Here is my latest heatmap showing how cases are travelling through the age groups.
It is very concerning.
"The first thing to note is the more-than-doubling in the rate of Covid cases in 10-19 year olds. Many of these will be university students, but it's not clear how many of these are schoolchildren.
“Studies in Spain, France, and the US have all shown that although the second wave may start in young people, it will inevitably move to older people.
“The remarkable thing about this disease is that the death rate increases massively with age.
“Students are unlikely to die of Covid-19, although some may, and we are still unsure about the long-term health consequences from catching the disease.
“The heatmap of cases shows how the disease has travelled through the age groups. As you go from left to right through the weeks, you can see a gradual rise upwards through the population.
“These figures should be seen as a minimum. Lack of testing capacity has meant that not everyone can get a test. For example, we do not know whether delays in testing may be concentrated in certain groups such as care home residents.
“The latest figures (which will be revised upwards as new cases are recorded) show a very worrying number of cases in the over-80s.
“A case rate of 53 per 100,000 over-80s is very concerning.
"The Department of Health and Social Care have this week stopped publishing the COVID-19 surveillance report which broke down numbers of people with the disease. However, we can estimate that over 1,000 over-80s tested positive last week.
"Given the very high fatality rate in over-80s, we can confidently predict that over 100 over-80s will die of infections caught in the last week.
“This is one of many reasons why interventions are so critical – by not clamping down hard on the disease now, we will sleep walk into a situation as bad or worse than the first wave.
"The mid-July Academy of Medical Sciences report commissioned by the Chief Scientific Adviser set out a reasonable worst case scenario of 119,000 deaths in the second wave excluding those in care homes.We have a choice as to whether we as a nation repeat the mistakes of the past
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These have been replaced with the National flu and COVID-19 surveillance reports. So, that's good.
And I'll be providing weekly updates on these.
But - a few things.
The new reports don't show hospitalizations by NHS trust. These were useful for showing e.g. the 5th highest hopsital trust with admissions per 100,000 population was in London, not the north of England
Public Health England have published their latest (week 41) COVID surveillance report. However, this is in a new format called the 'influenza and COVID-19 surveillance report'. It is not clear whether a separate COVID report will be published
This report does not appear to contain a watchlist of local authorities. Previous weeks have contained a watchlist of local authorities published jointly by PHE / Joint Biosecurity Centre / NHS Test and Trace.
We may not be able to rely on case data. But here's the latest PHE map of cases. Not now restricted to the north east and the north west - look at London
So if we can't rely on cases, we have to use other metrics.
Here is a graph of admissions to hospital in England.
478 people were admitted today. And the trend is upwards.
What happens if you deteriorate is that you end up in ICU or a High Dependency Unit.
So what's happening there? These are increasing too.