VikingVoyager

I couldn't agree less (though Buffoon is a completely inadequate description)! Regarding the treacle I've waded through personally on this thread, there is one very obvious conclusion - there is something fishy with the SW NOIDS data. More widely, we absolutely should be making decisions based on hard data, it's not acceptable to just throw your hands in the air and say it's just not black and white enough so it should be ignored. To say that statistics have not helped at all is preposterous. I'd caveat the above by saying that we need to accept that the evidence evolves and

ETA of 13:00 tomorrow according to Marine Traffic - so she'll be passed by her sister tonight somewhere

I think it was 2003 when we visited. I've got half a decade on you!

We certainly are!

As I recall, she was merely a girlfriend at that point and was allowed to accompany myself and a group of friends!

FWIW, I get the following from the figures (I've colour coded them according to the three tiers of the government 'system'): Total hospital cases: 383 South West 60 North West 32 East Mids 7 North East 6 London 5 South East 4 West Mids 3 Yorkshire & the Humber 0 East of England Hospital cases expressed as 1 in X of population (to the nearest 10,000): South West 10,000 North West 120,000 East Mids 150,000 North East 380,000 West Mids 1,480,000

And still only three hospitals with more than ten cases outside of the South West (Halton, Amber Valley and Liverpool)

We must be similarly aged! Amazing to think how much has changed since he made that trip. I think back then, I was of the view that things would be largely the same when I grew up but the world is now entirely different. I very much enjoyed Budapest too and don't recall going in a Fashion House!

I used Wikipedia's figures for the English regions which are from the ONS are estimates for 2019. The NW includes Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire (including it's metro type areas), Cheshire and Cumbria, while the SW is Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire and all the metro-type areas around Bristol. I must admit to having to look up a few of the Health Authorities and Universities when assigning them to a region and also that my mental map of Essex and Suffolk is very vague.

All valid considerations and well beyond my constraints here! However, I am more satisfied than ever that there is something fishy in the SW NOIDs data. Age is by far the biggest determinant that I am aware of, and even that isn't anywhere near as skewed as I tried to make it in the tests I did earlier and yet, they couldn't replicate what the data said. As far as I'm concerned, it's just such a big outlier, it cant' make sense. I wonder if we'll ever find out why?

I make it that the SW has approx. 170,000 Uni students across 15 institutions, compared to 235,000 in the NW (also 15 places of learning). That's a rate of 0.030 students per population in SW vs 0.032 in the NW. The outlier here is the East of England with only 90,000 students seven universities - a rate of 0.01. Scotland, Wales and London are the mostly "densely studented" (>0.040 students per population)

Probably true - but compared to the other factors it will have minimal impact and I'd be surprised if the two regions were impacted very differently - they both have large universities

It's an interesting theory, so I tested it on the week 39 data using the SW and the next worst region (the NW). For that week, there were 50 admissions across the NW, and 558 in the SW. Populations for the two regions are 734,000 and 562,000 according to figures I found. Figures from the the US reckon that hospitalisation rates for Covid are 12 higher for the 85+ year group compared to the 18-29 group (there's a whole spectrum of rates in the link) I started by assuming equal distribution by age in NW across the 9 age groups (not a good assumption but tested later). I used t

No maybe about it, surely, if there were zero in this week's report there must be 10 in next week's What do you think the reason for the persistent high numbers in the SW is (in NOIDs reports)?

But 0 in the NOIDs report. I think I'm being thick! No problem with the low response, I've been reading the Secret Seven to a young 'un and catching up on work but thankfully not interrogated by the other half (her expertise is museums)