Ed Conway Profile picture
Nov 23, 2021 13 tweets 7 min read Read on X
How many people could still die of #Covid19 in the UK?
It’s an unpalatable question I know, but is worth pondering given cases are on the rise in many parts of Europe.
The good news is that, well, this thread contains better news than you might have thought.
First, the data:
Here’s the big picture. Covid may have been out of the headlines in recent months but the death toll has been creeping higher.
Now up to nearly 168k in the UK, 142k in England.
These are deaths where Covid is mentioned in certificate. Abt 90% were directly attributed to Covid.
You can split it into three broad phases:
1 Wave 1 last spring.
2. Wave 2 (arguably two waves in one) last winter.
3 The period since May.
Here’s the death toll in each (for England). Raising the question: what next. How many more deaths…?
Some of the boffins at @LSHTM inc @Lloyd_Chapman_ & @AdamJKucharski have an intriguing paper out with some intriguing answers. They’ve looked at lots of factors from age breakdown to vaccine status to previous infections. Full thing here: medrxiv.org/node/433124.ex…
In short, and at the risk of oversimplifying, their model suggests that if Covid were to spread across the population now, there would be just over 10k deaths in England. Clearly more deaths is nothing to celebrate. But the level is strikingly low.
When you adjust for population, England faces the lowest “maximum remaining COVID-19 deaths” of any country the epidemiologists at @LSHTM looked at in Europe. Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Romania, on the other hand, look v exposed.
Why is England's potential mortality so low here when, say, Germany is so high?
Mostly cos of vaccines.
Germany has more unvaccinated elderly people. So unvaccinated people (the red slice) is v v big in the German potential deaths numbers. V small in UK where so many are jabbed.
Do the @LSHTM numbers mean England/UK can relax this winter?
Let’s have a look.
Here are the deaths figs for the top 5 (eg most vulnerable) countries acc to their model. Indeed deaths are rising there quite sharply. Seems to bear out their analysis.
Now look at the countries with the lowest “potential deaths”. Most of them do indeed have low deaths numbers.
BUT now look at Czech rep and Hungary. Deaths are rising v sharply there despite the @LSHTM numbers implying they’re less vulnerable.
So the fact that England has a comparatively low level of modelled vulnerability doesn’t necessarily preclude a spike in deaths.
But this analysis is worth keeping in mind next time you hear someone shouting we’re just as vulnerable - or more vulnerable! - than our neighbours.
*deleted and corrected a tweet above which mixed up Hungary and Bulgaria. Apologies to all Hungarians and Bulgarians.
How many more people could die of Covid in this country? The answer, according to a new study, is strikingly low.
There are provisos aplenty; but there's also hope. Here's a longer explanation about the new study: news.sky.com/story/covid-19…
Here, for those who prefer their charts in video form, is a quick run through the numbers on how many people have died from #COVID19 and how high the toll could eventually get

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Ed Conway

Ed Conway Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @EdConwaySky

Sep 2
📽️Is Britain REALLY facing a 1970s-style fiscal crisis?
Why are investors so freaked out about UK debt?
Is this REALLY worse than under Liz Truss?
Who's to blame? Rachel Reeves? The Bank of England?
And would a bit of productivity really solve everything?
📈 Your 6 min primer👇
OK, so let's break it down.
Start with the chart everyone (well, everyone in Whitehall) is talking about.
The 30yr UK government bond yield. Up to the highest level since 1998. And it's still rising.
Does this mean the UK is facing a fiscal crisis? Let's look at the evidence Image
First let's compare the UK to other G7 countries.
There's two ways to do this.
First, look at absolute levels👇
And it looks pretty awkward for the UK.
Pre-mini Budget we were middle of the pack. That changed post-Truss. And now, under Labour, the UK is even more of an outlier. Image
Read 18 tweets
Jul 29
EXCLUSIVE

👗Billions of pounds of imports...
↗️Rising by more than 50% a year...
🛬Planes stuffed with cheap clothes...
🇨🇳And a loophole saving Chinese companies from £billions of UK taxes.

Behind the scenes of one of the biggest stories in the modern economy: e-commerce
👇
We've spent months investigating this phenomenon.
- We've got the first official estimate of the scale of cheap untaxed imports into the UK.
- We've seen inside the planes carrying these goods here.
- A whole logistics industry is growing around it.
This is a v big deal! Image
The story begins with a MASSIVE rise in orders from Chinese e-commerce giants like SHEIN and Temu.
Now, most coverage of these brands focuses on labour standards. An important issue.
But there's something else going on here - something deeper.
A shift in how trade works... Image
Image
Image
Read 25 tweets
Jun 18
🧵Some thoughts re inflation.
Not the data today, but two deep issues we should prob spend more time thinking about.
1. While economists and policymakers may have convinced themselves that the cost of living squeeze is over, for millions of households, it doesn't feel that way.
The key thing to remember here is that when economists talk about inflation what they're really talking about is the ANNUAL RATE at which a basket of goods and services changes price. And certainly, that rate is much lower than the 2022 peaks... Image
But, as I say, what that number is is simply looking at the difference in the LEVEL of prices over the past year. This chart is that level. (The actual consumer price index!).
And yes, look over the year to May and it's up 3.4%. Image
Read 9 tweets
Jun 12
🧵Why, barely 24 hours after the Spending Review, is everyone already going on about tax rises?
Are they REALLY coming?
Or is this an "incoherent argument", as one leading minister calls it?
Well here's a thread explaining what's really going on here.
Bear with me...
First things first.
Key thing to remember is that the main job of HMT is to generate enough money, mostly via taxes (left hand bar here), to finance all its spending (right hand bar).
If that left hand bar isn't high enough, we have to borrow to fill the gap.
That's the deficit! Image
This week's Spending Review was about the right hand column, obvs. But not ALL of the column.
Actually more than half of govt spending is on stuff that WASN'T covered by the spending review - on benefits, debt interest, pensions etc. It's called "annually managed expenditure"Image
Read 17 tweets
May 28
🧵
You may recall a spate of stories a few years ago about appalling working conditions & abysmally low pay in Leicester's clothes factories.
The hope was those stories would shame businesses into improving working conditions.
But here's what ACTUALLY happened next...
👇
Instead of staying in Leicester, most brands abandoned it & shifted production to N Africa & S Asia.
Today Britain's biggest centre of textile & apparel manufacture is battling the threat of extinction.
It's a mostly untold economic story we've spent recent months documenting Image
Once upon a time Leicester was the beating heart of UK clothes manufacturing.
The city was dotted with factories making clothes for big name brands.
Now, according to one estimate, the number of clothes factories has dropped from 1500 in 2017 to under 100 this year. A 95% fall. Image
Read 16 tweets
May 8
How big a deal is the new trade agreement unveiled between the US and the UK? Here are some initial thoughts.
Start with this: this is total UK exports to the US over the past 5yrs: £273bn. Right now most of this will face a 10% tariff. Some things (eg cars) face 25% extra Image
Let's break down that total. The biggest chunk is cars. Just under £30bn. That's covered under the agreement. So too are steel/aluminium exports. Much smaller at £2.7bn...
These sectors will benefit from special deals (though much of the detail still remains vague). Image
Image
Rolls Royce will apparently get tariff free access for its jet engines. That mostly helps Boeing, but also Rolls Royce. Jet engines comprise a surprisingly large chunk of UK exports to the US, about £17.3bn. So let's shade that red too... Image
Read 9 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(