NHS staff absences heading in the right direction, but that is still a *lot* of staff off sick or isolating with COVID.
Unsurprisingly still some big regional variation in staff absences, with numbers highest in the North, where there are also the most COVID patients.
Comparing these absences to the total NHS workforce (based on the most recent data from September 2021), absence rates are still not far below 10% of all staff in the North West, although falling.
So things are getting better, but not *that* quickly.
There really is a lot going on in the recent COVID case numbers in England.
Cases back to being highest (and rising fastest) in primary age children.
Cases starting to rise again in their parents' age group.
Falls stalling in other ages.
Let's do some graphs...
If we look at it like this then, outside the 5-14 age bracket everything looks like it's going pretty ok.
Maybe cases haven't fallen as much in the 30-44 age group (who happen, perhaps not coincidentally, to be the right age to have primary school age kids).
But if we instead plot the rate at which cases are changing (blue = down, red = up) the problems become more apparent.
Cases rising in 35-44 year olds and the fall in cases slowing in all other adult ages.
At NHS trust level, the recent changes in COVID admissions are a bit of a mess. More downs than ups, and good to see Bolton's admissions finally falling, but admissions still rising in quite a few Northern trusts.
If we map the trust-level data onto Local Authorities the picture looks like this. Pretty messy. Blackpool and Liverpool currently heading the wrong way. Hopefully not for long.
On a map the geographical division of new COVID admissions is really quite striking.
This is generally looking a bit more positive - all 3 metrics heading down almost everywhere in English hospitals.
But 2 points of note: 1) Admissions not falling at same speed everywhere. Still pretty level in the Midlands. 2) Some big falls in Mechanical Ventilation bed nos
This is a bit weird because in many parts of the country MV bed occupancy never really rose during the Omicron wave, yet is falling rapidly now. Perhaps this is the effect of Delta being effectively killed off by Omicron?
Also need to be careful with the MV bed numbers because it's just the number of patients in beds with ventilator *capacity* whether that capacity is being used or not.
This is, I think, interesting. Overall COVID bed occupancy is falling in England, but the fall in patients being treated *for* COVID is bigger, it's just being hidden by a continued rise in patients in hospitals *with* COVID.
This is still true in London, which was hit by Omicron before the rest of the country and were overall COVID bed occupancy has been falling for longer. Patients *with* COVID are *still* rising.
Across all NHS regions in England the picture is broadly similar, just with regions at different phases. London and the East leading the way, with the North East/Yorkshire only just seeing patients *for* COVID starting to level off 🤞
The data is a week old, but the ONS infection survey shows that at that stage COVID cases were already falling in all age groups except primary schoolchildren and those over 70+.
The regional picture is also quite interesting - cases still rising a week ago in the NE, Yorks, Midlands and SW. I'd guess these are all currently heading downwards. That's certainly what the case data is telling us.
(Apologies to any 70-year olds mortified at being described as "very old", but I only had so many characters to fit the title into!)