{"id":50,"date":"2020-06-04T09:05:00","date_gmt":"2020-06-04T08:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drbannonsblog.aprendo.co.uk\/drbannonsblog_wp\/2020\/06\/04\/covid19-what-are-the-chances\/"},"modified":"2021-03-25T08:36:36","modified_gmt":"2021-03-25T08:36:36","slug":"covid19-what-are-the-chances","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drbannonsblog.aprendo.co.uk\/drbannonsblog_wp\/2020\/06\/04\/covid19-what-are-the-chances\/","title":{"rendered":"COVID19 – what are the chances??"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the age of many new and not many welcome things. Yet the incredible availability of data should now be able to tell us far more about COVID19 and what this means for us. In particular, its comparison to pandemic flu, which is sometimes touted in cyberspace and in politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

So let’s look back and see how many people have been infected and what happened to them?<\/span>

<\/span> <\/p>\n

What are the overall chances of dying from COVID19?<\/span><\/span><\/h3>\n

<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

Public Health Englands latest tally<\/a> is perhaps the place to start. As of the 3rd June there has been a total of 217,076 cases and 35,456 deaths. The case fatality rate is thus 1.6%, but this of course misses all those people out there who don’t get tested due to mild or absent symptoms, or because they don’t want to or can’t get tested.<\/span>

<\/span>Based on this, the overall mortality in the population varies from 30 to 70 people per 100,000 people. In Devon with our wonderful ‘peripherality’ our chance, so far, of dying from COVID19 has been 0.03%, rising to 0.078 in the current hot spots in the North. <\/span>

<\/span>Put another way, 99.93% of people in Devon have survived thus far. However this is not to minimise the pandemic or its effects, the average death rate of 50 deaths per 100,000 people adds up to a 32,000 deaths across the UK. <\/span>

<\/span><\/p>\n

What happens to people who do get infected?<\/span><\/h3>\n

Information from Public Health England offers an idea how many people in the community<\/a> have come across COVID19 in terms of developing antibodies. The tests were done on blood donors to give a sort of baseline of the number of people in the community who have been infected. <\/span>

<\/span>Of course we assume the test are reliable. Like anything else, they are far from perfect. <\/a>Yet they are more likely to be accurate in this sample of blood donors who would not have been having active symptoms at the time of sampling. People seeking tests for symptoms might not have generated the antibodies the tests measure. <\/span>

<\/span>So this represents the best measure of background level we have right now.<\/span>

<\/span>
<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
UK Prevalence of COVID19 <\/b><\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Results vary across the county, but my previous guesstimate of about 2% in the South West turns out not to be far off the 4% these figures reveal. <\/span>

<\/span>Put another way, 96% of us down here in the South West have not come across the infection and nor have 86% of Londoners.<\/span>

<\/span>With such an infections disease, this is rather a surprise. Either the restrictions have been very successful, or there is more to COVID19 immunity than meets the eye. I think there is but that’s another story.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, lets get the back of the envelope out:<\/b><\/span>

<\/span>The figures show that about 8% of people have developed immunity to the virus. For a UK population that represents about 5 million people.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n


<\/span>With 60,000 hospital admissions that means that your chance of being hospitalised with your COVID12 infection is about 1.2%<\/span>

<\/span>The study below shows the overall hospital mortality from COVID is 26%.<\/span>

<\/span>So the overall mortality so far for anyone infected is 0.3%, or just less than one in 300.<\/b><\/span>

<\/b><\/span> <\/p>\n

What happens to those admitted to hospital?<\/span><\/h3>\n

It is reassuring to know that for the majority of people COVID infection will not be a problem. <\/span>

<\/span>However for those with more severe symptoms hospital admission is necessary and this has so far been the case for about 60,000 people in the UK with peaks over March and April, declining slowly since.<\/span>

<\/span>A paper from<\/a> the “International Severe Adult Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium” <\/b>otherwise know as ISARIC detailed what happened to over 20,000 <\/b><\/span>hospital <\/span>admissions<\/span> to UK hospitals since the onset of the pandemic. This represents about 35% of the total 60,000 COVID-19 admissions in the UK in between 6th February and 19th April, when cases were increasing rapidly.<\/span>

<\/span>In words and graphs, this is what they found.<\/span>

<\/span>Overall:<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n