Todays Covid data is shocking but perhaps most worrying in how incomplete it is. Here's the overall picture, I'll go into the key parameters over the next few tweets (1)
Cases are bonkers, and while its fair to say we've had some crazy days of reporting, its still very obviously enormous. 218,742 cases today, and its not even a surprise (2)
1,238,751 cases over the last 7 days. That figure doesn't include reinfections (3)
Thats an average of 176,964 a day over the last 7. With no sign of slowing. (4)
Cases are rising at 6.4% a day on average. Thats a fast exponential to be on. Even with the delays in data and uncertainties that brings, its unmistakable that cases are rising incredibly fast (5)
Deaths data has yet to settle down to anything like a coherent trend after the holidays yet. It looks like deaths are up, but we haven't got a steady average yet (6)
We're up at 130 deaths a day, on average, with a staggering growth rate of 7.6% a day on average - which is terrifying, if it settles there. But wait and see - the chaos in the data should settle down over the next few days. (7)
Its worrying that we haven't had any new hospitalisations data for days. We're way behind with that now, we have no national data since the 27th of December, and the next update is critical. Last we saw, it was rising fast (8)
We know that the number of patients -in- hospital is rising fast (9)
So we are at -such- a critical point. I'd love to be able to tell you more about whats happening, but it now comes down to two things - will hospitalisations rise? Will deaths rise? And if they do, by how much? (10)
Hospitals across the country are declaring major incidents. The crisis is now. Its only a matter of how much worse it'll get (fin)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
PSA (so please RT): After the death of Awaab Ishak, a few words on black mold. Do you have a couple of spots of mold in your shower? Like, maybe top corners on the grouting? That. Well, it might be. It might be a different mold. The really nasty one is Stachbotrytis chartarum.(1)
Well... Aspergillus niger is a badass mofo of a fungus. It's a fighter, it competes in all sorts of environments and it's a generalist. Black spot on an onion? Might be that. Black mark on the grouting? Might definitely be that. (3)
Nobody cares, but here's the solution to the energy price crisis in the UK, at least this Winter. (1)
Start with a windfall tax on producers. The excess profits they're making here, based on our relative political stability, are worth extra because £ is so low. That's just a start (2)
Next thing to do? Scrap standing charges, immediately. You pay for energy, the notion of a 'standing charge' that you pay to have the honour of then spending more, it's just nonsense. Put the cost on use, not having access (3)
Pet hate. Company puts a card through your door "We will be in your area on these days doing (X)". You phone them. They offer you an appointment date a month or months later. So your card was basically a lie, wasn't it @OVOEnergy? Straight up, flay out a lie.
"well the appointments went really fast..." No. If the card comes through my door, posted yesterday to the whole area, all 5 days did not fill up in that time, you did not book out for a whole extra month in that time. I don't believe you @OVOEnergy
You put immediate, early dates on your literature and post it out, bait people to sign up to something and switch to a later date. It's an old and really rubbish trick @OVOEnergy - I expected better from you. Really expected better.
Let me stop you there, David. Peak infection can be calculated from peak fatalities, we know average time it takes Covid to kill. Peak infection was just prior to lockdown, if you cast your mind back you'll recall lockdown was a reaction to public behaviour, not a leader thereof.
In other words we have mathematical proof that lockdown 1 was both needed and way, way too late to save as many lives as we could. Lockdown was soft, without masking, and infection continued to spread in supermarkets etc....
...which meant our rate of recovery from peak 1 was gunbarrel straight for many, many weeks - and too slow. We then opened too fast and sprinted into another catastrophe, and more late lockdowns...
There were things wrong with the first episodes. This wasn't one of them. There are times when a producer concentrates on inclusivity while failing on content (most recent BBC version of Dracula, Doctor Who spinoff Class) but it ain't casting that's the problem, it's content...
...the problem is that whoever you cast, the show can
still be crap. Rings of Power was just OK rather than great, Lenny Henry as a hobbit and a brown guy cast as an Elf weren't the reasons why it didn't meet higher expectations...
...but I do wonder, if you didn't enjoy it and you're rationalising it "well Tolkien didn't make his harfoots brown" then y'all haven't done your reading and you might well rectify that. Google harfoots and nut brown, there's a starting point for you...
So, Polio in London? I'm going to meander on a bit. Sorry. A thread by a microbiologist (but not that kind of microbiologist) detailing what you need to know (1)
Unusually, for me, I'm going to start with a tl;dr point. Should you be worried? Only a little bit, so far. Get your kids vaccinated if you have not. Call your doctor - now-. NOTHING is gained by this risk (2)
Ok. Polio is short for poliomyelitis, from the greek for grey (polio) marrow (myelon). Grey matter myelitis, which sounds (and is) horrible (3)