Racing COVID-19

It is clear the country is being led on a sprint to herd immunity

Those supporting this are Brexiteers, Covidiots and Tory Scum.

At the other end of the arguments are good people considerably cleverer than the Proles.

I say this because it always seems to be two polarised groups, whatever the issue, on twitter particularly, and in the broadcast media.

What about the Stats?

Rising Cases?

Cases means identified cases, and is no useful measure of how many people have Covid.

The more people you test, the more cases you will find.

Looking at the top 10 Western European Countries, it is true the UK has the more cases over the last 28 days than the other nine combined.

What is not often told is that in the same period the UK has tested over 70% more people (Germany, Spain & the Netherlands don’t publish testing data). The percentage of people testing positive is a better measure and in the UK, it currently stands at 2.6%, compared to 1.8% for the other countries. Hardly surprising when the Indian variant exploded first in the UK. The rest of Europe will inevitably see this measure rise over the coming weeks as this variant comes to dominate in Europe.

Healthcare Overwhelmed?

At the peak in January there were nearly 40,000 people in hospital with COVID. Now, there are just under 4,000.

To put this in perspective, there were around 68,000 (identified) cases a day at the peak in January, yesterday there were 55,000. Using a 10-day lag from identifying a COVID infection to when you might be hospitalised, the % being hospitalised has dropped from a peak of ~10% to ~3% now.

Three times as many people would need to catch COVID for the same number of people to end up in hospital.

The average time a person stays in hospital with COVID has declined steadily from 15 days at peak to around 5 days currently.

It is clear the number of cases will continue to rise, unless we are all fully locked-down again!

However, even at 150,000 daily cases, way over most forecasters (lamentable) forecasts, there will only be around one-third of the COVID hospital patients than at January’s peak.

COVID Dominates?

In the latest (ONS) published weekly data there were 800 deaths. 84 of these we caused by COVID, as listed on the death certificate, that is 1% of all deaths, and close to its lowest point since the pandemic started in 2020. In the same week there were 816 deaths caused by respiratory diseases and 231 by Flu & Pneumonia.

So, there are 3 times as many deaths currently caused by Flu & Pneumonia and 10 times as many by other respiratory diseases.

I do not understand why the NHS has not created COVID secure hospitals, or COVID secure zones in all hospitals to stop cross-infection and allow other more important treatments to resume fully and start dealing with waiting lists.

International Travel

Anyone planning a holiday is taking a huge risk as our government, with its traffic light system, changes the rules increasingly frequently, and seems to follow no logic.

And, even if they will let you travel somewhere or not restrict you on your return, increasingly this is likely other countries will not be welcoming Brits, whether you are double vaccinated or not.

Whilst other countries vaccination rates are so low, why would they risk letting in people carrying the virus? We know well how it can spread rapidly and silently until its got a firm hold.

You can check out the stringency levels of most countries on the interactive dashboard this chart is taken from.

The stringency index, another great project from Our World in Data, has a scale of 1-100, where 100 has a combination of the strictest measures. Individual measures are graded on a scale of 0-4 where 0 indicates no restrictions and at 4 fully restricted. They value shown is an average for the last 14 days.

I am looking at making this more up-to-date, current delays in reporting make this challenging.

You can view all these charts and more, many fully interactive, on my Covid dashboard here.

All the data is refreshed daily, so the latest available data is always included.

Whichever end of the shouty scale you sit on, keep well, and wear a mask where it makes others feel more comfortable, although not in the pub as it impedes proper beerstorming!