COVID-19 Outbreak (Update: More than 2.9M cases and 132,313 deaths in US)

Some updates from the UK. The Office of National Statistics released a bulletin yesterday on their Infection Survey Pilot. This is a study intending to provide estimates of how many people have COVID-19 at a given point in time.

The early estimate is that 0.24% of England are positive for COVID-19, with around 136,000 currently infected.

Caveats are that's an early estimate, the data involved in this sample came from self-administered throat and nose swabs with an unknown false-positive/negative rate, and there's no profiling there (i.e. we don't know what proportion of that estimated 136,000 have recently been infected, and what proportion might have had it and recovered but still be testing positive). There are also blood samples being taken to determine what proportion of the population has antibodies to COVID-19, but they haven't published results from that. The first regular release of results is due on the 14th, so it'll be interesting to see that.

Also, today, our government has published their plan (pdf) outlining their recovery strategy. It mentions in there that the number of patients in hospital in the UK is 'under 13,500 as of 4 May', and that '27% of NHS critical care beds in the UK were occupied by a COVID-19 patient on 4 May - compared to 51% on 10 April'. (Note those figures are for the UK, not just England, although ~85% of the population of the UK is in England).

At a crude measure, that would indicate around 8.5% of those currently infected being hospitalised.

There's also a report on the first reported 8250 patients critically ill with COVID-19 (pdf) published by ICNARC (intensive care national audit & research centre) on 8th May. You can also get a table of the underlying data, linked from here: https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports

That goes into a lot of detail about the demographics of those being admitted (sex, age, ethnicity, medical history), and outcomes. If I get a chance I might come back to that in a bit, but if someone else wants to take a look, please do, there's some interesting data in there that's worth highlighting (71.3% male, 91.7% of those admitted previously able to live without assistance in daily activities...).

But in terms of how many people are currently in critical care, it indicates that around 2,107 were last reported as still receiving critical care, which, in line with the figures above, would indicate a crude rate of roughly ~15% of those hospitalised, or ~1.3% of those currently infected.

Those estimates are broadly in line with those earlier in the thread, so on the face of it, that would appear to indicate that there is not a huge quantity (millions) of people who've silently had it without knowing as some have suggested and we would have a very long road ahead of us in terms of building up natural immunity in the population (assuming that's viable otherwise). But again, it's an early release of data, so I'll keep an eye on it as they publish more.

The UK government plan isn't great by the way, and has led to a lot of confusion. They've switched from a 'stay home' message to a 'stay alert' message, although the devolved nations (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) aren't following that. On the one hand, they seem to be saying it's very serious and we can't significantly lift restrictions yet, and at the same time, they seem to think that lifting some restrictions (allowing people to meet individual people from other households outside, exercise outside as much as you like, encouraging some more businesses to resume activity) will somehow lower the rate of infection and allow some primary school years to resume in three weeks. Mmm.