Thread by @VictimOfMaths

There really is a lot going on in the recent COVID case numbers in England.

Cases back to being highest (and rising fastest) in primary age children.

Cases starting to rise again in their parents' age group.

Falls stalling in other ages.

Let's do some graphs...

If we look at it like this then, outside the 5-14 age bracket everything looks like it's going pretty ok.

Maybe cases haven't fallen as much in the 30-44 age group (who happen, perhaps not coincidentally, to be the right age to have primary school age kids).

But if we instead plot the rate at which cases are changing (blue = down, red = up) the problems become more apparent.

Cases rising in 35-44 year olds and the fall in cases slowing in all other adult ages.

Plus, the growth in <15 cases is accelerating.

Here's these case ratios as a line chart. Above the central grey line => cases rising.

Cases still falling for everyone aged 15+, but the rate at which they are falling has slowed down, and if this continues they'll start rising again within a week or so.

(obviously there's no reason they necessarily will, and it would be great if they carry on falling, but 🤷. It's easy to see why some people might argue that this is a bad time to relax restrictions (even if you disagree))

One other point - this weird thing is still happening. Cases in all ages 20-64 are becoming increasingly female-dominated.

The age bracket is a bit different from the Autumn, when it seemed to be mothers being more likely to get it from their kids (since women do more childcare). So not sure it's the same thing.

It *could* be differences in testing, but it would require the way that either men or women approach testing to have *changed* significantly from before Christmas (not the fact that it has always been different, which it has).

It's *maybe* something to do with this weirdness in the positivity data over New Year. But honestly, I don't know.

R code for all these plots is here:
github.com/VictimOfMaths/…