A Different Slant

Regular followers will know that I maintained a blog called "Running Late" for around 10 years. It was solely on running topics and I wrote about 20 posts a year. I stopped it quite consciously at the end of 2018 because I realised that keeping it active was  becoming something of a chore rather than a pleasure and for this reason alone the posts were in danger of becoming repetitive and uninteresting. I have no intention of taking it down; it's still there http://ajc-runninglate.blogspot.com, so the stuff's still there if you want to browse. I've started to think of ways to make it more searchable and accessible because I don't want to lose it all, I enjoy going back over things myself from time to time ("Did I really write that?")  but I had drawn a line under it as a creative exercise.

A few months after I stopped, I found that I missed making the odd comment on things that interested me and the few things I had achieved, so I started this blog "Jogging On" on the basis that it would be sporadic and I would only post when I felt I had something worthwhile to say. It's sort of worked, I've posted nine times in just over a year and was happy enough with that. But I've noticed on the last couple of posts I've really just used the running part as a way into thinking about other things, at the moment in particular the Coronavirus event which is impacting all our lives so significantly just now, but I'm sure there will be other topics in the future. As with some of the running themes that I've pursued, I get interested in trying to work out what is going on under the glossy surface that is sometimes all we see.  So I've decided to go with the flow, as it were, and let the posts drift into whatever is on the top of the pile at the time, sometimes running, sometimes not, and I've changed the header a bit to reflect this. 

As always, you'll get the world as I see it. My views may not coincide with yours but I'm not trying to persuade you that I'm right, I'm just trying to make some sense of the information I have in front of me.

More immediate and popular social media platforms have overtaken much of blogging over the past few years. They have a valuable place of course but I think their essential ease and transience works against more measured thought about things; but maybe I'm just getting old. As I've done recently I'll continue to flag up posts to my Facebook friends; that's not a huge number but I'm not sure it's worth trying to circulate wider unless people stumble on the blog via other routes. Occasionally I get asked if it's OK to share; the answer is of course, but then a blog exists in the public domain anyway so there's really no need to ask.

So here goes. If running is your only interest, time to click out now.

In my last post I tried to work out how an individual might judge what risk they ran of catching Covid 19, and how they might mitigate against it. To recap briefly, every time you go out of your house you need to see 400 people to "guarantee" statistically that you meet a carrier. Whether you then catch the bug can depend on how far you are away from them, whether you are outside or in an enclosed space, and how long you spend in their proximity. In parallel you run a risk every time you touch a surface that may previously have been touched by a carrier. which is best mitigated by washing your hands before next touching your face.

The risk I rather glossed over was the second stage, that if you do catch the bug, what is the risk that it might kill you. All I said was that that as a near 72-year-old I might have a different take on this than if I were fifty years younger. I didn't go into more detail because I thought we had covered enough figures for one post. If you are to think this whole thing through carefully it doesn't pay to take on too much at once, easier to reduce to bite-size chunks. I was also interested in this particular aspect as we seem now to be moving into a period where people have a lot of fears about moving back gradually into some sort of normal life. No-one is generally fearful of catching a cold or the occasional bout of flu (though maybe they should), so much of the concern has to be about mortality.

I always try to go to the ONS (Office for National Statistics) for basic data if I can. It sometimes takes a bit of understanding as they are statisticians writing basically for other statisticians, but I think worth a bit of effort because most media sources seem to put some degree of spin on things. Not telling lies exactly but presenting the truth (or sometimes only part of the truth) in a way to illustrate or confirm a particular point they want to make.

The first thing we need to know is what is the expected average mortality rate for the disease in the UK. And the answer to this is that we don't know. That's because we know how many people have died, but we don't know how many people have had the disease. Many people have had the disease and recovered without consulting any medical facilities, many may have had it and not realised because their symptoms were so mild, and none of these appear on any national statistics.  Recently some work has been done by sample testing and questionnaires to get a better fix on this, but we will not get a reliable figure until we have done a significant number of antibody tests. These are the ones that determine whether you have had the disease or not, and testing has not yet started on this. When we do get these done the samples give real data so can be scaled up accurately, rather like the "exit poll" after a general election. But until then, the experts are modelling and estimating. The figure that seems to be the current best guess is 1%. This means that from a hundred people catching Covid 19, one will die. This is where I think the "worst case" figure of 500,000 deaths mentioned by the government came from, being approximately 1% of the total population in the scenario that everyone catches the disease eventually.

But that, as you will suppose, is not the whole answer. In the absence of more meaningful data, let's look at the Covid death rate not as a percentage of those infected but as a percentage of the population as a whole.

Up to 8th May there were 37575 deaths, which were split into the following age ranges

Under 14            3            ie 0%

15-44              422                1%

45-64             3852             10%

65-74             5786             15%

75-84           12233             33%

85+              15079             40%

The fact that nearly 90% of deaths were in people aged over 65 confirms quite starkly the assertion that it's older people who are most at risk. But even this isn't the whole story. As best as I can from the information available, I divided the UK population into the same age ranges as those above, and then worked out the risk those groups faced over the period from the start of the epidemic up to 8th May.

Age group       Population (million)   Mortality risk

Under 14                       12              One in 4,000,000

15-44                            25              One in 60,000

45-64                            16              One in 4,000

65-74                             6,6            One in 1,000

75-84                             3,8            One in 300

85+                                1,6            One in 100

These are averages based on age groups to simplify things. Of course you don't suddenly face a fifteen times greater risk the day you turn 45 for example, the curve is continuous; but they do give some idea of how the picture changes as you go through the age ranges. And we do have to be careful when looking at average risks because they take a lot of other factors out of the equation; all they can do is give us a pointer based what we know has already happened in the country as a whole. So for example a vulnerable person in good isolation faces a far lower risk than one circulating in the general population. But these are the averages.

These were the risks over a particular period until 8th May. You can take this to mean 3 months or 4 months, whenever you assume the epidemic to have started. Assuming that was past the main peak infection point, the risks for a similar period going forward should be less, we hope considerably so.

One last point. We hear that many people dying from Covid 19 have "other underlying health conditions". My understanding is that the definition of this is that it covers any condition that is serious enough to be stated on the death certificate, in addition to Covid, ie something that made a significant contribution to the individual's ability to overcome the disease. The figure from ONS is that this occurs in over 90% of all deaths, which means that an otherwise healthy person can adjust their individual risk by a factor of 10. 

The main reason that I went through this process was to see what sort of risk I was personally facing as an otherwise (reasonably) healthy pensioner. I now take that risk to have been, up to 8th May, a one in 10,000 chance of catching and succumbing to Covid. I will be as careful as I can, and as these things become more optional I will certainly take fewer risks than a healthy 40-year-old might, but overall I don't find this scale of risk worrying. Care rather than fear is I think the keyword.

The other aspects of this situation that I want to try and fathom my way through in future posts are how we compare with other countries, how we get out of this, the "blame game", and what the future might hold. But just one bite at a time. And a bit of running in between I hope.

Still Running Round in Circles

It's nearly 4 weeks since my last post and what has changed? Well, the easy stuff first.

Just Living

In our house life goes on in our easy world somehow remote from the real one. We go out walking and running, still haven't really used a car in nearly eight weeks now except for a couple of trips to Screwfix and Halfords, one of which to get a battery charger - just in case! The weather continues to be kind and we're still finding places within 3 or 4 miles from home that we've never been before. We also seem to have an unlimited supply of things that need doing and now with access to DIY shops and garden centres, no real excuses for not doing them.

On the running side I've still been rambling along as before, going out 3 times a week and notching up around 30-35 miles. Now that we've had the OK to go out more than once a day I'll probably up that a bit for the next few weeks. I'm still sticking to the country lanes, I'm assuming that with the latest easing of restrictions the popular off-road routes nearby such as the Sandstone Trail will be crowded for a while. We don't have access to the Clwyds yet as Wales is still closed but I'm hopeful that our local forest at Delamere will open soon. What I have found over around 7 weeks now is that MAF training (if you've heard of it) does what it says on the tin, well for me at least. This period of just ticking over with no events on the near horizon seemed the ideal time to try it out. Missing the hills but I'll gradually start to get out a bit further afield than straight out of the front door over the next few weeks.

As for events, well a lot more that I had entered have been cancelled or shelved until the autumn or next year. If any do take place in the autumn I think I'll see what the overall level of infection in the country is before making a decision whether to go or not. If it's still fairly high I will personally want to avoid any events that involve bus travel which is about the only situation that the individual is unlikely to be able to control. I have hopes that the Chester 100 which was up for late May will now go ahead in late November as planned; this starts and finishes just a few miles from our house, passes within half a mile of it and follows paths that will not be generally popular at that time of year. I still think anything earlier , say from September onwards, will depend very much on the individual details and confidence of the RD whether it goes ahead or not. But a few months is not really here or there in the overall scheme of things.

Dealing with the virus

So other than doing as we are advised, how are we shaping up to the continued threat of infection? If you know me you will know that I will have been trying to fathom out what is going on and how it affects me as an individual. I'm an engineer rather than a scientist but seems to me that although the overall situation is complex you don't need a lot of scientific knowledge to draw a few conclusions and plan accordingly. The key thing is to understand that terms such as "safe" and "unsafe" are relative not absolute, the whole deal is about probability and the evaluation of risk. Sorry but you can't scan the next bit rapidly, you may have to concentrate a bit to follow me.

There are two elements to the risk presented by the virus. The first risk is, will you get infected?

Well, the figure that you hear from the official briefings, that is the number of people who have tested positive since testing started (currently around 230,000) is pretty useless as a planning tool because it contains a mix of current and historic data. What you need is an estimate of how many people have the virus at this moment, and so could pass it on to others. The best figures I could find were the ONS estimates of currently between 76.000 and 225,000 (the wide spread is because this is an unprecise game). This means that if you step out of your door today, you need to meet somewhere between 250 and 1000* people to have a statistical guarantee of seeing someone carrying the virus. These figures will be higher in some parts of the country and lower in others, but you have to start somewhere. And of course you may be unlucky in that the very first person you meet has it, and the next 999 are clear, but that is what risk is all about. This is what the "lockdown" and ongoing restrictive measures are all about. If we can get to the stage where you need to meet say 10,000 people when you go out to guarantee meeting a carrier, then things will look a lot different.

So if you do meet our hypothetical carrier, what are your chances of then becoming infected yourself? Well, we are told that the most likely form of transmission is if you breathe in air exhaled by the carrier (that contains the droplets/aerosols carrying the virus).  It seems to me that this has to be some sort of inverse square law, so there is nothing magic about being 6 feet away (other countries have different distances), but it follows that being 6 feet away is four times safer than being 3 feet away, and being 9 feet away is nine times safer than being 3 feet away. Of course it also follows that being 6 feet away from two people (either together or one after the other) is twice the risk as if you only approach one person.

But the real world is not as neat as the maths would have it, and what I just said only holds good in completely still air.  Get the air moving and it's not that all bets are off exactly, but they are significantly compromised. If you are out of doors, any air movement is likely to be in your favour, dispersing air exhaled by anyone near you much more rapidly. If you are inside, the speed at which this dispersal happens will be slowed by the fact that it is now being dispersed into a confined space. The smaller this space, the higher the risk to anyone in it (compare a supermarket sales floor to a bus, for example).

We are also told that a secondary but less common form of transmission is via commonly touched surfaces. The risk here depends on (a) the nature of the surface (eg polished steel is a better transmitter than fabric) , (b) the frequency with which it is touched (compare a popular shop door handle with a stile on a remote country path) and (c) the number of different people that touch it (compare the door handle on your village shop with a similar one in a city). Transmission can be reduced by regular cleaning of the surface but the surest way of lessening the risk is to wash your hands after touching the surface and before touching your face.

I think this tells you all you need to know and explains the majority of measures we are being asked to take. The answer to "Why can I do this but not that?" that you see so frequently these days often obvious if you go back to these basic principles. There are bits of advice that I don't really understand, for example the suggestion that people in certain public situations should wear home-made masks seems to me might carry more risks from face touching etc than the one event they can mitigate, that is slowing down the velocity of projection when a carrier coughs or sneezes. I can't see how a home-made mask would protect the wearer in any way. Similarly for gloves, I would guess that poor management of wearing and doffing may incur more risk than simply being rigorous with handwashing. I will do these things if someone asks me to, but if so I will take more care rather than less.

I said there were two elements to risk. The first is the likelihood of something happening which I have just covered, the second is the impact of the event if it occurs. In my seventies I may take a slightly different view of this from a twenty-five year old, so all I would ask is that we don't in our comments impose our own view on others; we are all different and must make our own judgements on what is best for us.

Reportage and comments.

Just a month ago, I wrote the following: " I've cut down the amount of both mainstream news and social media that I absorb. Though there are inspiring stories in both, I just got a bit fed up with the continual search for blame and the number of press experts and armchair critics telling everyone what has been done wrong and how exactly we should be living our lives. It seems to me that we are where we are, everyone is doing their best, some heroically so, very few have anything other than the best motives. More encouragement and less criticism would be good. "

If I hoped that things would improve in this area then I was just being naive I guess. I'm still saddened by the degree of sloppy coverage from both mainstream and social media and from from all political viewpoints. Too many snap judgements of failure, too much virtuous preaching on what should have been done, too many simplistic conclusions from complex situations, too much fault seeking and schadenfreude from those who seemingly know all the answers.

I'm sure it will take time, probably at least a year or two, to establish just how many people have died in the countries affected (both during the pandemic and its aftermath), and whether their governments could or should have done a better job. The current UK government is not one I would have chosen and not one I voted for. We will not know how they have performed for quite a while. What I would venture however is that they are neither completely in control of the situation, making the best possible decisions “guided by the science” as they themselves would claim, nor are they total unfeeling incompetents not fit to be in charge, as I see regularly from many social media experts. They will have done a lot of things right and a lot of things wrong. Whether a different government would have done better or worse we will never know.

My overriding impression of these times is that understanding this disease and determining the best way to fight it and get out of it is complicated and uncertain. To fully understand policies you need a basic grasp not only of the medicine involved but also of how risk is assessed and managed. Also, things change fairly rapidly so that factors that were important yesterday are less so today and vice-versa.  Yet we have a seeming need in the media (and possibly by implication, in the population) to make it simple and fixed. So those managing the crisis not only have to deal with the pandemic but with finding ways to explain what is going on in terms that meet the almost impossibly opposed (but often voiced, even by the same people) criteria of “treat us like adults” and “keep it simple, don’t confuse us”. It seems that every time we are given guidelines on how to behave, we immediately want a comprehensive set of rules governing every possible situation. Then when we get them, we complain that they are wrong.

I think I'll just carry on trying to work out what I think is best, and keep running round in circles at home for a while. Let's see what the next four weeks brings

On a lighter note, late yesterday afternoon Jan and I drove a few miles and walked up and around one of our local hills, enjoying the woods, the late spring flowers, the dappled sunlight through the trees and the peacefulness of it all. After nearly 8 weeks at home it was, in more than one sense, a real breath of fresh air. 

* I started writing this yesterday afternoon, then learned on the news last night that the ONS has now come up with a figure of one in 400 (instead of the range of one in 250 to one in 1000 they published earlier). For an organisation whose job is statistics it seems strange that they should feel happy to collapse onto one figure without an estimated range of accuracy; unless of course they were under pressure from either the government or the media to do just that. In doing so they have drifted towards the more pessimistic end of the previous range - well, in their situation what would you do? I leave you to speculate on whether the new figure really tells us any more than the old range did..............."Treat us like adults  -  but make sure it's simple!"

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