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.
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