Thread by @jburnmurdoch

Now, some will inevitably say "but that’s just showing Covid spreading among people who were already in hospital for other reasons", but that is wrong.

Of the 17,900 new Covid cases in English hospitals since Christmas day, 15,072 were new admissions from the community, i.e 84%.

Here are hospital admissions for all UK regions (excl Wales where this data is not readily available).

Far from being only a London problem, new Covid admissions are now doubling in less than 2 weeks across 5 English regions.

And here’s what that means for Covid hospital occupancy:

Now increasing in every English region + Wales, and no longer falling in Scotland or Northern Ireland.

We can also see how the new B.1.1.7 variant is playing a key role.

Latest data from @covidgenomicsuk show that even in 5 days from Dec 17 to Dec 22, the share of sequenced samples that found the new variant was growing well beyond the south east, with hotspots in the north too.

Edit to third tweet: we can also look at data not only on how many Covid patients are in hospital, but what share they make up of *all* available beds.

Covid patients now occupy more than half of all beds in many areas (and rising fast), including 63% in North Middlesex.

For those interested, the hospital bed breakdown data shown in these charts come from the weekly NHS hospital activity data here (specifically the last three sheets of the Excel workbook) england.nhs.uk/statistics/sta…