How many people could still die of #Covid19 in the UK?
It’s an unpalatable question I know, but is worth pondering given cases are on the rise in many parts of Europe.
The good news is that, well, this thread contains better news than you might have thought.
First, the data:
Here’s the big picture. Covid may have been out of the headlines in recent months but the death toll has been creeping higher.
Now up to nearly 168k in the UK, 142k in England.
These are deaths where Covid is mentioned in certificate. Abt 90% were directly attributed to Covid.
You can split it into three broad phases:
1 Wave 1 last spring. 2. Wave 2 (arguably two waves in one) last winter.
3 The period since May.
Here’s the death toll in each (for England). Raising the question: what next. How many more deaths…?
Some of the boffins at @LSHTM inc @Lloyd_Chapman_ & @AdamJKucharski have an intriguing paper out with some intriguing answers. They’ve looked at lots of factors from age breakdown to vaccine status to previous infections. Full thing here: medrxiv.org/node/433124.ex…
In short, and at the risk of oversimplifying, their model suggests that if Covid were to spread across the population now, there would be just over 10k deaths in England. Clearly more deaths is nothing to celebrate. But the level is strikingly low.
When you adjust for population, England faces the lowest “maximum remaining COVID-19 deaths” of any country the epidemiologists at @LSHTM looked at in Europe. Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Romania, on the other hand, look v exposed.
Why is England's potential mortality so low here when, say, Germany is so high?
Mostly cos of vaccines.
Germany has more unvaccinated elderly people. So unvaccinated people (the red slice) is v v big in the German potential deaths numbers. V small in UK where so many are jabbed.
Do the @LSHTM numbers mean England/UK can relax this winter?
Let’s have a look.
Here are the deaths figs for the top 5 (eg most vulnerable) countries acc to their model. Indeed deaths are rising there quite sharply. Seems to bear out their analysis.
Now look at the countries with the lowest “potential deaths”. Most of them do indeed have low deaths numbers.
BUT now look at Czech rep and Hungary. Deaths are rising v sharply there despite the @LSHTM numbers implying they’re less vulnerable.
So the fact that England has a comparatively low level of modelled vulnerability doesn’t necessarily preclude a spike in deaths.
But this analysis is worth keeping in mind next time you hear someone shouting we’re just as vulnerable - or more vulnerable! - than our neighbours.
*deleted and corrected a tweet above which mixed up Hungary and Bulgaria. Apologies to all Hungarians and Bulgarians.
How many more people could die of Covid in this country? The answer, according to a new study, is strikingly low.
There are provisos aplenty; but there's also hope. Here's a longer explanation about the new study: news.sky.com/story/covid-19…
Here, for those who prefer their charts in video form, is a quick run through the numbers on how many people have died from #COVID19 and how high the toll could eventually get
🚨This is the story of how UK & EU goods are STILL going into Russia in vast quantities, despite sanctions.
Of how the economic war waged by the G7 is failing.
Of how I witnessed sanctions rules broken in plain sight.
But above all else it’s the story of a chart... 🧵
Here’s the chart in question. It shows you UK car exports to Russia.
And there’s a clear story here.
Look: when Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK (and for that matter most of the G7) imposed sanctions on Russia. So exports of cars to Russia stopped.
End of story, right?
Wrong, because now look at what happened to exports of UK cars to countries in the Caucasus and Central Asia.
At precisely the same moment as sanctions were imposed on Russia, exports of these cars to Russian neighbours suddenly ROSE.
🧵Here’s the extraordinary story of a Frenchman who came up with an invention that changed the world, before events took a twist.
It’s a rollercoaster story that just might help us solve one of the biggest challenges facing humanity.
Sounds far-fetched, I know, but read on…
The man in question was Nicolas Leblanc.
Born in 1742, he trained as a doctor but was always short of cash. He became the physician to Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans - a minor French royal. Like many enlightened intellectuals, his hobby was scientific experimentation.
And when he heard about a scientific competition, launched by the French Academy of Sciences and backed by none other than King Louis XVI, he jumped at the chance. The prize of 2,400 livres (quite a lot - a few years of earnings) would go to whoever could turn salt into soda ash
🧵Want to understand why weaning ourselves off fossil fuels like oil is such a tricky challenge?
Best place to start is with this ubiquitous toy👇
This is a thread about what I call the LEGO conundrum.
It begins when you ponder what a LEGO brick is actually made of...
Standard Lego bricks are made of something called Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene.
ABS is a tough thermoplastic you often find in the handles of scissors or the frames of hard carry-on baggage cases.
But Lego bricks are prob the most iconic application. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonit…
It's worth saying btw not all Lego pieces are made out of ABS.
Baseplates are moulded from high impact polystyrene. Gearwheels are polyamide.
The small, flexible green pieces that look like plant stalks or flags are polyethylene, and so on and so on. lego.com/en-us/sustaina…
🧵
It might look like something from space, but some folks think lumps of rock like this could help us solve one of the biggest problems facing the planet.
Others fear they could trigger ecological catastrophe.
Presenting the weird, unsettling story of polymetallic nodules
These potato-sized mineral lumps form over millions of yrs on the ocean floor as metals accrete around organic fragments.
Up until 150 years ago no-one knew polymetallic nodules even existed. Today they're a very big deal.
So. Here are the 2 main things you need to know abt them
1. These nodules contain ASTOUNDING concentrations of certain metals - esp nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper. The grades of metals are multiples better than anything you can find on land (esp now we've mined out most of the easy stuff).
🧵
80 years ago today, newspapers in Europe carried news of the unexpected death of a very important man, in a hotel miles from the nearest city.
A man who, said some, was helping the Allies win the war.
But there was a twist to the tale. The man in question wasn't actually dead
That man was John Maynard Keynes. The 61 year old economist was at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire for what became known as the Bretton Woods conference. And the day earlier he had indeed collapsed, following a heart attack. It was a moment of high drama.
The conference had already overrun.
It was supposed to be done in two weeks and there was talk that the delegates would soon be kicked out of the hotel. This was, to put it lightly, a problem.
After all, in the absence of an agreement there was a chance of yet another world war
It says something about how confusing Labour's green investment policies are that seemingly even the Treasury has misunderstood them.
Contrary to what the picture in this press release👇 suggests, the National Wealth Fund has nothing to do with wind power or indeed green energy
Instead it's very specifically designed to focus on all the low or zero carbon technologies that AREN'T really to do with generating power.
- Green steel
- Hydrogen
- Clusters
- Gigafactories
Here's the sectors the institution will focus on 👇
Simple way to think abt this:
Pretty much ALL heavy industry today emits carbon, directly or indirectly. The techniques we use to make stuff mostly date back to the industrial revolution. Getting to net zero involves redoing the industrial revolution! edconway.substack.com/p/yet-another-…