Thu vaccine update:
522k doses today, down over a fifth on last week, and the 6th consecutive day of falls, bringing the 7D total down from 4.2m to 3.5m in just 6 days.
1st doses of 173k are hit hardest today, down over a quarter, so the 7D total is now just 1.1m.
1/
2nd doses of 349k are down 18%, but on a positive note, after reaching 75% coverage of adults yesterday on 1st doses, today we pass the 50% mark of adults who have been fully vaccinated.
England next...
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We're now getting a daily age breakdown so unlike previous weeks, this is fully up to date, not 3 days behind.
We can see there's still someway to go to get all over 50s fully dosed.
Let's compare younger ages with the rest of the UK next...
3/
We can see how Wales has vaccinated around twice the number of 18-29s than the other countries to date, and is also ahead for those in their thirties, albeit by a lesser amount.
4/
It's hard not to draw a link between the previous chart and the data on the government dashboard regarding infections, backed up by the most recent ONS data that shows Wales under half the level of the other three countries.
5/5
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A great thread on the state pension and National Insurance.
For me, the trailed abolition of NI and thus its replacement by general taxation in terms of funding state pension benefits will have a major generational redistribution of tax.
It’s been the case that (in aggregate) at any one time the working generation funds the SPs of the retired generation above it.
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If the abolition of NI results in an increase (albeit smaller - else why bother) in income tax, whilst those in work will in total be better off, pensioners will be worse off.
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The Pensions & Lifetime Savings Association has updated its guide to living costs in retirement. The full report is well worth a read, and goes into a lot of detail.
One key point is that it assumes that pensioners own their home outright - probably reasonable now, but the shift to renting means that in future years that may become increasingly questionable.
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It focuses on retirement income, but note that other sources may be used to fund retirement, whether it be income from savings/investments, or gradual withdrawal of capital. Much more likely to be relevant for those aspiring to a comfortable lifestyle of course.
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UKHSA estimates that prevalence of COVID in England and Scotland has nearly tripled in the month since the ONS restarted its COVID infection surveillance.
Fortunately prevalence is lowest at the oldest, more vulnerable age groups, but is estimated at just under 6% in the 18 to 44 age groups.
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Prevalence is estimated to be highest in the London area, at just over 6% across the population. Note though that confidence intervals are wider due to lower sample sizes than in previous studies.
So with the news this morning that the earnings growth announced today means the state pension (SP) will very likely increase by another 8.5% next year, it's time to set out once again why the SP triple lock (TL) is such a bad idea.
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It's all down to cherry-picking the best of the three rates each year. I did a thread nearly a year ago, that hopefully sets out clearly how the mechanism inevitably means that the SP will grow over time against both earnings (E) and prices (P).
With BH's still distorting individual weeks' figures, the cumulative position gives a better view, with the latest CMI age-standardised analysis showing mortality 3.8% (of a full year's mortality) worse than its reference year of 2019.
Here's the mea culpa - it was only wrong by a factor of 13, but at least the post has been deleted rather than just corrected and left up, when experience shows that only a fraction of the original audience will see the correction.
So what are the true numbers?
2/
In E&W the peak week in 2020 was just under 9,000, and the second wave peak was pretty close to that number.
In total ONS has recorded 199,728 COVID related deaths in E&W since the pandemic started.