Thread by @Telegraph

📈 Omicron is already causing record-breaking case numbers.

But extreme rises are likely to skew admissions and deaths figures to such a point that they may become largely useless in helping to drive policy, writes science editor @sarahknapton

Thread🧵👇
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/1…

🦠 Dr Susan Hopkins, chief medical adviser for UKHSA, predicted that Britain will see around 1m infections a day by the end of the year.

Under modelling by the London School and Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, roughly half the country could be infected with omicron by the spring

📊 The January death rate is around 0.09%, according to ONS.

So on a day of one million infections, we would expect 908 of those people to die naturally over the next month, yet currently all would end up in the Covid data

Under worst case scenarios from the LSHTM, some 34.2 million would be infected up to April…

…Which could see nearly 30,000 natural deaths wrongly reported in the daily Covid figures during that period ❌

Not all these predicted infections will end up being recorded cases.

➡️ But most of these natural deaths will occur in hospitals or care homes where patients and residents will have been tested

📝 The only way to get a true picture is to wait for the ONS to publish death registration data, which breaks down deaths into people who die ‘with’ the disease and those that die ‘from’ it, Sarah writes
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/1…

But that figure comes about a fortnight late, too late to impact on policy decisions, which must be made quickly.

Faced with huge rises in deaths, it may be hard to avoid calls for more restrictions🔻

Data on hospital admissions will also be perturbed by this glitch.

🏥 If half of the country catches omicron then the chance of someone testing positive when they go into hospital for any reason will be very high

🔴 Currently around 27% of cases included in the daily admissions figures are patients who tested positive on or after admission rather than being admitted because of the virus

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telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/12/1…