Thread by @andrewflood

Occasional #Covid19Ireland analysis - that 1308 in hospital today with Covid is 125% last Monday & one of the highest days of the pandemic but is this simply the human cost of the 'exit wave' or indicating something has gone very wrong /1

So far I'd lean towards this being the *expected* cost, the key metric of the proportion of cases that are hospital cases(1.36%) is still far below pre-Booster peak even though we know cases are comparatively undercounted since which would push that proportion up /2

The increase in hospital cases is real enough, 1151 new hospital cases this week is 118% previous. About 1/2 are being described as incidental but that doesn't cancel out the increase in recent weeks as that was also true when it started /3

It lags but the best clue if more hospital cases were not really incidental is the rate of hospital cases going to ICU. That is not rising with ICU Covid cases at 3% of new hospital cases in the week to 3 days previous /4

According to last nights HSE Operations report less that 25% of invasively ventilated patients in ICU have Covid, 3/4 are something else. The 49 C19 in ICU is 117% last Monday /5

The rate of new ICU cases per 7 days is well below the Autumn pre Booster peaks. 33 new ICU this week is 122% previous & New ICU in week is 0.05% cases in week to 10 days previous /6

We recorded what might be the last episode of Plague Tapes at the weekend discussing this 'exit wave' & its human cost that current government policy has judged to be acceptable / inevitable. Current stats mean that calculation is unlikely to change /7
radioactiveinternational.org/gotw-pt124/

All the testing chopping & changing along with the extended bank holiday make case & swab numbers hard to interpret but with that 49% positivity & the last 3 days swabs being 104% previous week we can presume infections continue to grow so hospital cases will also /8

I'm not really commenting on policy above, more describing the trends. But in general since the completion of willing primary adult vaccination at the end of July I've tended to see the removal of restrictions as the path that had to be taken /9

I'd have liked to see
1. Guaranteed sick pay
2. Heavily subsidised antigen testing (1 euro/test)
3. Major 'wear a mask to protect the vulnerable even though you don't have to' messaging rather than the protecting yourself / respecting 'anxiety'
4. Certified air filtration /10

But overall the purpose of the restrictions was to buy the time for vaccines to be developed, tested & administered while protecting healthcare & minimising deaths in the meantime. And so far the vaccines protect very well against severe outcomes /11

BTW I put exit wave in '' to indicate it was a label that has been used rather than somehow Covid magically goes away which clearly won't happen. We can hope its an 'exit' from the need for severe restrictions with future waves but even that isn't a done deal /12

The death notification system is too slow to read much into but the much faster NISRA system in the north continues to show negative excess deaths for 2022 & little suggests in the available data that the south should be worse. Again vaccines working well /13

That negative excess does't equate to zero 'real' Covid deaths but rather than those that are occurring are less than the number of premature deaths created earlier by Covid that would otherwise occur now /14

Adding in & graphing all the PCR & antigen cases of the last few days suggests hospitial number will continue to rise into next week & beyond as the long weekend is bound to have had a lot of extra infection opportunities