1a. Pillars 1&2 - last couple of weeks & last month (current wave) & full curve. Bear in mind the left-hand side was heavily rationed for testing, the right-hand side far less so: the 'two waves' are not comparable.
1b. English pillar 1 (clinical need & NHS) cases and % positive. Again, bear in mind that the left-hand side was heavily rationed for testing, the right-hand side *far* less so. Positivity currently 1.6%
*Critical data*. In week 37 there were 10x more outbreaks in care homes than in food outlets and restaurants; interventions targeted at the latter would be pointless.
Infection rate increasing in the young, but not in the elderly. Fantastic news - the faster the virus passes through the young / healthy, the sooner it will pass over the elderly / vulnerable.
COVID-19 was the 24th most common cause of death this week, with August covid deaths 98.8% lower than April. Year to date mortality is at 2009 levels, and deaths have been below average since end May.
7.1 *Huge* spike in rhinovirus (colds) diagnoses this week, couldn't have come at a worse time for worried parents to confuse with covid symptoms, hence the strain on testing
Source: covid surveillance report
7. Miscellaneous
7.2 Contact tracing still seems to mostly take the place of positive test recipients just telling their housemates and guests they tested positive!
Source: PHE surveillance report
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This is Toby Young (@toadmeister)'s response to my piece in the @spectator, which he very fairly follows by a frontline account from an in-house senior doctor in London.
I am still a lockdown sceptic, and Toby sets out very well the principled objections to lockdown that I still believe too. 2/n
I still think the 1st lockdown went on too long, with harms likely to have outweighed the benefits. TikTok punting videos while people missed basic healthcare is revolting.
I don't think the 2nd lockdown was well justified: the arguments that convince me now didn't then. 3/n
ONS: Incidence now up to 35k per day, 0.9% overall; huge variance regionally and by age group, with young getting infected *much* faster than old (good news), and this is backed up by Zoe (KCL/CSS) data: (
My experience of contact tracing.
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My daughter was sent home from school to isolate Tuesday morning, following a positive test by her teacher (who had been isolating since Friday).
She rapidly developed (moderate) fever and kept falling asleep (fine now), so was tested /1
This was 2.30pm Tuesday.
Result came through 10pm Thursday; within half an hour we had phoned all contacts (piano teacher, school, houseguests, other direct contacts).
Contact tracers phoned us 17 hours later (Friday afternoon); we gave them all the same information. /2
I asked what the point of contacting people we had already contacted; they confessed "basically... not much".
Since then they have repeatedly been contacting us (in isolation) by phone and text to confirm our details, even though I've told them we're isolating. /3
Note sharp age distinction in ONS / REACT1; if you favour the "GB Declaration" approach (see below) you would want the difference between young and old incidence and trajectory as great as possible
The headline is that during the most recent week (18 to 24 September) there were around 8,400 new infections per day not including those living in institutional settings, *down* from 9,600 previous week.
We also had the Imperial "REACT1" interim incidence report this week which also pointed to a slowdown, and the KCL Zoe app (tracking symptomatic cases) points in the same direction