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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released a report on coastal towns, including data on the impact on them from COVID-19.
Prof Kevin McConway, Emeritus Professor of Applied Statistics, The Open University, said:
“The pattern is complicated, and the divisions are a bit arbitrary. (There are essentially 3 size divisions – smaller, larger, and cities, with the division between smaller and larger being at 20,000 population in the 2011 Census, and they haven’t included cities at all (so nothing with a population over 225,000 which rules out Brighton and Southsea (because it’s part of Portsmouth), for instance). And the pattern on Covid deaths is not entirely straightforward. In smaller towns, coastal ones (whether they count as seaside towns or not) have lower Covid mortality than non-coastal smaller towns, but in larger towns, seaside ones do better on Covid mortality than do either coastal non-seaside ones or non-coastal ones (which are about the same, and worse than non-coastal smaller towns). So it’s hard to draw any conclusions about what might be the reasons behind these data.”
Prof Rowland Kao, the Sir Timothy O’Shea Professor of Veterinary Epidemiology and Data Science, University of Edinburgh, said:
“The reasons for deprivation are many – these are often correlated with each other. However there are key differences in the reasons for deprivation when comparing rural and urban areas. In particular, while deprivation in rural areas (including some seasides) often is due to remoteness and access, housing density and personal health which drive deprivation in more urban areas are less of an issue, and it is these latter factors that seem to be more closely related to COVID-19 transmission. However, this does not mean that there are no risks – movement of people from areas with higher infection rates (both day visits and local holidays) will always present a risk of introducing COVID-19 into these seaside areas; should this happen remoteness may present challenges in terms of access to hospitals with ICUs.”
Dr Yuliya Kyrychko, Reader in Mathematics, University of Sussex, said:
“As has been noted throughout the world from the start of COVID-19 epidemic, the severity and prognosis for this disease very strongly depend on age, with older people having higher chances of requiring hospitalisations, and potentially becoming severe cases of disease.
“At the same time, because this is a directly transmitted infection, rates of transmission are to a large degree determined by the levels of mixing between individuals, and this is also very different for different age groups.
“The fact that coastal towns have experienced statistically smaller rates of COVID-19 deaths could, perhaps, be attributed to a degree to them having higher proportion of people over 65 and a smaller proportion of younger people, which means that, on average, there is less mixing, and therefore, a smaller potential for significant outbreaks.”
Dr Konstantin Blyuss, Reader in Mathematics, University of Sussex, said:
“With significant differences between values of disease parameters for different age groups, the dynamics of COVID spread is largely affected by the population age structure of different regions, as well as the levels of local mixing between people.
“This mixing is primarily determined by such aspects as types of employment, levels of commuting.
“With coastal towns having, on average, older population, who may not be doing so much commuting, combined with a smaller proportion of younger people, who are generally socialising more, this all results in reducing levels of people mixing for extended periods of times in close proximity of each other.
“That could be one of the reasons why coastal towns in England and Wales have so far experienced smaller rates of COVID-19 deaths.
“The outcomes detailed in the ONS report fits with the modelling work we did at the end of April 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.25.20079848), where we compared the time course of COVID in three neighbouring coastal regions on the South Coast, namely, East Sussex, Brighton and Hove, and West Sussex.
“That work showed that due to substantial differences in population age structure (Brighton and Hove being significantly younger than the other two counties), there is a major variation in which of the first or second epidemic peaks is larger, the timing to reach the peak, as well as in the numbers of cases and deaths.”
Dr Simon Clarke, Associate Professor of Cellular Microbiology at the University of Reading, said:
“This looks like positive news for people living by the coast who may have been worried that stay-at-home holidaymakers would bring extra Covid19 deaths to their more elderly resident populations. These data show that, on the whole, deaths have been lower for people living by the sea than elsewhere.
“Older retirees with more indicators of deprivation, living in individual homes and less likely to be going out are presumably much better insulated against Covid19 infection and death, than their less deprived metropolitan counterparts, for whom close contact with other people, including carriers of the virus, will be harder to avoid.
“This is evidence that policies designed to limit transmission can’t be guided just by demographics, i.e. the age and vulnerability of the local population – but also need to be informed by geography and the nature of the local economy. In other words, measures to prevent transmissions and deaths in coastal communities are probably more to do with the nature of what people do for a living and for recreation, rather than as a result of big influxes of tourists.”
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
Declared interests
Prof Kevin McConway: “I am a Trustee of the SMC and a member of the Advisory Committee, but my quote above is in my capacity as a professional statistician.”
None others received.