Thread by @ZiadFazel

#COVID19AB 🧵
CMOH Spin v UK & Denmark Reality

Yesterday, the CMOH made some claims about the health system impact in the UK that are demonstrably untrue, at least with the UK's official stats that were available at the time.

Let's look into this...

alberta.ca/release.cfm?xI…

"In countries like the UK and Denmark, where Omicron is spreading widely, their early reports of health system impact indicate that hospital and ICU admissions are not rising as quickly as in previous waves."

coronavirus.data.gov.uk

Ahem.

Week-over-week in the UK:
• cases are up 48%
• hospital admissions are up 50%
• hospital stats as of 27 Dec were avail to CMOH by 31 Dec

Does that spike ↘️ look like "hospital and ICU admissions are not rising as quickly as in previous waves" to you?

"It is also important to note that in both of those countries, their booster program has reached more than 40 per cent of their population, while we are still at around 20 per cent."

Let's start with apples-to-apples at age 12+
• UK 59%, Alberta 23.6%

alberta.ca/stats/covid-19…

And then do 3rd doses as % of whole population.
• Alberta (from table) = 20.1%
• UK (calculated) = 50.5%

Much more than 40%.

2.5x higher 3rd dose coverage in UK than Alberta.

[33,927,775 3rd doses ÷ 67,081,000 population]

ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulati…

So despite UK having 2.5x more 3rd Doses than Alberta:
• cases took off ~ 9 Dec
• hospital admissions took off ~ 18 Dec
• 7-day avg then = 989.6 admissions/day
• most recent day = 1915 admissions

ie. Hospital admissions doubled 10 days after cases.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/health…

Shall we have a look at Denmark now?

1st / 2nd / 3rd Dose as % of population:
• Alberta: 79.1 / 72.8 / 20.1
• Denmark: 81.9 / 77.9 / 47

Like UK, Denmark also has ~2.5x the 3rd doses as Alberta. (2.35x to be precise).

sst.dk/en/english/cor…

Denmark provides an official table, not fancy graphs, but you can see interesting things from it:
• Cases have doubled in the last week
• Reinfections have more than doubled

So much for immunity from prior infection.

Reinfections growing faster than cases. 🤔

For hospitalization, a reliable data aggregator.
• number of people in hospital has gone up 6x in 3 months
• here's their late Dec jump in hospitalization, just as the number of patients were starting to fall from Delta (spoiler alert)

ourworldindata.org/grapher/curren…

Aw heck, let's compare Canada, UK and Denmark:
• While Canada seems to have fewer cases
• We also have very low testing
• Canada's test positivity is nearly 18%, way above the others
• Alberta's test positivity = 30%

ourworldindata.org/explorers/coro…

But our CMOH would tell us if Severe Outcomes like Hospital are following cases, riiight?
• the slow fall in hospital admissions from Delta has stopped
• since a low on 21 Dec at 3.4 admissions/day/million people, latest 28 Dec is 4.8
• highest in a month
• up 41% in a week.

What does all this remind me of?

Alberta's intentional launch of 4th Wave. Some common themes:
• cut public health measures & test/trace/isolate
• benchmark to the worst, not the best
• cherry-pick or misrepresent even their statistics
• cover up