Thread by @gnomeicide

Todays Covid data is shocking but perhaps most worrying in how incomplete it is. Here's the overall picture, I'll go into the key parameters over the next few tweets (1)

Cases are bonkers, and while its fair to say we've had some crazy days of reporting, its still very obviously enormous. 218,742 cases today, and its not even a surprise (2)

1,238,751 cases over the last 7 days. That figure doesn't include reinfections (3)

Thats an average of 176,964 a day over the last 7. With no sign of slowing. (4)

Cases are rising at 6.4% a day on average. Thats a fast exponential to be on. Even with the delays in data and uncertainties that brings, its unmistakable that cases are rising incredibly fast (5)

Deaths data has yet to settle down to anything like a coherent trend after the holidays yet. It looks like deaths are up, but we haven't got a steady average yet (6)

We're up at 130 deaths a day, on average, with a staggering growth rate of 7.6% a day on average - which is terrifying, if it settles there. But wait and see - the chaos in the data should settle down over the next few days. (7)

Its worrying that we haven't had any new hospitalisations data for days. We're way behind with that now, we have no national data since the 27th of December, and the next update is critical. Last we saw, it was rising fast (8)

We know that the number of patients -in- hospital is rising fast (9)

So we are at -such- a critical point. I'd love to be able to tell you more about whats happening, but it now comes down to two things - will hospitalisations rise? Will deaths rise? And if they do, by how much? (10)

Hospitals across the country are declaring major incidents. The crisis is now. Its only a matter of how much worse it'll get (fin)