Thread by @andrewflood

Yikes, hospital cases are starting to look like the start of a #Covid19Ireland 5th wave - now really is the 2nd best time to get vaccinated if you've been putting it off.
8th of March was the last time we had 400 hospital cases so yes this is a Monday high but still a high

Vaccination is doing a great job of reducing our mortality - Eastern European counties with low vaccination rates are starting to get hammered as cases surge again but UK mortality being twice our rate is a warning that cases still come with a mortality cost /2

I abandoned posting detailed daily updates a few weeks back & switched to one big weekly one but I'm still checking the key data every day & taking notes in case the exit goes seriously wrong quickly - I'm not too happy with trends of the last few days /3

https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1446192480425234435?s=20

This is another stat I don't like, New Hospital Cases in a week as a percentage of new cases in the week to 6 days back have been slowly climbing since Sept 1st, now its 3.6%. Hard to be certain why but one possibility is fewer mild cases coming forward for testing /4

The 'hospitalisation' rate is now twice its lowest August days of 1.6-1.7% so it could be that 1 detected case now would have been 2 in August (the silver lining to this being more survival based population immunity which at least slows the pandemic & gives some protection) /5

Quite a large increase in positive swabs just came in, last 3 days are 132% same day last week. That will turn into New Hospital Cases over next weekend & into ICU admissions a few days later /6

https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1447566447702597633?s=20

I did an update to the NPHETs Exit plots last night where on all 3 measures we are approaching or have crossed the Reduced Transmission curve (a reminder that we are still doing better than expected even if thats about to end) /7

https://twitter.com/andrewflood/status/1447625748534149123?s=20

HSE 14 day tables to 10/10 show case increase had been in older groups with expected case reduction in under 12s as CC testing in schools ended. Over 85s up 28% between the two weeks adds urgency to completion of booster shot program. Not much increase in student age /8

Under 18 cases may be down but hospitalisations rose a lot, from 18 to 30. And as contact tracing ends for 5-12 age case hospitalisation rate rose by a factor of 3 to a still low 0.4%. But that may hint at number of cases infections now not being detected as cases /9

County table shows 9 counties improving and its notable that the disimprovement is not happening in just one or two places but across the island so its a trend rather than a couple of large outbreaks. All the above tweets being bad news /10