Brightons R rate

[Official Old Man]

Chatting with a council official this morning (3/6/20) and some interesting news emerged.
First was the R rate which could be as high as 1.8 in Brighton. This will lock down the town. Would this stop Brighton playing at the Amex I wonder.
Next was how Brighton will manage the tourists coming in the summer. Seems many roads are to be closed or double lanes cut to single lanes (A259 seafront in particular), to allow walking in the roadway.
Then restaurants & bars. One near to me has seating for 150 inside and 125 outside but this will be restricted to 25 & 25, numbers that would not cover wages.
I think it could be a long long summer.

 

[blue-shifted]

How does your friend know this?

 

[Chicken Run]

Chatting with a council official this morning (3/6/20) and some interesting news emerged.
First was the R rate which could be as high as 1.8 in Brighton. This will lock down the town. Would this stop Brighton playing at the Amex I wonder.
Next was how Brighton will manage the tourists coming in the summer. Seems many roads are to be closed or double lanes cut to single lanes (A259 seafront in particular), to allow walking in the roadway.
Then restaurants & bars. One near to me has seating for 150 inside and 125 outside but this will be restricted to 25 & 25, numbers that would not cover wages.
I think it could be a long long summer.

Us Brighton & Hovians can only hope for a rainy miserable summer if the last couple of weeks have been anytime go by!

 

[The Wizard]

R rate when we have so few cases is absolutely useless.

 

[Mellotron]

R rate when we have so few cases is absolutely useless.

Quite.

Also at a time of low cases the R rate is likely to fluctuate massively from day to day, so any info will very quickly be outdated and of little use.

 

[Guinness Boy]

Chatting with a council official this morning (3/6/20) and some interesting news emerged.
First was the R rate which could be as high as 1.8 in Brighton. This will lock down the town. Would this stop Brighton playing at the Amex I wonder.
Next was how Brighton will manage the tourists coming in the summer. Seems many roads are to be closed or double lanes cut to single lanes (A259 seafront in particular), to allow walking in the roadway.
Then restaurants & bars. One near to me has seating for 150 inside and 125 outside but this will be restricted to 25 & 25, numbers that would not cover wages.
I think it could be a long long summer.

Could be?

There were only 3 cases in ICU this weekend and the total number of confirmed cases, with massively increased testing, still isn't over 450. It's increased by a few this week but that could be a single cluster. It's concerning because anything above 1 can become exponential quickly, but it could also drop of its own accord.

 

[The Wizard]

Just to clarify why the R rate is useless on a city level at such low case rates.

We had 8 cases one week, the next week we had 15 I believe if I remember right which although double is still very small in a 300k population - a jump of 8 cases makes the R rate increase from under 0.5 to 1.6, this is why outbreaks can’t be monitored only by R rate. Would be interesting to know in what capacity this ‘council official’ works because R rate cannot be used at our current low case rates.

 

[atomised]

Seems strange that this 'council official' is reliant.on that crowd funded research the.argus published a week or so ago. I thought they would be more reliant on stronger evidence

 

[Napper]

1.8 lol

no chance.

Never barely touched us before the social distancing lockdown

 

[Machiavelli]

I've been checking this:

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/#category=utlas&map=rate

for months now. It's just been trickling up, little more than one or two a day

 

[driller]

R rate 1.8 total crap.

https://www.brightonandhovenews.org...-coronavirus-cases-are-rocketing-in-brighton/

 

[atomised]

R rate 1.8 total crap.

https://www.brightonandhovenews.org...-coronavirus-cases-are-rocketing-in-brighton/

Interesting they say that the amex testing centre starts will filter in to our local figures

 

[vegster]

The R rate is one of the great mysteries of our time, very hard to find out the actual rate at any time in a given area, when they say something like 155 cases/100,000 people that's since the start rather than a current ratio/chance thingy surely ?

 

[Official Old Man]

My reply and defence.
The council worker is from Highways, their jobs are to keep the street clear of all the tables & chairs, boards and clutter. I see them once a year when we get instructions on what we can and cant do. Diary says walk along seafront so they did. Fact that all the shops are closed meant nothing, job has to be done.
If you look at shop, bars & restaurants windows you'll see a sticker showing what that business can place on the pavement. This cost £100's for shops and £1000's for restaurants. It will specify a 'clear' width that has to be left for pedestrians, this is generally 2 metres. What Highways are saying is that this needs to be more thus the A259 Brighton seafront road may be cut down by a lane to allow pedestrians to walk on the road and thus keep the social distance.
Something that really got me annoyed. There is a chip shop fully open with zero protection, no masks, no screens and no markings. Customers walk right up to the counter and place an order, no more than two feet from the server. This goes on all day. Who is the stupid one, the server for having no mask or screen (down to the business owner) or the customers who just keep walking right up to the counter?
As the staff are all cash in hand no one dare take a day off either.

 

[Saladpack Seagull]

I heard a guy on Radio Sussex the other day saying that you can't really get an accurate R rate for individual locations such as towns/cities. Apparently you have to look at regional figures as a minimum requirement. He wasn't too clear on the geography but said that figures for Sussex are lumped together in a group of five counties (assuming he's counting East and West Sussex as two of those), so Kent, Surrey and Hampshire are likely to be the others, with Brighton and Hove included in the Sussex figures.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

My reply and defence.
The council worker is from Highways, their jobs are to keep the street clear of all the tables & chairs, boards and clutter. I see them once a year when we get instructions on what we can and cant do. Diary says walk along seafront so they did. Fact that all the shops are closed meant nothing, job has to be done.
If you look at shop, bars & restaurants windows you'll see a sticker showing what that business can place on the pavement. This cost £100's for shops and £1000's for restaurants. It will specify a 'clear' width that has to be left for pedestrians, this is generally 2 metres. What Highways are saying is that this needs to be more thus the A259 Brighton seafront road may be cut down by a lane to allow pedestrians to walk on the road and thus keep the social distance.
Something that really got me annoyed. There is a chip shop fully open with zero protection, no masks, no screens and no markings. Customers walk right up to the counter and place an order, no more than two feet from the server. This goes on all day. Who is the stupid one, the server for having no mask or screen (down to the business owner) or the customers who just keep walking right up to the counter?
As the staff are all cash in hand no one dare take a day off either.

This beggars belief. Is there no limit to the ludicrous expensive ineffective absurdities being dreamt up by dimbots as, first, policy then strategy then action plans? Every tiny aspect of our lives will have a policy and a strategy and an action plan. None of it will be joined up. Much of the 'rules' will be flouted. Few will be aware what rules are being flouted. There will be no clarity on implementation or assessment. The rules will also change on an ongoing basis, in accordance with local and national implementation and strategy committees, events, the weather, my arse, your mum.....

No wonder we have the worst Covid containment in the civilised world.

One thing we can be certain about. A small number of people will be making a large amount of money out of this.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

I heard a guy on Radio Sussex the other day saying that you can't really get an accurate R rate for individual locations such as towns/cities. Apparently you have to look at regional figures as a minimum requirement. He wasn't too clear on the geography but said that figures for Sussex are lumped together in a group of five counties (assuming he's counting East and West Sussex as two of those), so Kent, Surrey and Hampshire are likely to be the others, with Brighton and Hove included in the Sussex figures.

The R number signifies the average number of people that one infected person will pass the virus to.

How the **** do we work out what that is? We infer it from the rate of change of the rate of increase in cases in a population (the change in the slope of the cases/time curve over time). When R is 1, the inference is each infected person passes covid on to one person, and so on.

R has NOTHING TO DO WITH NUMBERS OF CASES. R in Brighton can be 1 even if there is only one case in Brighton, and he passes it on to one person, and so on. If the viral spread is slow the slope of the relationship between time and cases will be shallow. If the virus spreads quickly the slope will be steep. In both cases the slope will be constant if one person infects only one other.

If R is more than one the slope may also be shallow or steep, but it will not be a straight line - it will be a line that gets steeper and steeper with time.

The data on cases worldwide shown on the Johns Hopkins page shows in every nation the slope was initially linear and steep, then topped out. I don't think that our understanding of R maps to this at all. No slope has ever been greater than 1.

Therefore I think people (our 'government') have been talking bollocks about R. This is why they keep saying stuff like 'between 0.6 and 1.2' etc. They haven't got a clue.

To me it is obvious that R is a useless variable if you don't have the data to determine it accurately. It is easily assessed for example in a culture of bacteria infected with a bacteriosidal virus. In a test tube. Where you can track and trace preciseley and accurately the number of living bacteria.

Now transfer that to the human population, where we only test the sick, and 'diagnose' covid down the phone.

'R', my arse. Incalculable and meaningless in this context. My own wanky stats are much more informative.

 

[Eeyore]

My reply and defence.
The council worker is from Highways, their jobs are to keep the street clear of all the tables & chairs, boards and clutter. I see them once a year when we get instructions on what we can and cant do. Diary says walk along seafront so they did. Fact that all the shops are closed meant nothing, job has to be done.
If you look at shop, bars & restaurants windows you'll see a sticker showing what that business can place on the pavement. This cost £100's for shops and £1000's for restaurants. It will specify a 'clear' width that has to be left for pedestrians, this is generally 2 metres. What Highways are saying is that this needs to be more thus the A259 Brighton seafront road may be cut down by a lane to allow pedestrians to walk on the road and thus keep the social distance.
Something that really got me annoyed. There is a chip shop fully open with zero protection, no masks, no screens and no markings. Customers walk right up to the counter and place an order, no more than two feet from the server. This goes on all day. Who is the stupid one, the server for having no mask or screen (down to the business owner) or the customers who just keep walking right up to the counter?
As the staff are all cash in hand no one dare take a day off either.

Council worker, or 'council official' ?

A street cleaner is unlikely to be in possession of policy knowledge from the smokey rooms above.

Although they are more valued in their function.

As regards the masks, I'm with you. Been saying they should be compulsory for some time.

 

[beorhthelm]

Therefore I think people (our 'government') have been talking bollocks about R. This is why they keep saying stuff like 'between 0.6 and 1.2' etc. They haven't got a clue.

To me it is obvious that R is a useless variable if you don't have the data to determine it accurately. It is easily assessed for example in a culture of bacteria infected with a bacteriosidal virus. In a test tube. Where you can track and trace preciseley and accurately the number of living bacteria.

Now transfer that to the human population, where we only test the sick, and 'diagnose' covid down the phone.

'R', my arse. Incalculable and meaningless in this context. My own wanky stats are much more informative.

a good rant. to be fair the politicans can only use the data they are given by epidemiologists. R should stay in their models, but someone latched on to it, it came into public concious and now its something politicans can use. we all love a simple metric even if we dont understand it.

 

[Harry Wilson's tackle]

a good rant. to be fair the politicans can only use the data they are given by epidemiologists. R should stay in their models, but someone latched on to it, it came into public concious and now its something politicans can use. we all love a simple metric even if we dont understand it.

R was latched on by the politicians (i.e., the government, aka Boris and Cummings) who were happy to babble on about it, as were the nodding dogs (cabinet), pretending knowledge and understanding they didn't have.

For the current lot, this is what they do. Shameful.