Thread by @gnomeicide

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)