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Colin Angus Profile picture
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Jan 23 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is one of the stupidest things I have ever read in the name of science.

No, red wine does not ward off COVID.

Not being poor (which is strongly correlated with red wine consumption) does though.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…
Sadly swapping your Friday night cans of lager for a bottle of Bordeaux won’t miraculously make you middle class and remove the structural inequalities that actually do increase your risk of getting COVID.
I know it’s the Mail, but this is so aggressively stupid and dangerous.

Whenever anyone starts talking about resveratrol or polyphenols in red wine as the cause of some benefit of alcohol, your bullshit alarm should immediately be going off.
H/t @alcohol_review for bringing this particularly egregious example of a sadly widespread genre of terrible science to my attention.
I found the original study. Incredibly it doesn’t even acknowledge possible confounding by socioeconomic position as a limitation.

frontiersin.org/articles/10.33…

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More from @VictimOfMaths

Colin Angus Profile picture
Jan 24
I've seen a few people recently shouting about how new ONS data shows that the "true" death toll from COVID in England & Wales is only 17,371, rather than the ONS figure of 157,816.

This is obviously nonsense, but evidently still needs debunking, so here goes...
The claim comes from an FOI request that some genius sent to the ONS asking them for the number of deaths where *only* COVID was listed on the death certificate without any other pre-existing conditions listed.
ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transp…
But what does it mean to die with both COVID and a pre-existing condition on the death certificate?

Death certificates list an "underlying cause" and can list several "contributory causes".
Read 21 tweets
Colin Angus Profile picture
Jan 21
There really is a lot going on in the recent COVID case numbers in England.

Cases back to being highest (and rising fastest) in primary age children.

Cases starting to rise again in their parents' age group.

Falls stalling in other ages.

Let's do some graphs...
If we look at it like this then, outside the 5-14 age bracket everything looks like it's going pretty ok.

Maybe cases haven't fallen as much in the 30-44 age group (who happen, perhaps not coincidentally, to be the right age to have primary school age kids).
But if we instead plot the rate at which cases are changing (blue = down, red = up) the problems become more apparent.

Cases rising in 35-44 year olds and the fall in cases slowing in all other adult ages.

Plus, the growth in <15 cases is accelerating.
Read 10 tweets
Colin Angus Profile picture
Jan 20
NHS staff absences heading in the right direction, but that is still a *lot* of staff off sick or isolating with COVID.
Unsurprisingly still some big regional variation in staff absences, with numbers highest in the North, where there are also the most COVID patients.
Comparing these absences to the total NHS workforce (based on the most recent data from September 2021), absence rates are still not far below 10% of all staff in the North West, although falling.
Read 4 tweets
Colin Angus Profile picture
Jan 20
At NHS trust level, the recent changes in COVID admissions are a bit of a mess. More downs than ups, and good to see Bolton's admissions finally falling, but admissions still rising in quite a few Northern trusts.
If we map the trust-level data onto Local Authorities the picture looks like this. Pretty messy. Blackpool and Liverpool currently heading the wrong way. Hopefully not for long.
On a map the geographical division of new COVID admissions is really quite striking.
Read 5 tweets
Colin Angus Profile picture
Jan 20
This is generally looking a bit more positive - all 3 metrics heading down almost everywhere in English hospitals.

But 2 points of note:
1) Admissions not falling at same speed everywhere. Still pretty level in the Midlands.
2) Some big falls in Mechanical Ventilation bed nos
This is a bit weird because in many parts of the country MV bed occupancy never really rose during the Omicron wave, yet is falling rapidly now. Perhaps this is the effect of Delta being effectively killed off by Omicron?
Also need to be careful with the MV bed numbers because it's just the number of patients in beds with ventilator *capacity* whether that capacity is being used or not.
Read 5 tweets
Colin Angus Profile picture
Jan 20
This is, I think, interesting. Overall COVID bed occupancy is falling in England, but the fall in patients being treated *for* COVID is bigger, it's just being hidden by a continued rise in patients in hospitals *with* COVID.
This is still true in London, which was hit by Omicron before the rest of the country and were overall COVID bed occupancy has been falling for longer. Patients *with* COVID are *still* rising.
Across all NHS regions in England the picture is broadly similar, just with regions at different phases. London and the East leading the way, with the North East/Yorkshire only just seeing patients *for* COVID starting to level off 🤞
Read 5 tweets

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