most vulnerable residents, and those in most need of help, by emailing and distributing leaflets.

All volunteers carry photo ID and have been registered with the police.

Anyone needing assistance is asked to contact help@online.ottery or call 01404 600013.

From supplies of personal protective equipment (PPE) for frontline staff, to the government’s testing policy and efforts to acquire ventilators for those in critical care, ministers stand accused of a series of mixed messages and U-turns in their response to the pandemic.

Frances Perraudin  www.theguardian.com 

PPE

Amid growing criticism by NHS staff that they were not getting the equipment they needed to protect themselves, the Department of Health and Social Care issued a statement in early April refusing to acknowledge a shortage of kit and instead saying there had been an initial problem with distribution.

“In the past two weeks the NHS supply chain have delivered 397m pieces of PPE equipment,” it said. “While we are confident that enough supply is now reaching the frontline, we appreciate there were limited distribution problems to begin with while we dealt with a new demand caused by this emerging epidemic.”

A week after that, on 10 April the health secretary enraged medical unions when he adjusted the government’s position to saying there was enough PPE to go around, but only if workers did not overuse it. “We need everyone to treat PPE like the precious resource it is,” Matt Hancock said.

It was three days later, on Monday evening, that the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, finally admitted there had been supply problems, saying there was “a competitive market out there”.

Testing

Announcing that the government would move from the contain phase to the delay phase of its strategy to tackle the coronavirus outbreak, Boris Johnson told a press conference on 12 March that those with any symptoms should stay home for seven days. Appearing alongside him, the chief medical officer for England said they would stop testing people with mild suspected cases. “We will pivot all of the testing capacity to identifying people in hospitals who have symptoms,” Chris Witty said.

Four days later, the World Health Organization told countries battling Covid-19 that testing should form the backbone of their response to the pandemic. “Test, test, test,” said the body’s head, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

But one of England’s deputy chief medical officers, Jenny Harries, dismissed this as a message aimed at less developed countries. “There comes a point in a pandemic where that is not an appropriate intervention,” she said.

In an apparent U-turn on the initial strategy, Hancock announced on 2 April a new aim of increasing testing to 100,000 a day by the end of the month.

In Monday’s press conference, nearly five weeks after first turning away from a policy of testing outside a hospital setting, Whitty said: “One of the things we want to do is to extend the amount of testing of people in care homes as the ability to test ramps up over the next few weeks.”

Ventilators

 Medical ventilators being built at the OES medical supply company in Witney, Oxfordshire, on 23 March. Photograph: Neil Hall/EPA

After first implying that they had not taken part in an EU scheme to source life-saving ventilators because the UK was “making its own efforts” after Brexit, Downing Street admitted on 26 March that it had failed to take part in the programme because it had accidentally missed the deadline. In another twist, it was then revealed that British officials had taken part in four meetings where EU projects to bulk-buy medical kit were discussed – the earliest of them in January.

Speaking to the BBC on 5 April, Hancock said the UK was on track to have ventilators for 18,000 patients, but admitted they may not be in place in time for the peak in hospital admissions – expected by the end of the month. He said that 1,500 ventilators should come into use in the NHS in the following week.

However, the prime minister’s spokesman said on Monday that there had been an increase of just 200 in the previous seven days.

Masks

Asked about the decision by countries including the US to advise people to wear face masks, England’s other deputy chief medical officer, Jonathan Van-Tam, said on 3 April: “In terms of the hard evidence, and what the UK government recommends, we do not recommend face masks for general wearing.”

Two weeks later, amid growing calls for the UK to change its advice, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, told Monday’s Downing Street press conference: “The evidence on masks is much more persuasive for masks stopping you giving it to somebody than it is for you preventing you catching it.

“We have a review ongoing at the moment on the evidence around masks. If that review concludes that the position should change, we will of course make that recommendation and if it stays the same we will make that clear as well.”

“The cliche is true. Only time will tell, but that time starts now. The task is to scrutinise the evidence and let it tell the truth, not just the truth we want it to tell.”

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist www.theguardian.com

The trickle is starting. Spain, Austria, Italy, China, possibly Germany and the US will this week begin, however hesitantly, the great return to work. As others hold back and some may even toughen lockdowns, the result will be the most extraordinary mass experiment in history.

The outcome should go some way to settle the central argument of coronavirus policy, of lockdown and suppression v mitigation and herd immunity. It will also condition a later political blame game, who was right and who was wrong.

In this experiment, only one thing should matter: the evidence. It is the lack of it that has clearly determined the wide diversity in policy responses in different countries. We see a potentially fatal disease, Covid-19, of unusual infectiousness. Yet we have no idea how infectious, because lack of testing means we cannot tell if vast numbers of people have it to some degree, or just a few. The science disagrees. We have no idea if fatality is the outcome for 5% of victims, or 1%, or 0.3% – and therefore how drastic should be the response.

Statistics are in chaos. Death “rates” lag behind deaths. Deaths are confused with “hospital deaths”. Headlines highlight “most cases per nation” or “most deaths per nation”, not deaths per million. Yet we are at the mercy of these statistics. They are the raw material of the modellers, and their models are the sacred entrails into which policymakers peer each day, to see what level of lockdown to impose on their people.

Not surprisingly, science is giving way to value judgments. Authoritarian regimes are diverging from libertarian ones. Countries in total lockdown (Spain and France) are compared with countries practising social distancing (Sweden and Korea) and those such as Brazil, which does none of those things. As David McCoy said in the Guardian last week, we simply don’t have models that balance “the direct, visible and dramatic harms of Covid-19 with the more indirect, chronic and hidden social and economic harms of lockdown”.

I assume that hard evidence will now start to emerge. There will be a wide comparative spectrum, of outliers and controls. We should learn to what degree were face masks and two-metre separation efficacious, as against mass isolation and economic collapse. So far, such evidence is in desperately short supply. Soon it will be on the ground, in the world’s factories and on its pavements.

Economics has taken a terrible battering this last month, because it is thought to put “money before lives”. But all options cost lives, which is why political judgment has moved to centre stage. Businesses are ruined, dreams shattered, people die. As in the conundrum of the swerving driver, do you avoid one death now, but is it at the cost of five down the road?

The cliche is true. Only time will tell, but that time starts now. The task is to scrutinise the evidence and let it tell the truth, not just the truth we want it to tell.