Covid data in the UK right now is nothing short of catastrophic. Our healthcare system is struggling to cope, and its quite understandable why. Here's the overall picture, I'll go through whats happening in this thread (1)
I'll start with deaths. 97 reported today, the highest on a Sunday since the 28th of February (2)
1294 deaths over the last 7 days. Thats the highest 7 day rolling total since the 9th of March (3)
Over the last 7 days we've seen one person reported dead due to Covid every 7 minutes 47 seconds. Listen to 99 Luftballons by Nena twice. Every that long (4)
Because the data still has some bits of the Christmas catch up in it, the average rate of rise is rather all over the place. Its around 5% a day - that could be out by a LONG way and STILL be terrible (5)
At the delay between a positive test result and death thats held true through the pandemic, we're seeing around 0.17% of cases turn into deaths. Thats roughly where we were with Alpha, but lower than Delta (6)
Boosters have helped, but we're nowhere near out of this - vaccines alone have not been enough (7)
Whether cases have hit a testing plateau or whether they may actually be about to fall is anyone's guess, but with over 14 MILLION people having been infected in the UK and reinfections NOT counted this is, at very best, an incredibly misleading figure (8)
On average we're looking at 174,000 cases a day, down from the very peak of 182,000 - to maintain that rate of infection in an ever smaller population of people who have never been infected is -astonishing- (9)
And with deaths rising, with cases sky high, with testing being a dangerous bottleneck and missing reinfections anyway, lets not get cocky that for just a couple of days cases aren't rising fast. (10)
The most recent national admissions data is for the 3rd of January, and they were rising at just shy of 7% a day. Thats why NHS trusts across the country have been declaring major incidents - this is unsustainable (11)
Bluntly hospitalisations are rocketing. Even if they stabilise around this point, thats a crisis (12)
We are in trouble. Hospitalisations follow cases (13)
And deaths follow hospitalisations (14)
If cases are starting to fall, and its a big if, they're falling very slowly. But whether the are or not, hospitalisations are showing us that deaths will get worse before they get better. And these deaths were avoidable (15)
The people dying today caught Covid before Christmas. That rapid rise we were beginning to see around the 18th of December or thereabouts? When we were averaging about 73k cases a day. They caught it around then (16)
Cases have reached two and a half times that since then. We are a long way from this being over, and we're a way off the peak of deaths of this phase of the pandemic. And this was all entirely avoidable (17)
A rapidly evolving novel pathogen doesn't suddenly become a harmless endemic disease overnight. And not without us paying an extraordinary human cost. The high level of infection we have will lead to more variants and the risk of greater vaccine escape is acute (18)
Britains Covid response has been, and remains, a failure. At higher economic cost we have killed more of our people than other comparable nations. We are in trouble, and it is apparent that our government has given up (19)
What happens next? Nothing good. I can only urge you to remember who is responsible for this and hold them to account. Boris Johnsons murderous cabal should end up in prison for this. For life. (fin)
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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)