NEW: the variant thought to be responsible for fuelling India’s grim second wave (B.1.617) has been found in the UK, and numbers are rising relatively quickly in Britain.
1) Numbers are very small (<100 sequenced cases so far), which means random variation and patterns in testing can play an outsized role in driving the overall trajectory.
We can see this with the Brazilian and South African variants, whose trends are anything but established.
2) We have vaccines now, so key question is not just "is B.1.617 spreading fast?", it’s also "do the vaccines work as well on B.1.617 as they do on B.1.1.7?"
We don’t know the answer to that yet, but with vaccinations rolling out in India, I suspect we’ll start to find out soon.
We don’t have sufficient evidence right now to say B.1.617 will continue its growth trend, and whether or not it does we don’t know whether it will set back the progress we’ve made on vaccinations.
So for me, this goes in the "one to keep a very close eye on" bracket.
An aside: there’s a lot of noise about variants in the UK at the moment. It’s good to be wary and to keep a very close eye on things, but some of what I’ve seen has crossed the line into alarmism.
The alarmist stuff is generally not giving people any information they can use, but is fanning fear among the already extremely anxious.
The numbers we‘re talking about here are tiny. Sometimes 2 or 3 confirmed cases in a week. That means huge uncertainty around trends, so we should be very careful about using words like "surge".
/ends/
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Surprised by pushback to Boris Johnson’s comments that restrictions have played a key role in reducing UK Covid rates.
Why do people think rates have fallen among unvaxxed groups?
I always felt "lockdown effect" was implicit in these charts, but here it is explicitly labelled
Of course, it’s very difficult to know exactly how big the lockdown effect is for several reasons, but we can now see from dozens of other countries how B.1.1.7 sends rates rising without restrictions, even among the age groups who have been mostly vaccinated.
See France:
Same is now clear in the US, too:
With minimal restrictions in much of the US, hospitalisations have been rising again among under-50s as B.1.1.7 has taken hold.
Vaccines produce the gap between those lines, but without restrictions in place, the lines can bend back upwards.
NEW: big international Covid data thread, focusing on the contest between vaccines & variants
First to the UK, where things are looking very good. The vaccine effect is still crystal clear, with more than 10,000 lives already estimated to have been saved assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
And critically, rates of cases, hospitalisations and deaths are all falling among both the most and least vaccinated age groups.
Those straight blue lines represent constant rates of decline among the most-vaccinated, completely unaffected by the reopening of schools.
It’s not just the very elderly who are benefiting, either. This chart (concept from @JamesWard73) shows that as the UK’s vaccination rollout has progressed down through the age groups, so has the vaccine effect. It’s amazing how clear the pattern is.
UK regulator: under-30s should be offered an alternative jab to AstraZeneca (but those who have had first AZ jab should get a second AZ jab)
Both orgs are clear that the specific blood clotting side-effect is extremely rare, and the vaccine has been proven highly effective, so the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine still outweigh the risks for the vast majority of people.
So UK decision is based more on the other side of the coin: that Covid mortality risk is also very low for under-30s, so the balance of two low risks becomes less clear-cut.
NEW: just updated our excess deaths figures, including data into April
It’s abundantly clear that Latin America is the hardest-hit region in the world, with the five highest excess death rates globally. The UK is 21st out of 48 countries, and the US 24th
Note the underlying patterns. It can be easy for people in the US and UK to think Covid is almost gone, but excess deaths are climbing again in Brazil, Bolivia and Peru to name just three countries.
The grim toll of Europe’s third wave is also clear. The Czech Republic, Italy, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Poland have all climbed above the UK into the global top 20.
And this comes just two days after another cyclist was killed in a hit-and-run collision with a lorry.
Your regular reminder that HGVs are involved in 15% of fatal crashes in London, despite making up just 3% of traffic.
Incidentally, one of the highlights of my third lockdown was a driver leaping out of his van and coming over to bump his forehead against mine, footballer style, because I had the temerity to walk across a side road that he wanted to speed out of.
NEW: I saved this one up for the US morning, because it’s a big "good Covid news" moment for our friends across the Atlantic
A "vaccine effect" is now clear in US data, with hospitalisations falling faster among the old (mostly vaccinated) than the young ft.com/content/78bb2c…
This divergence can’t just be explained by the elderly being more cautious: we did the same analysis for the second wave last summer/fall, and back then rates among the old actually fell slower & less far.
Now they’re falling faster. What’s changed? They’ve been vaccinated 💉💉
Hospitalisations are clearest sign of vaccine doing its work, but we can see similar patterns in cases & deaths if we make the same comparison:
Second wave, no vaccines: rates fell slowly & less far among the old
Today, with vaccines: rate of decline among elderly has caught up