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Cambridge Conversations Coronavirus Covid-19 Michael Levitt

Cambridge Conversation 14th May 2020, and Michael Levitt’s analysis of Euro data

I covered the May 14th Cambridge Conversation in my blog post last week, and promised to make available the YouTube link for it when uploaded. It is now on the University of Cambridge channel.

I covered the May 14th Cambridge Conversation in my blog post last week, and promised to make available the YouTube link for it when uploaded. It is now on the University of Cambridge channel at:

Cambridge Conversation – COVID-19 behind the numbers – statistics, models and decision-making

In my following, and most recent post, I also summarised Prof. Michael Levitt’s interview with UnHerd at my post Another perspective on Coronavirus – Prof. Michael Levitt which presents a perspective on the Coronavirus crisis which is at odds with earlier forecasts and commentaries by Prof. Neil Ferguson and Prof. Sir David Spiegelhalter respectively.

Michael Levitt has very good and consistent track record in predicting the direction of travel and extent of what I might call the Coronavirus “China Crisis”, from quite early on, and contrary to the then current thinking about the rate of growth of Coronavirus there. Michael’s interview is at:

Michael Levitt’s interview with UnHerd

and I think it’s good to see these two perspectives together.

I will cover shortly some of Michael’s latest work on analysing comparisons presented at the website https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps, looking at excess mortality across several years in Europe. Michael’s conclusions (which I have his permission to reproduce) are included in the document here:

where as can be seen from the title, the Covid-19 growth profile doesn’t look very dissimilar from recent previous years’ influenza data. More on this in my next article.

As for my own modest efforts in this area, my model (based on a 7 compartment code by Prof. Alex de Visscher in Canada, with my settings and UK data) is still tracking UK data quite well, necessitating no updates at the moment. But the UK Government is under increasing pressure to include all age related excess deaths in their daily (or weekly) updates, and this measure is mentioned in both videos above.

So I expect some changes to reported data soon: just as the UK Government has had to move to include “deaths in all settings” by including Care Home deaths in their figures, it is likely they should have to move to including the Office for National Statistics numbers too, which they have started to mention. Currently, instead of c. 35,000 deaths, these numbers show c. 55,000, although, as mentioned, the basis for inclusion is different.

These would be numbers based on a mention of Covid-19 on death certificates, not requiring a positive Covid-19 test as currently required for inclusion in UK Government numbers.

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