I didn't do an update last week, but the cases never did go below 300 a day on any day in England and we have had a couple of days above 400 in December. When the lag works through, we are likely to see several days above 400 cases from the last week or so, plus a higher number than the earlier wave 2 peak in mid November. As I mentioned last time, I wasn't expecting the cases to drop much, and though there have been days where the number dropped near to 300 deaths a day wave 2 never really ended, so wave 3 never really started. Wales has had it worse and have already past their previous wave 2 peak even before the lag has worked through.
Hospital admissions have gone past their previous wave 2 peak and heading inexorably towards wave 1 levels. See
https://twitter.com/COVID19actuary/status/1341483186124169217. I know people always hear that this is an old people's disease, but there is a real split of ages amongst the hospital admissions with a good chunk in thier 50s and below.
On the cases by specimen date, I was talking a couple of weeks ago about how we were struggling to get below 15k cases a day in ther UK; that has long gone, and nearly every day in the last week has seen over 30k cases a day.
I am not going to cover the new variant again, but think things would be looking bad even without it.
Make the most of your little freedoms you have now. But the darkest hour is before the dawn and all that, so hopefully things will start looking up really soon with the vaccine rollout.
Merry christmas all. Hope HMRC are sending you money and not the comedy bill they just sent me.
Hmm, looking back on this..
Yesterday it was announced there were 1,000+ cases a day, which is clearly just a big catch up dump that is because they always use date reported rather than date of death on the news.
The reality is that in England we went through 500 English deaths a day on Christmas Day, and whilst there is still lag in the data, we are very likely to be through 600 in England already, and 700 UK wide.
This thread originally followed the Spectator projection charts, which were based on England and based on some projections used to justify the November lockdown. What is clear now is that we went under the projections after that lockdown, but we are about to go through the charts for the lowest projections they used. This is because nearly every projection had a peak in December and started going down. Deaths are still hitting new wave 2 highs, and rising at about 20% a week, and will be for a couple of weeks until deaths catches up with the recent surge in cases.
On cases, it is too early to make concrete conclusions on if the latest lockdown has been enough. I don't want to confirm anything regarding Christmas meet-ups yet, but we were clearly already in a mess before that. I suspect it will be a minor blip rather than anything massive. I think most people just didn't meet-up or kept gatherings to a minimium.
Away from deaths, hospital admissions are stll increasing significantly (see the post from yesterday). They are clearly going to carry on rising for a couple of weeks, so I don't think the talk of triage is hyperbole. I think there is bound to be some knock on effect of the limited resources on deaths.
There is some good news elsewhere, with more succesful treatments just announced. I haven't been monitoring vaccination stats, but might throw something together. Surely medical services getting overun is not going to be good if some of the same people will be needed for vaccinations. I wouldn't like to be allocating resources right now.
Again, this is mostly bad news, and the deaths data is bound to be dreadful for at least another couple of weeks. Hopefully, the lockdown should be making a noticeable difference on other stats towards the end of that period. It is going to take longer for the vaccinations to make a significant difference simply because it still takes a few weeks to build immunity after vaccination. I still think things are going to look way better in the sping.
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