Thread by @JamesWard73

The headlines from today’s case data are concerning, and it’s certainly not great news. But there are some glimmers of hope in the detail by age, so let’s have a dig in. The overview doesn’t look too bad, with case rates stable in the under-40s, and still falling in the 40+ 🧵

But that is a slightly lagged view of what’s going on, and obscures some useful detail. So I’ve built some new graphs which break down each of those lines into 5-year age groups, with no averaging, and using data up to specimen date 9th Nov – NB this date will get revised up.

Here’s the under-20s, to start with – we can see growth re-emerging in the 5-9s and 10-14s, but not so much in the 15-19s. The 0-4s were already bouncing around, close to stability – and that looks to be continuing here.

The difficult question to answer is how high that growth in the 5-9s and 10-14s goes, and for how long. I’m not going to make a confident prediction, other than to note that I’d be very surprised if we returned to the kind of growth rates we saw in mid/late September.

On the other hand, a repeat of the smaller surge we saw in early/mid-October is very possible – but fortunately now starting from a lower base. This is easier to imagine using the raw case data (here for the 10-14s).

Now stepping up the age groups to the young adults, we can see roughly stable cases overall – although the recent declines in the 35-39s have been cut back in the last few days.

That pattern extends into the 40-60s, which also have returned from falling cases to near-stability. My sense is that this is more of a post-half-term back-to-work effect (rather than a sign of more infections from child to parent, which you’d expect to take a few more days)

There is slightly better news in the older adults, where declining cases are continuing – except maybe in the 60-65s who are more impacted by the back-to-work effect, and who mostly haven’t had their boosters yet. It would be good to see that happening soon.

And finally in the elderly, case declines continue – and in fact the rate of decline looks to be continuing to accelerate. Go boosters!

So overall, it feels there’s a good chance that cases in the 60+ will continue to decline, even as we see growth in some of the younger age groups. That’s not ideal (as there will be some inevitable leakage between the swimming pool lanes, and I’d still rather that kids…

…got vaccinated before they were infected). But it's definitely better that way round, and it may mean that the impact on hospitalisation statistics is more muted. We’ve already seen some decent falls in admissions this week, and I’m hoping that will continue.

Finally, the best news today was in the booster vaccinations, which jumped up; while some of that is catch-up from the last 2 days, the weekly run-rate is now over 2m per week in England, which is getting close to the level it needs to be at. /end