Thread by @MackayIM

In Victoria's (Aus) Wave 2 in 2020, there was a lag to hospitalisations (blue) following the initial wave of detections (orange). A small portion of those went to ICU and some died (black line). But in the current New South Wale's Wave 2...

...the daily number of COVID-19 cases hospitalised doesn't show that lag.
Is this due to a different policy for faster admission of cases, or home hospitalisation from the outset, or something else in NSW compared to VIC?

NSW sure got the testing amped up early on (green line)

I have no idea if there's a well-known & simple reason for this.

Chime in if you know it.

Data copied from covidlive.com.au

Also interesting (the reason I wanted to plot these data in the first place) - deaths.
Caveat: no two different jurisdictions (also separated by viral variant and time) can be directly compared.
I still thought this was interesting.

I've chosen an arbitrary >10 cases per day limit to start counting when deaths consistently hit a(nother arbitrary) value of >3 per day. 36 for Wave 2, VIC.

It's been more than 36 days in NSW since 10 cases per day was consistently hit...and yet still no consistent 3 daily deaths.
Is this the impact of protecting *some* of each of our most at-risk populations with vaccines?
And also, is this working even with the evil Delta VOC?

Time will tell of course - let's give the lag more of a chance to appear, but it is looking that way to me.
This is great news if so, and not unexpected, but you'd be forgiven for being sucked into the gloom on this platform and some of the mainstream media.