Thread by @gnomeicide

Deaths and cases up today. Here's the overall Covid-19 picture in the UK, I'll try and unpack whats happening in a thread (1)

If you look at recent trends for reported cases on log plots, its getting frightening. Cases are rising ever faster, and deaths are rising. 6765 cases, up from 3398 last Saturday, and 13 deaths, up from 7. (2)

Deaths have risen, relative to the same day the previous week, for 6 of the last 7 days. The exception was Monday, which of course was at the end of a bank holiday weekend, meaning the report was likely artificially low (3)

8.71 deaths per day, as a rolling average, is higher than at any time since the 18th of May. At that time deaths were still declining (4)

With the number of deaths being lower right now the data is noisier - but the daily average change is still going the wrong way - on average deaths are rising at 1.37% per day right now (5)

The rate cases are rising is -terrifying-. Its an average of 5.59% per day, which is the fastest since the 4th of January. There have been two days this year (3rd and 4th of Jan) when the average daily change in cases was greater. (6)

Half term might slow things down. My gosh we need it to. A line thats curving up on an exponential plot? As the D strain takes over from the A strain, the proportional rate of change gets faster. Cases are rocketing. (7)

At this rate we go over 10,000 cases per day in a little over 10 days, based on the change in cases over the last 7 or 14 days. If we cross that earlier, be alarmed. (8)

Calculating a proxy of infection rate (R) from deaths we can get up to the 13th of last moth (the average day people who caught Covid who died today caught it), that has just crossed to over 1, to 1.05. As calculated form infections it was also 1.05 that day (8)

Or, n other words, almost none of the recent rise in infections is yet indicated in death data. Claims that vaccines have conclusively broken this link are not yet borne out. Deaths are rising slowly now - thats what we would predict when we compare R from deaths to infectins (9)

Case numbers look ominously like they did at the start of wave 2 last July (10)

Just like last July people were brushing that off because deaths weren't much rising yet - but of course the gap between cases rising and deaths rising was the same (11)

Cases are now doubling every 8.8 days. (12)

So what can we conclude? Nothing good. It matters if cases spread, it means thousands more will suffer long term health effects. We know that at Easter cases slowed when the kids were off school, that may happen for half term too (13)

So if the rate of rise slows now, don't take too much comfort in that, it'll take off again after the holiday. If deaths start rising faster this week, well, we sort of might expect that. The rate of change will be what we need to keep an eye on (14)

We don't have herd immunity from vaccination yet, not with the new strain that is spreading. We would have had that by now with the original strain, as I've previously described, thats a mathematical certainty (15)

Stay alert, stay safe. We've a way to go yet before we can say we are safe. It would be immensely foolhardy to unlock faster now (fin)