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John Bye Profile picture
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9 Dec, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Covid sceptics like to dismiss most people dying from the virus as so old they were about to die anyway and somehow don't count.

Ambient music pioneer Harold Budd was 84 when he died yesterday.

His latest album was released last Friday.

He also composed a soundtrack this year.
We'll sadly never know how much more music he might have written had covid-19 not come along.

But people reaching that age have in many ways already beaten the odds. Life expectancy for an 85 year old male is about another 6 years, in both the UK and US.

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati… Image
Behind the statistics, every death from covid-19 is tragic.

Just because someone was old or had pre-existing conditions making them more vulnerable to covid doesn't mean they couldn't have led a full, happy and productive life for many more years if the virus hadn't intervened.
As for me, today I'll be listening to Harold Budd's final album.

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
12 Dec
The full results of the Liverpool LFT trial have been released.

False positives are much lower than expected, but false negatives much worse.

Liverpool has now paused plans to use the tests on care home visitors, following Sheffield and Manchester.

gov.uk/government/pub…
The good news is the LFTs only gave 2 false positives out of 3,199 tests checked by PCR. That gives a false positive rate of 0.07%, far less than the 0.38% reported in initial tests.

The bad news is they missed 23 of the 45 PCR positives, giving a 51% false negative rate!
We already knew the Innova LFTs were less sensitive than PCR, but they were meant to catch 95% of people with "higher viral load".

In the Liverpool trial though they missed 15% of people who were positive at below 20 cycles on PCR, and 47% of people positive at 20-25 cycles!
Read 16 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
10 Dec
You'd think the Brexit Party would have other things on their mind at the moment, but instead they seem to have latched onto a misleading story about false positives.

Unsurprisingly it doesn't show what they think it shows.
For starters, Cambridge are using pooled testing, which none of the regular test system is.

This means mixing several samples together to reduce the number of tests you need to run, then if a pool is positive you individually test everyone in that pool to see who had the virus.
But a recent study suggests pooling causes false positives.

They tested 17,945 pools. 2,084 of them were positive. When they tested the people in those pools individually, they didn't get any positives from 92.

92 ÷ 17,945 = 0.5% false positive rate.

medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Read 9 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
4 Dec
This week's Test & Trace report shows cases falling sharply in the week to November 25th, thanks to lockdown 2.0.

There's also a sudden big improvement in contact tracing performance (which turns out to be smoke and mirrors), and some odd revisions to old pillar 1 testing data.
Cases in England were falling sharply towards the end of November, with both the number and percentage of people testing positive falling by about a quarter compared to the previous week.

There's a small drop in the number of tests done, but it may well be due to reduced demand.
In case there's any doubt about the effectiveness of lockdowns, regional data shows clearly that all areas where cases were level or still rising when lockdown 2.0 began started falling in perfect unison about a week later.

The question now is whether that can be sustained.
Read 15 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
2 Dec
This week's ONS weekly deaths report again shows deaths well above normal in the week to November 20th.

All causes deaths were 21% above the five year average, meaning 2,169 extra deaths.

And still well outside the normal range (showing by the dotted lines on the graph below). Image
Excess deaths are also still tracking the same curve as all measures of covid-19 deaths. Image
And as usual, most death certificates mentioning covid-19 listed it as the underlying cause of death (ie, they died "from" it not "with" it).

87.5% in the latest week. Image
Read 5 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
1 Dec
The government has now released some info on how LFTs compared to PCR in field tests in Liverpool. h/t @ScienceShared

It's not great.

LFTs found about half the people that tested positive with PCR. Which is a little better than my back of the envelope estimate.

But... Image
It only found "more than" 70% of people "with higher viral loads, who are likely to be the most infectious".

Far less than the 95% it managed in the original Porton Down trial, which was in a lab using spiked samples, not members of the public shoving swabs up their noses.
So although the LFTs have found a few hundred cases that would have been missed otherwise, they still missed half the people with the virus that were tested.

Including 20-30% of the ones most likely to be infectious.

Source: Community testing prospectus
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
Read 8 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
24 Nov
The latest ONS report shows another rise in excess deaths in the week to November 13th.

All causes deaths were 18% above the five year average, meaning 1,917 extra deaths.

Still far above the highest number of deaths we've seen in any of the last five years.
And excess deaths are still following almost exactly the same curve as all measures of covid-19 deaths (due to, involving, and within 28 days of a test).

This is not a coincidence.
As usual, the vast majority of death certificates in that week which mentioned covid-19 had it listed as the underlying cause of death - 88%.

In other words, people are mostly dying "from" covid-19, not "with" it.
Read 7 tweets

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