What Percentage Of People In The UK Survive COVID-19?
This is only a simple analysis based on the COVID-19 statistics published on Sunday, 26th April.
- So far 152,840 people have been lab confirmed as having COVID-19.
- There has also been 20,732 deaths in hospitals.
- Suppose another 25% have died in care homes or in their own bed.
- That would give a total of 25,915 deaths.
- So rather crudely, if you get tested positive for COVID-19, you have a 17% chance of dying. What is the chance of dying from a serious stroke or breast cancer?
- On the other hand 126,925 or 83% have survived.
- Some, let’s say 20,000 are in ICU beds in hospitals, reducing the figures to 106,925 or 70% that survived.
We should be examining these seventy percent to see why they survived.
The official statistics concentrate on the negative side, but don’t publish figures like how many left hospital for convalescence at home or in an ordinary hospital ward!
Update – 27th April 2020
The actual figure of those in ICU beds yesterday was 18,667, which makes the figures 108, 258 and 71% have survived.
Trump’s Fake News
This article on the BBC is entitled Coronavirus: Trump’s Disinfectant And Sunlight Claims Fact-Checked.
This is the introductory paragraph.
President Donald Trump has questioned whether injecting people with disinfectants and exposing patients’ bodies to UV light could help treat the coronavirus.
The article then goes on to demolish Trump’s claims with the full force of scientifically-correct evidence.
Do they have whelk stalls in the United States? Trummkopf certainly doesn’t have the intelligence to run one!
Is Undiagnosed Coeliac Disease A Possible Explanation For High Deaths From Covid-19 Amongst Those Of Caribbean And Jewish Heritage?
In The Times today, they publish a list today of deaths per 100,000 people, who died in hospital from Covoid-19.
- Caribbean – 70
- Any other black – 48
- Total black – 43
- Indian – 30
- Any other Asian – 27
- All Asian – 27
- African – 27
- Overall – 26
- Pakistani – 26
- White British – 23
- Bangladeshi – 20
Some things jump out from the data,
- Those of Asian, African and Pakistani heritage have death rates similar to the general population.
- Bangladeshis do rather well, which is contrary to the expectations of some people.
- Those from the Caribbean, fare much worse than other black groups and Africans.
In the statistics, one group of immigrants were ignored. I live in Hackney and there have been a large number of Orthodox Jewish immigrants to the borough in recent years. From statements, by the Chief Rabbi, in The Times and on BBC Radio, he is worried and has closed all the synagogues under his control. Separating this group might give an insight into the data.
Recently my GP, asked if I had been vaccinated against measles, as Hackney is a measles hotspot. I haven’t been vaccinated, but I have had the disease. Apparently, the Orthodox Jewish groups have low vaccination rates.
I am also coeliac, which means I have a gluten allergy. Mine comes from an Ashkenazi Jewish line from the Baltic, but coeliac disease is also present in the Irish and some West Africans. In these three groups, historic famine seems to be the cause. Over the years, I have met several coeliacs from Jamaica and other islands in the West Indies, but never have I met any from Asia or East Africa.
Various research into coeliac disease has shown, that as many as one in a hundred of the UK population could be undiagnosed coeliacs. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was fifty, twenty years ago, so sufferers do slip through the net.
But research from Nottingham University has also shown, that coeliacs on a gluten-free diet are less likely to suffer from cancer, than the general population. Could this be because this group has a strong immune system, which gets an immune response in early on the cancer?
Undiagnosed Coeliacs And Pollution
I can speak of this with authority, as that was me as a child.
I grew up in Southgate in North London and the air was polluted with the smoke from domestic coal fires. I suffered badly and was a very unhealthy child, who regularly had three months off school.
My health improved about ten and it could have been one of three factors.
- I was exercising more, having learned to ride a bike.
- My parents had bought a house in Felixstowe, where we tended to spend lots of boring weekends and holidays.
- The Clean Air Act of 1956 had cleaned up London’s air.
My breathing certainly improved and I was a good enough athlete to make a school team at fifteen.
Recent research has shown, that there can be a link between air pollution and COVID-19. I wrote about this in Air Pollution May Be ‘Key Contributor’ To Covid-19 Deaths – Study.
These days, even in a polluted street, I don’t suffer much at all, but then I’m on a strict gluten-free diet!
Although, I do find that my breathing improves in the Spring, when we start to get longer days with lots of sunshine.
Undiagnosed Coeliacs And Strokes
I had my serious stroke because of atrial fibrillation. My father died after two serious strokes. He must have been coeliac, so were his strokes caused by the same reason as mine?
I have talked with cardiac specialists and they have felt, that my fifty years as an undiagnosed coeliac could have damaged my heart muscle to cause the atrial fibrillation.
Slavery
It would not be right to ignore slavery.
Millions of Africans were taken from West Africa to America and the Caribbean and they were probably fed nothing more than bread and water most of the time.
Did this increase the predominance of coeliac genes in those that survived the horrific treatment?
What Are The Bangladeshis Doing Right?
As a coeliac, if I’m stuck in a town, that is unknown to me and I need a meal, I’ll often go to the smartest Indian (Bangladeshi?) restaurant, as I’ve never found one with cloth tablecloths and napkins, that doesn’t do good gluten-free food. The only wheat they use is in the nans!
So has this diet given Bangladeshis a good immune system?
What Is The Figure For Jewish People?
In this article in The Times, Melanie Phillips says this.
As of last Friday, 335 British Jews had died of the virus, more than five times their proportion in the population.
Wikipedia gives the number of British Jews as 263,346 in the 2011 Census.
A rough estimate using these figures gives a figure of 127 per 100,000 of the population.
Conclusion
Could undiagnosed coeliac disease be the unexplained link as to why people with Caribbean heritage have higher deaths than those with African?
Air Pollution May Be ‘Key Contributor’ To Covid-19 Deaths – Study
The title of this post is the same as that of this article in the Guardian.
This is the first two paragraphs.
High levels of air pollution may be “one of the most important contributors” to deaths from Covid-19, according to research.
The analysis shows that of the coronavirus deaths across 66 administrative regions in Italy, Spain, France and Germany, 78% of them occurred in just five regions, and these were the most polluted.
I think that this report could prove significant. But I have no idea why!
I grew up in a very polluted London, where regularly at Primary School we would be sent home early as the smog was so bad. In those days of the 1950s, there were few immigrants and I only remember one black person at school. She was the Deputy Head Girl! The few immigrants at school, were generally Poles, although I do remember one Spanish boy.
Will Innovative Engineering Solve The PPE Gown Problem?
In the early 1970s, I worked as a programmer for various consultancies, who were doing innovative engineering. In one, which could have been Cambridge Consultants, where I worked for perhaps three months. One guy told me about a project he was working on, that was the automatic assembly of clothing.
I know more than a bit about making clothes, as my mother taught me how to knit, crochet, sew and use a sewing machine. In the early years of our marriage, I used to make dresses for C and in one instance, I made her a long heavy-weight winter coat.
So I am surprised, that innovative engineering has not come together to make hospital gowns automatically!
Let’s hope that some engineers have seen the gap in the market, and as I write, are putting together a machine, where you put material in one end and get gowns out the other. Neatly folded of course!
Surviving Lockdown
People ask if I am surviving lockdown.
I am lucky in several ways.
Housing
I live in a spacious house, which is comfortable.
Although, it does have problems.
- It was built by a Turkish Jerrybuilder, who bought fixtures and fittings at the cheapest price possible.
- It gets too hot.
- The plumbing is suspect.
- The air-conditioner is broken and the service company, have had my money to fix it, but won’t come.
- The smoke detector above my bed is just hanging there, as I wrote in A Design Crime – The Average Smoke Detector
Hopefully, when we beat COVID-19, I’ll be able to move.
Finances
My investments give me enough to live comfortably. If you call, living in two rooms, never talking face-to-face with anybody living comfortably.
Exercise
I am still fit and can exercise as much as I need and is recommended.
I have a workout that I do twice a day, which includes movements like press-ups, stretches and single-leg stands.
I can do two dozen press-ups straight off or walk three miles, if I need to.
Health
My health is good, despite being a coeliac and suffering a serious stroke ten years ago.
- I test my own INR.
- I seem to have survived my fall of a month ago.
- I only go to the surgery for B12 injections, drug reviews and the odd problem.
Other than that I just suffer from the problems of a healthy man of 72, like arthritis and hay fever.
I do have a strange skin, that leaks a lot of water and doesn’t bleed, when I have an injection or a doctor or nurse takes blood. I never have a plaster after either procedure.
Food
I am a reasonable and very practical cook, or so my son and various friends tell me. These are some meals, I’ve been cooking under lockdown.
Pasta With Yogurt Sauce For One
Goat’s Cheese, Strawberry And Basil Salad
Smoked Haddock And Curried Rice
I shall add more here.
I won’t starve!
Shopping
A Marks and Spencer food store is fifteen minutes walk away, so I can get all the food I need.
I also got plenty of Adnams 0.5% alcohol Ghost Ship beers direct from the brewers delivered last week.
Their beers have been a lifeline, as they are gluten-free, thirst-quenching and don’t get me drunk. Even in quantity!
I also have safe delivery without any contact, as the couriers just ring my bell, we chat through the window about three metres away and they leave the goods on the step.
I didn’t think about lockdown, when I bought this house, but it is ideal for safe COVID-19-free deliveries.
Lockdown Practice
There can’t be many people, now going through the COVID-19 lockdown, wo have locked themselves away so many times in their life as I have.
- At the age of about six, I spent three months or more, in isolation because I caught scarlet fever.
- For the summer before A-Levels, my parents went to their house in Felixstowe. For part of the time, I locked myself in my bedroom and read up on my A level Physics.
- A couple of times at ICI, I self-isolated with a computer to get important jobs done. How many have used an IBM-360 as a PC?
- I self-isolated to write Speed, my first piece of independent software.
- Pert7 and other software for Time Sharing Ltd was written overnight sitting in the window of their offices on Great Portland Street.
- Artemis was written in an attic in Suffolk, with no-one else around for most of the time.
- The special PC version of Artemis, that was a combined project management, database and spreadsheet program, was also written under lockdown.
- After Celia died, I wrote Travels With My Celia(c) under lockdown. You can download the pdf file here.
Lockdown has almost been a way of life for me.
But on past form, I certainly have the mental strength to get through lockdown unscathed.
Conclusion
There must be a lot of others in much worse situations than myself.
The Scientists Who Made A ‘Home-Brew’ Coronavirus Test
The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on the BBC.
Only by reading all the article, will you get any handle on what scientists at the Crick Institute have been up to.
At least, they are on our side!
NHS Procurement
I first had knowledge of government procurement in the 1970s! Then it was defence procurement, which was shambolic!
Nothing appears to have changed.
Perhaps, we should ask Tesco or Screwfix to source PPE and PCWorld to source ventilators?
I Only Ran Out Of Deoderant
For about three years, I’ve not bought deodorant or toothpaste in the normal manner, in say a shop in the High Street or locally.
What I’ve tended to do, is just pack my toothbrush and a few other things in my travel bag and buy new travel ones, once I’ve gone through Customs.
Consequently, I’ve only bought small travel roll-on deodorants. I’ve used roll-on ones for many years, as I didn’t like to use aerosols with all their noxious gases.
On Friday my last one ran-out and I needed a new one. The only one I could buy in a local shop, was an aerosol powered by butane. In other words it’s a flame-thrower in all but name! Search the Internet and you’ll find lots of pictures.
I find this very sad, as I funded a development of a totally-safe aerosol, that used compressed nitrogen as the propellant! The development was sold to a US company and I got a return on my money! Obviously, the product wasn’t cheap and nasty enough! But it was good enough though to be discussed at the Montreal Climate Change talks in 2005.
I actually found the butane-powered flame-thrower impossible to use, due to the damage to my left hand.
- Was it the break to my humerus caused by the school bully?
- Was it the stroke?
- Was it the recent damage caused by my fall?
I just needed to find a roll-on deodorant. But had they been discontinued?
This morning, thankfully, I found one at the Angel.
So I will smell better tomorrow!
I won’t leave this post before telling this tale.
I used to work for ICI Mond Division, who used to make the hydro-fluoro-carbon gases, that used to power aerosols in the 1960s and 1970s.
One of the guys in a nearby lab, where I worked at Runcorn Heath, used to formulate the propellants for possible products.
His standard joke was that he’d get baked beans into an aerosol, even if they had to come out one by one.
Every so often, he’d bring round samples that he’d made for various companies and one day I obtained an aerosol hand cream.
What make it was, no-one had a clue, but C always swore, it was the best hand cream, she’d ever used.
The Anonymous Widower 