Thread by @gnomeicide

Covid picture in the UK right now is very complex. Here's the overall picture, I'll try and take us through various current trends in this thread (1)

Lets start with deaths. We're still seeing a slow rise (as an average over 7 days). 263.3 a day, over 1843 a week (2)

The rate of rise has fallen. Its actually levelled out at a rise of under 1% a day right now. That doesn't sound too bad, but a stable -high- rate of death is still -terrible- (3)

We're also seeing deaths as a % of cases at a 15 day delay roughly stabilise at around 0.15%. Thats the lowest it been - but when dealing with immense numbers of infection thats still a lot of deaths (4)

So over the last 7 days one person died of Covid every 5 minutes and 28 seconds. If you remember Disco, then the track Le Freak by CHIC - that long between deaths (5)

We're averaging 92,243 cases a day. Thats still -enormous- (6)

And it seems while almost nobody was looking the rate of fall has stalled. In fact the rate of fall has plummeted in the last week, down to 1% per day. I would be surprised if today or tomorrow we don't head back into a rise (7)

This stalling is happening far too soon for comfort - our rate of infection is less than at its peak but it remains colossal. You can see this well looking at trends for each day of the week (8)

Hospitalisations are falling -slightly-. This may represent being past the Omicron peak in parts of the country, but nationally this does not show a good picture. (9)

The rapid fall we saw in cases is not yet reflected in hospitalisations (10)

Which is why hospitalisations as a proportion of cases is rising. You have to think this is a testing issue - removing the need for PCR confirmation and the squeeze in testing availability is a huge problem (11)

Deaths typically follow hospitalisations (of course) so we aren't expecting to see them fall very quickly yet - we may see a fall. We really need to see a fall (12)

We should by now be seeing hospitalisations fall far faster than they are, and deaths SHOULD follow, if the fall in recorded cases reflects reality. We can see that from R as back calculated from each of those data sets (13)

So where are we? Well we are trundling along with a high case load, high deaths, high hospitalisations. And the cost remains extreme, both in terms of chronic illness and fatalities. We really are not in a good place (14)

This notion that we are 'over the peak' so everything is ok, its just nonsense. Its complete bullshit. We are in trouble because we seem to have entered a state of denial over Covid (15)

Over the last few days cases have been rising. At current rate, we're looking at deaths falling from just shy of 300 a day to 130-140 a day, before rising again (16)

We are not out of this. We are not nearly out of this. We aren't even going the right way to get out of this. The notion that we ignore this and it goes away is so fundamentally wrong-headed that its hard to know what to do to counter it (17)

But we will continue to needlessly and avoidably squander lives for as long as this continues (fin)