In this thread I'm going to show you in reverse what happened last night with a series of availability snapshots.
First where we are at 10:03, which is the worst I've seen. Essentially no availability except in connaught.
This scale of depletion is the strongest yet in the 2 weeks I have been tracking it. It happened nearly. At 9:50...
at 8:20...
That was the situation at breakfast time. That remarkably strong loss of availability was already set in stone 7 hours earlier however (and the HSE knew it).
Here is the picture at 51 minutes past midnight, when 19k was added. Already significantly down.
This fall in availability was dramatic and sudden just after midnight, when again the HSE systems suffered system outages for the second time in 15 hours.
Here is 34 minutes past midnight. Better availability across the east and the west coast, but already significantly down
Here at 0:21. notice the volatility - this is due to massive parallel attempts to book slots. So many being booked in the south that availability actually rises after those booking are complete and slots temporarily held back from being offered to others are released.
Due to this volatility, it hard to get a picture of how many slots are free, but the picture is clear. A massive surge from midnight saw an enormous reduction in availability. By 0:21 there are just 12k left out of 19k.
I'd be very surprised in Paul Reid was not called.
This is the earliest data I have at 4 minutes past midnight. This should all be green, but already we cn see very significant depletion. in fact about 3.5k appointments are no longer available at this point and the system has once again called over to the general public.
I see the much anticipated "peak" has been dropped as an idea by NPHET. Now it's just maybe happening according to modelling (which no real epidemiologists believe) and will be a long drawn out affair anyway.
Network scientists have a name for that. it's called an S curve.
It normally is used to describe an idea or product adoption curve, where adoption starts very slow, and then accelerates till everyone regularly adopts the product.
here the product is covid, and government have essentially handed it the market.
the idea of idea adoptions (or meme) or indeed product adoption on the one hand, and covid acquisition by a population on the other, seem to have some useful parallels.
Both are driven by social networks (physical rather than virtual). Both see clustering and breakout.
As you may know I've been tracking PCR testing closely for the last 7/8 weeks.
I want to make this very clear.
There is no general self-referral HSE PCR testing system in this country anymore.
The HSE offers just 12-13k test appointments in 12 counties ...
...to a small group of citizens who have a positive antigen test (despite high false negative rates), who are not aged 4-39, or who are healthcare workers.
Despite this, all available appointments book out rapidly just after release at midnight across most of the country.
The state typically dos about 30-40k tests a day. A country of comparable size, Denmark, does about 200,000+ tests a day.
We really have to hit this nail of the head: omicron is less severe so it will be all right.
Lets take the extreme new claim. 70% less severe.Lets believe it for a moment.
so if 100 cases was delivering 10 hospitalisations, not it's only delivering 3.
Here is the problem.
omicron grows the number of cases, doubling every 2 days.
So after 4 days you have 400 cases.
3% of 400 is 12.
So you have more cases that with the original strain.
And from here it gets worse.
because omicron keeps doubling every 2 days, the next doubling will yield 800 cases, of which, I'm sure you're getting it now, 24 will be hospitalisations.