Update on the situation in Bolton, courtesy of the covid dashboard.
First up, cases are still rising rapidly. Daily case numbers are almost back to the peak they reached during the second wave that hit the North West hard in the autumn.
Zooming in shows more clearly how cases in the over 60s have accelerated recently.
As cases usually work their way up the age groups over time, this is something to keep an eye on. Is vaccination enough to stop them rising much further, despite the more transmissible variant?
Meanwhile patient numbers in hospital with covid at Bolton NHS Foundation Trust (including Royal Bolton Hospital) remain very low, but are now rising too.
Again, as they always lag behind cases we have to hope vaccination keeps them from rising as steeply as last autumn.
The rise has prompted the hospital to open up an additional ward for covid positive patients, with the expectation that the recent surge in cases will inevitably result in more people arriving in hospital over the coming weeks.
And at the other end of the scale, infection rates amongst school age children are currently higher than for any other age group, and higher than they've been in any previous wave.
1 in 135 children in Bolton aged 10-14 tested positive last week alone.
It says a lot that so many politicians and their friends saw the pandemic as a get rich quick scheme.
In this case a disgraced former MP working with an organic dog food company owner (!) to broker a deal with a Hong Kong company, which itself seems to be a middleman. 🙄
Meanwhile in Canterbury, disgraced former scientist Michael Yeadon (who thinks proposed covid booster shots may be a plot to depopulate the Earth) is addressing people in a park with a PA system.
Having recently complained that he wasn't able to do this.
The problem is he's a racist crank with no expertise in viruses and a long history of writing nonsense.
His recent output on ResearchGate (which he was repeatedly warned about before the ban) includes articles claiming "vaccines are inherently dangerous" and that the surge in deaths last spring wasn't caused by covid but was "mass homicide by government response".
Before covid he was also a climate change denier.
A 2007 article claimed global warming was a "useful myth" that "deflects attention away from real world issues" such as "power-driven financiers, corporations and their cartels backed by military might".