Thread by @andrewflood

Sigh - this was not how I hoped the #Covid19Ireland Cautious Reopening plot would end but the last 3 case dots tell a story thats sadly unmistakable - adding as the final red dots
1183 cases is 187% of last Friday
79 hospital, 158% last Friday
23 ICU, 153% last Friday
/1

What happens next will be tracked on the Precarious Exit plot which has not improved since yesterday, indeed the 5306 cases this week being 151% of the previous week is. a lot worse, I'll show how much in the next 2 tweets /2

I've been tracking what percentage of cases end up in hospitals and what percentage of those go to ICU. As the force of infection increased these have got a lot worse, 2.5% cases hospitalised & almost 15% of those going to ICU when you account for lag effects. /3

At the current growth rate with cases of each week as 151% previous by end Sept a total of 950k cases, 24k hospitalisations & 3500 ICU admissions. Wk by wk it looks like this;
5306
8012
12098
18268
27585
41654
62897
94974
143411
216551
326992
/4

Those numbers sound so bad they can't be true - but the north has been following an even worse track since it opened indoor hospitality on May 24th & my mid June projections seemed unbelievable but are now being realised. Delta is a disaster basically

https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1416025705855520769?s=20

/5

Over the last two days the north lost the race to vaccinate, on both those days more people were infected than got a 1st dose. The south has not lost that ratio war yet, its almost at 50 to 1 today but by mid August we will also have more infections

https://twitter.com/auto_plot/status/1416086909957414913?s=20

This math is the reason the HSE decided to burn through the buffer stock of Pfizer & why NIAC changed its AZ & Janssen recommendations. Basically by September almost every adult is getting immunity the easy way through vaccination or the hard way through surviving infection /7

Towards the start of September hospitalisations overwhelm the health system unless by that point vaccination has reduced adult cases enough. It's actually hard to call but opening indoor hospitality shifts that into August and there we lose the race for sure /8

Otherwise September is hard - with a lot of adults vaccinated we have a huge wave of infection in school ages just at the point the return to school happens. And we probably have a lot of unvaccinated college age at just the level they start. It's terrible timing /9

I've no calculation of deaths here because as of now the methods I use and the data available makes that impossible. However the worst case NPHET model, and we are in a much worse position, has 1760 additional death so if they are right they would suggest 3,000 /10

I was going to add some wishful thinking here as to why this may not happen but TBH I can't come up with anything convincing enough. All I can say is the vaccines work so well that we are now talking of 3,000 deaths rather than 43,000+ on current government policy intentions