Covid-19 by postcode

With a number of different threads on issues relating to social distancing/lockdown, I thought it might be interesting to look at this.

It’s hard to visualise thousands of deaths over a wide area. But five deaths just in the little postcode area where I happen to live brought it home to me. I hope people bear this in mind when out walkng/jogging etc. Keep a good distance apart and please don’t impinge on the safe space of others.

This is just to 17th April:

Screenshot_2020-05-02-10-46-301080×1920 539 KB

Stay safe and well neighbours and everyone.

It may be significant that upper Sydenham includes Castlebar care home?

And for those of us that love a bit of dataporn, the raw dataset that powers these charts can be found as a downloadable Excel spreadsheet here

Castlebar is a different postcode but you were right Robin, it is included in the map So yes, the map boundaries and figures are for more than one postcode Sorry I hadn’t picked up on that. But I still think its useful in bringing the reality home.

I don’t think the home will have made much of a difference, as my part of Honor Oak (right of the station) has 3 deaths, and there is no care home here.

Crofton Park and Brockley have 4 deaths each.

Poor NXG has 13 deaths. They say that more deaths have occurred in deprived areas, so maybe that’s the reason for the difference, although having just 3 deaths in Honor Oak is far higher than the national average, indicating how London has been hit the hardest.

Thanks for the link. It looks like the 2020 equivalent of WW2 bomb damage maps. There’s hardly an area that hasn’t had a resident die - I found a sliver of Greenwich/Deptford and part of Eltham that aren’t showing any deaths.

Interesting to compare neighbouring areas. I think I’ll give Sydenham a wide berth…

Please also bear in mind that these are deaths “involving” COVID-19 not deaths “caused by” COVID-19. They’re very different.

But surely that’s because you don’t necessarily die from Covid-19 per se, but Covid-19 may trigger a heart attack, respiratory failure or organ failure. A bit like being hit by a car might cause a person to die of blood loss. But they wouldn’t have had the blood loss if they hadn’t been hit by a car.

For example, according to an article in Science News [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid-19-why-some-heart-patients-especially-vulnerable]:

By Aimee Cunningham

March 20, 2020 at 12:13 pm

Updated March 25, 2020 at 11:00 am

As researchers examine deaths from COVID-19, heart patients appear especially vulnerable.

In Italy, where the number of deaths has now surpassed those in China, public health officials reported on March 17 that among 355 people who died, a whopping 76 percent had hypertension and 33 percent had heart disease. And among more than 44,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in China ( SN: 2/25/20 ), the case fatality rate for people with underlying conditions was highest for those with cardiovascular disease, at 10.5 percent compared with the overall fatality rate of 2.3 percent.

Researchers know generally that infections can take a toll on people who have other health problems. But SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, may pose particular danger to the heart because of how the virus gets into cells, researchers speculate.

To invade a cell, SARS-CoV-2 latches onto a protein called angiotensin-converting enzyme 2, or ACE2 ( SN: 3/3/20 ). This protein is found on cells in the lungs, allowing the virus to invade these cells and cause respiratory symptoms. But ACE2 also is on heart muscle cells and cells that line the blood vessels.

Plenty of people are on ACE-inhibitors (e.g. Ramipril) for high blood pressure, or for heart conditions that they might only find out about by chance, when being examined for something else. Those people wouldn’t necessarily be in danger of dying from a heart condition unless they caught Covid-19.

In time, it will be interesting to see how the figures compare with density of population per hectare.

They have also done research on Brent which had the highest number of deaths in London. One of the factors was actually the high level of key workers. Other causes also had an impact of course but that was one of the reasons.

Marymck, as an example, according to the British Heart Foundation 7.4mil people in the UK live with heart or circulatory disease and 170,000 of them die every year without any assistance from COVID-19, so dying with it doesn’t necessarily mean dying because of it.
What I’m trying (perhaps badly) to infer is that if we are to emerge from this to any kind of normality in the foreseeable future then the media in particular need to tone down the sensationalist doom mongering else many people will be too scared to go out.

The challenge (and a horrible one) for governments to navigate is that relaxing both too soon or too late has awful consequences, to take 2 extremes:

a) Next week we all go back to normal, 2nd spike of virus, perhaps worse than first, many deaths, further lockdown, big recession. A generation blighted

b) Have a long and successful lockdown lasting many months or more, no more deaths from COVID…but…major economic recession (much worse than 2008, perhps going towards 1929), many deaths downstream from various causes, including suicides etc. A generation blighted (where do bar workers, restaurant staff, small theatre actors go - the streets?)

I do have considerable sympathy for governments as by definition they are dealing with the future, and they can’t choose multiple paths. And expert models and predictions are well …models and predictions.
It is probably for another discussion chain as to what the optimum way out of lockdown (more accurately the least bad), though I do have some scepticism as how a “semi-lockdown” works in London. It will be harder and more contentious than the full lockdown I fear.

Part of the longer term solution I suspect will be around a combination of tracking via app (the Isle of Wight experiment, South Korea) so local outbreaks can be seen near real time married with greater testing availability.
Catch the R4 programme A Cure At What Cost (on last Sunday 8pm) on Sounds, which explores the minefield of the way forward.

I’m not seeing postcode in any of those sheets - they seem to use some kind of area coding for town, but a postcode would be easier to geocode if you want to draw pictures… I had a poke around the ONS website, but couldn’t find anything.

Edit: on closer inspection the map is somehow converting your postcode into a ’ MSOA code ’ whatever that is - Lewisham is split into 35 areas…

Likely they are doing the conversion with a cross reference to this dataset: