Thread by @gnomeicide

5274 infections and 18 deaths today. Here's the overall Covid picture in the UK now, and we're just falling off the wrong side of the knife edge (1)

Have a look at recent trends for cases and deaths on log plots. Cases are rising ever faster, and deaths are, well, rising slowly again. In a break from tradition I'll go over infections first today (2)

Here's what infections are doing - 7 day rolling average change in infections is going the wrong way. The rate infections are rising is going up, and fast. 4.82% per day, thats the worst rate of rise since the 6th of January (3)

5274 cases is the highest total since the 26th of March. (4)

And yes, when something is curving up on a log plot it means cases are rising proportionally faster. That ain't good (5)

Look at how cases doubling time is trending down. Cases are now doubling every 16-17 days (based on daily change in the 7 days rolling average) (6)

And that means R as calculated from cases is rising. For the 26th of last month (roughly the most recent day we can calculate) it reached 1.25. Thats the highest R we can calculate since the 29th of December (7)

Calculating a proxy of R from deaths is harder right now, as the number of deaths is low so daily variation makes up a larger proportion of whats going on - derived figures like this are therefore less reliable (8)

Deaths have risen for 6 of he last 7 days. (9)

From a low of 40 dead per 7 days we're back up to 54. From a daily average of 5.71 to 7.71. (10)

On trends based on either the last 7 or 14 days, deaths are now rising. Neither projection is currently fast, but we need to watch this like a hawk (11)

The second wave of infections started last July. If we plot whats happening now, compared with then, its not dissimilar (12)

And then, like now, deaths weren't doing much, daily variation was pretty big, and that made spotting any specific trends difficult. We know how ignoring that ended (13)

Even more striking is how similar the situation is now with where we were in recovery from wave 1. (14)

Do we know how fast deaths will rise? No. But we do know that with the claimed infectivity of the strains of Covid we're battling, we are not at herd immunity yet. Cases, hence deaths, will rise. (15)

Opening up further and faster now means one thing. Accepting more people will die, entirely needlessly, and we will be in this mess for longer. Now is a time for caution (16)

More haste, less speed as they say. We're teetering on the wrong side of the knife edge right now. This is not a good state of affairs (fin)