Thread by @TravellingTabby

As promised, here is a thread giving an overview of the Covid-19 situation in Scotland from over the past week!

First some figures on cases, which are still rising at a rapid pace. Our daily and 7-day average figures are now the highest they've been since the pandemic began. 👎

Yes, the amount of testing we are doing each day has increased by quite a bit.

But the rise in cases is outpacing that, which has resulted in the positivity rate rising quite steeply too.

Our 7-day positivity rate is now at 11.2%, which is up from 7.2% this time a week ago.

In terms of age, 15-24 year olds have the highest rates right now by some distance.

Although every age group is seeing a fairly sharp increase right now. Even the older ones, to a lesser extent.

I had the idea to make this table, showing the week-on-week increase in cases for each age group and sex.

It turned out to be more complex than I imagined, and I just started confusing myself with it. 😅

I summarised some points of it in the 'thoughts' area though.

At a local level, cases are rising everywhere other than in Orkney right now. Most areas have seen their cases double in the past week, and some areas have even had them triple.

Both West and East Dunbartonshire currently have the highest 7-day rates though.

I put this together quickly, to give a quick glance at the rates in each council area over the past few months.

You can see that many areas have now either matched or surpassed the peak they saw a month ago. For some, quite dramatically so...

At an intermediate zone level, Rothesay continues to be the worst affected part of the country.

About 2.4% of the town has tested positive in the past week.. over 1 in 50 people.

A lot of other littles towns are having outbreaks, although none to the same extent.

In terms of the vaccination status of the new cases, there has been a little shift in the most recent week (which is still incomplete, to be fair).

People with 1 dose now have the highest case rate, and not the unvaccinated (because of high cases in 16-24-year-olds, I imagine).

And lastly here is a quick glance at the situation across the UK.

Cases are still highest in Northern Ireland, by some distance. They are increasing in Wales and England too, although the rate of the increase in England is quite slow, outside of the South West.

I'm not going to go into as much detail on the deaths (as there's not much change to report on.. thankfully!), but here are some figures on them.

Deaths are still steadily declining, and we're now reporting under 5 new deaths a day, for the first time in over a month.

And an update on the number of new deaths reported this week, by vaccination status.

I added a couple of little extra bits in there, to show the population size in each group and the per capita figures.

The population sizes shown there are based on the same ones shown in the case figures here, from the weekly PHS report (publichealthscotland.scot/media/8824/21-…).

These are based on CHI population figures, which are quite a bit different than NRS population estimate figures shown elsewhere.

Anyways, hopefully those extra figures give a bit of extra context! Yes, most of the new deaths we're seeing are in the fully vaccinated. No, that does not mean the vaccinations are not effective.

I think this chart should get across their effectiveness quite clearly...

And heres an update on the situation across the UK.

I've also included some figures on deaths by age range in England, so you can see more clearly who is still dying from the virus, age-wise.

(I could do a similar one for Scotland, but it doesn't work well with our low figures)

The number of people in hospital with the virus in Scotland has unfortunately started to increase again in recent days. 👎

The same situation is happening in the number of people in ICU too. 👎👎

I guess it was to be expected though, after seeing it happen last month.

The rise in admissions isn't quite as clear cut, but as these lag behind a little, we might need to give it another week to see the increases here.

Age wise, most new admissions are still in the elderly, both in total and per capita.

Then in terms of vaccination status, the difference between the vaccinated and the vaccinated is pretty clear cut here.

The unvaccinated are being admitted to hospital at more than twice the rate of the vaccinated.

And again here is this chart, showing the trend of cases vs the trend of hospitlizations.

The most recent day showing on the chart is the 19th of August, just for context. So some of the increases during the past week won't even all be showing yet.

Moving on again to vaccinations!

These haven't really changed much in the past week, so there isn't too much to say about them.

We have now vaccinated over 50% of the at risk 12-15 year olds with their first dose, which is good!

Although its not so good when you notice that this only makes up 0.8% of all 12-15 year olds.

UK wide, Scotland is still administering the most new doses each day, per capita.

We're still a fair bit behind Wales on second dose coverage, but I imagine we will catch up and even surpass them with time, judging by how we've done so in first dose coverage.

Internationally, the world has just surpassed 5 billion vaccinations administered, meaning 25% of the planet is now fully vaccinated! 🥳🥳

In countries with over 300k population, Scotland currently sits 14th for the percentage of population fully vaccinated (and 8th in Europe)

Then finally here are some of the weekly NRS death figures.

There were 41 new deaths reported this week, which is the exact same as last week. This included a single death in the 20-29 age range, the eighth of the pandemic there, and also Shetlands twelfth death of the pandemic.

Excess deaths were up again, and above the normal range for this time of the year, for the 13th week in a row.

Quite noticeably so this week, too.

Anyways that is all!

So the big worry really seems to be the rising cases... and why.

I don't really know what is happening, but I think there are a lot of reasons that could be in play.

Schools are the obvious one to point at. There have been 60 schools affected in the Highlands alone.. (bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotla…)

But cases are rising across all age groups. They're not even rising any faster in 0-14 year olds than they are in the middle-aged age groups...

Not to mention how cases started spiking before most schools even went back

The PHS educational/children dashboard will be updated on Friday (i think), and that will be very interesting to read! I'll try to tweet out some of the figures from it on Friday if I can

Nightclubs and football are another possibility, especially looking at the rates of increase in the 15-24 range

Although there isn't really a massive gap between Males and Females like you'd expect with football, and again its not as if cases are only rising in these age groups

No self isolation requirement for the fully vaccinated could be playing a part. In the latest week, nearly 7,000 new cases were in the fully vaccinated.

Maybe these people were spreading the virus before they tested positive, when they would have been isolating before?

Tourism could also be playing a part, especially when you look at places like Argyll & Bute and the South West of England.

But many of the other hotspots aren't really known for having large amounts of tourists...

Maybe its just areas that haven't had many cases before, and the virus is working through them now.

Although I just threw this together and it doesn't even look like that. The areas with more cases overall are still generally seeing more cases right now.

Of course, council areas are large. It could potentially be a matter of towns like Rothesay which haven't seen many cases before and are now seeing a lot of cases, happening across the country.

I personally have no idea, but I reckon its probably a mixture of everything I mentioned above and then some other factors.

I guess they can all combine together, and then just cause high levels of community spread which affect everyone.

Either way, this sucks and I'm sick of it all😤

I'm worried with how cases are going, and I'm worried that things could get worse over winter.

Its been about 3-4 months now since we finished vaccinating the most vulnerable. So hopefully they can get boosters before that arrives

I'm also starting to accept that I'll be doing this website for even longer than I planned (another month at least), and that doing some international travelling is going to be difficult for a while longer yet, if possible at all this year. 👎😞

But you know I did get some Jack and Victor whisky today, so it's not all so bad! 😋🥃