Thread by @gnomeicide

I kind of feel I must interrupt festivities to talk about Covid data in the UK right now. tl;dr version: literally every indicator is going to shit. Here's the overall picture before going into it all (1)

Where to even begin. Well I suppose, lets start with cases. We've hit the most astonishing milestone of over 1 million recorded cases in a week (2)

In that context, obviously we've seen the record daily figure repeatedly smashed. Todays figure is another record, 189,846 - the last 3 days have clustered near there, we may hage hit a testing ceiling. Hardly surprising with testing being basically swamped (3)

Whether this is the ceiling or not, its -undoubtedly- understating the problem because we're not including reinfections there. Infection is off the charts. (4) theguardian.com/world/2021/dec…

On average we're seeing cases rise at over 5% per day. This is quite a fast exponential to be on, and considering the reinfection issue the fact that this can happen now is -astonishing- (5)

And that is of course why hospital admissions are rocketing (6)

We have national data to the 27th, when we're at just shy of 2,000 hospital admissions per day. We have some data for up until the 29th - we know that we'll up around 2,500 by then. The rise right now is averaging at 5% per day (7)

And yes, thats why tents are springing up in hospital car parks. Because in the coldest part of the year the best we can do is plan to treat people under plastic sheeting outdoors, having utterly failed to contain this disease. Again (8)

Of course admissions are rocketing. Admissions as a proportion of cases is now roughly static, and cases are rising at a fast exponential (9)

The average daily change in deaths just went over the line - on average, over 7 days, the daily change in deaths is up. Thats misleading though, being based on crazy changes after Christmas (10)

Its easier to see on a log graph than anywhere else - cases are rising exponentially, deaths are roughly static. As I've often said, its a huge ask for that to continue, especially now hospitalisations are going up -fast- (11)

Another way of looking at it is to take trends for each day of the week - Christmas has thrown a whole tool box of spanners in the works and we don't have reliable trending data to work with right now. Its sorting itself out rather, but it'll be days before we know for sure (12)

Deaths typically follow cases. It doesn't have to follow very closely to turn the current record infection rate, the present crisis, into yet another avoidable human tragedy (13)

And back calculating R from each of the three data sets, we can expect by the end of the New Year data weirdness to be set firmly on the path of rising deaths. Deaths lag well behind cases and hospitalisations, so that trend lags (14)

We may have weakened the link between cases and hospitalisations, and hospitalisations and deaths, but calculating a value of R from each shows that has thus far been an amazingly resilient link. (15)

And to allow over a million cases a week, to do nothing to slow the spread of this disease until way too late, is utterly irresponsible while that link exists -at all-. We are in massive trouble (16)

Hospitalisations and deaths are not falling as a proportion of infections any more. Shy of a miracle, the crisis in the NHS and indeed across all sectors with record numbers off work with Covid are going to be followed with an increase in avoidable deaths (17)

We are in a bad place. This was predictable and avoidable. Hold anyone who has the slightest attachment or loyalty to the murderous junta running the UK to account. They're trying to buy political gain with the lives of your loved ones. It is despicable. (fin)