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)
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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)
Last Friday we saw 189,846 reported cases, 203 deaths, and 2,036 hospitalisations. Cases were a little inflated by some carry over, deaths, less so. Today, based on the last 7 and 14 days we can project what we may expect to happen (1)
On trend, deaths have been rising, we'd see 262 to 337 deaths. Data is all over the place, we may see lower than that, lets hope so. To get back to where we were before Christmas Eve we'd need -75 deaths. In other words, deaths are rising regardless (2)
Cases were a little inflated a week ago. The trend is still for a rapid rise, to stay on either the 7 or 14 day trend we'd need over 250k. That seems unlikely - testing is severely strained, I think we're at or near a testing plateau (3)
So we've had a big hospitalisations data drop today, as well as the rest of the normal daily Covid data. Might split this stats update into a couple of parts, pre and post dinner. Here's the overall picture before delving deeper (1)
179756 cases. Thats insane, bud lower than last Thursday. Don't get too excited though, last Thursday we had some delayed data (2)
The trend is still massively upwards, but because we're starting to get better data it may settle down rather. Over the last 7 days we're still looking at over a 4% rise in cases per day. (3)
Today we're getting to the meat and drink of real Covid data in the UK. Deaths in particular, we'll start to see real data and we'll finally have a better idea of where we are. For context, where we were (1)
In the week running up to Christmas we were averaging 111-116 deaths a day. Deaths per day had been falling almost imperceptibly slowly during December (2)
By Christmas Eve recorded Covid cases had started to go absolutely bonkers. We'd just topped 100k per day on average, that day. A week earlier that average was 68k, another week back it was 49k (3)
Even including catch-up data for deaths, thats ghastly. Genuinely ghastly. Tomorrow is likely to dee a drop from last Thursday but we are now, unmistakably, seeing deaths rise quite fast. Hospitalisations also rising, and fast.
This -should- be the last catch-up data day for deaths. And last Thursday was also a catch-up day. But whatever the deaths data we get tomorrow, it is now impossible for deaths to be lower than before Christmas. We're already up over that, for 7 days, in tomorrows data...
...or in other words, we know for sure that deaths are rising. Tomorrows data starts to tell us how fast. The average daily rise over 7 days right now is 14% - that still includes the post-Christmas catch up though. Tomorrow and Friday we get real data to correct this...
Looking at projections for Covid cases and deaths today and the turbulence in the date makes them really quite wild. Deaths, on trend, would be 65-95, a wide range because over Christmas the numbers have been all over the place (1)
Whereas cases, they've been more bonkers on Wednesdays than other days, of late its been the day when we've seen the biggest rises. On recent trend, based on last Wednesday and average changes, it would be 253,923 to 283,036 (2)
And yes, I know, that would be a huge jump. 21 days back we were averaging about 63k cases, 14 days ago 88k cases, a week ago 125k cases. And by yesterday, 176,964 was the the average number per day (3)