London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain

Re:London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain by twic on Saturday December 19, 2020 @04:57PM (#25481617)

See table 2 in the most recent weekly national COVID-19 surveillance report [1], which breaks down where outbreaks have happened. In London, there were 220 outbreaks last week:

  Educational             108
  Hospital                 42
  Care home                38
  Workplace                20
  Other                    10
  Prisons                   1
  Food outlet/restaurant    1

This is outbreaks, not infections - i don't think we have statistics on that, so this is the best indication we have of where the virus is spreading.

Schools, hospitals, care homes, and workplaces account for the huge majority of spread. There's no empirical reason to think either tube trains or supermarkets are the problem.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-flu-and-co...

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Re:London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain by 317070 on Saturday December 19, 2020 @05:03PM (#25481669)

One needs to be careful with such statistics though. The Netherlands had similar numbers but luckily also reported they could only trace 20% of the outbreaks. And that puts things in a very different perspective.

Of the traced outbreaks, most were in schools. But that is not really a surprise, as outbreaks in schools are really easy to trace. If you have a group of 25 students which basically spend 40 hours a week together and they all get sick, super obvious. But how do you trace clients of a restaurant back to a restaurant? You mostly don't.

My reading of these lists is as a mix between places that are easy to trace, and places where really a lot of infections are happening. It is hard to tell which are which and which are both. Not to mention where the other missing 80% of cases came from.

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Re:London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain by LatteLazy on Saturday December 19, 2020 @05:10PM (#25481728)

Edit, ignore the next paragraph, I was looking at this week vs last wekk...

Weirdly I see slightly different numbers... Table 2 on page number 26 of the first pdf? Sorry if I'm looking in the wrong place...

Either way, I think this relies on contact tracing data, but contact tracing doesn't happen on trains or in supermarkets (super markets are exempt why exactly? No one knows). That's why their zeros...

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Re:London put in emergency lockdown as U.K. fights new strain by marcosdumay on Saturday December 19, 2020 @06:30PM (#25482312)

Both are places where a huge number of people pass, and nearly nobody stays for long. I imagine both would give a very large number of false positives, so you'll need a lot of work to get little impact.

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