Thread by @chrischirp

THREAD Confirmed cases in Scotland are as high as they've ever been (3.2K reported today) - and it's not just more testing, as positivity rates are over 10% and as high as they've been since the January 2021 peak.

Week on week cases have more than doubled.

Hospital & ICU occupancy are rising but still much lower than January's peak - obviously a very good thing.

This is because of vaccination and because infections are mainly in young people (also partly cos of vax)

But rapid recent increases have not yet fed through to hospitalisations - so hospitalisations will go up over next 2 wks.

Also, 20-30% of people infected will likely end up with long covid - with maybe 15% having it severely affect their daily lives
imperial.ac.uk/news/224853/ov…

In England, cases are also shooting up, although still not close to January's peak (thankfully!).

Week on week cases have gone up 60% - double the growth rate of the previous week. There seems to be *no* plan other than vaccination for getting cases down.

Vaccination will undoubtedly help - but 50% of population still without protection of 2 doses, kids are unvaccinated and the 18-30 year olds have just started their vaccinations.

Cases going up *fastest* in school age kids (5-19 year olds), but highest in 20-29 year olds.

Schools will be incredibly disrupted for the remaining 3 to 4 left of term - this is a direct consequence of allowing a new more transmissible variant to become dominant in this country, and then doing nothing outside vaccination to control its spread.

The week to 28 June saw 7 times as many cases reported as the week to 17 May.

*If* we keep going at current increases, we will be at well over 40K cases a day by 19 July. Another week of 50% growth and we're at 60K cases - higher than Jan peak.

And then what? yet more growth as we open up? slower growth as vaccination kicks? Eventual reduction as more people get protection from 2 doses?

But by then, tens of thousands more people living with long covid, hundreds of thousands more chances for further covid mutation.

And yes, also more people in hospital. The link between cases and hospitals has been weakened - SAGE Spi-M estimated in June that admissions are now about 4% of cases 10 days earlier. This might have come down further to 3%.

But 3% of 40K is still 1200 admissions a day.

Certainly enough to strain hospitals as they try to address backlogs of care and also a high burden of severe illness on thousands of people.

So what's the plan? Why are we *still* not supporting people to isolate (unlike many other countries) or investing in ventilation?

Finally - Delta overtook Alpha from nothing in 8 weeks. If we say vaxxed people don't need to isolate on return from abroad, then that will - by definition - help vax resistant variants to spread.

Unless we change policy, I'm not counting on Delta being our last variant. /END