R>1

[d000hg]

Does that data set also include how many tests are conducted? Considering we're doing lots of testing at the moment, I'd love to know what the proportion of positive cases is rather than a gross figure.

It's the raw figure. However by the 2nd wave testing was already very high; I don't think that has increased massively since. You can very clearly see the relative lack of testing in the first peak on the left though.

I might play with more data but an educated guess is that testing has more or less saturated from last December. %-of-tests-positive is a useful metric to intuit how many cases are being missed, though they also do random testing which is where the "about 1 in X people have Covid" comes from, which is separate to people getting covid tests.

[d000hg]

I'd be very interested to see the stats on the people hospitalised though. If you took out those that have refused to get a vaccine and just concentrated on the fully vaccinated population what would the numbers look like. Take out the idiots that are refusing and look at what the new tomorrow looks like. What are the infection and hospital figures for a fully vaccinated population. That's the decision point for me. Not including people refusing to get vaccinated scewing the figures.

Well, uptake in the most vulnerable categories was reportedly very high (90%+?). And that group accounts for the vast majority of hospitalisations and deaths.
I would theorise the sort of people who refuse a vaccine are the sort of people who didn't take restrictions seriously in the first place, and are therefore pretty likely to have caught Covid over the winter. Though I couldn't prove this generalisation of course.

[d000hg]

I am curious how FT get this result though. I would expect they have used the same data I did.

[mattster]

The graph looks like 28000 infected 4000 hospitlisations. Yeah low connection but next week when it's 60k infected and 8000 hospitlisations will that also be OK?

Well the hospitalisations are scaled 10x according to the graph, so it is not as bad as your figures, but then both are rising exponentially. I know exponential increases are hard for people to get their head around generally, but surely some in the government would have cottoned on by now?
I guess the question is just how many people are left for the virus to infect before it inevitably runs out of steam - but that number could be quite large still (millions).

[northernladuk]

Well, uptake in the most vulnerable categories was reportedly very high (90%+?). And that group accounts for the vast majority of hospitalisations and deaths.
I would theorise the sort of people who refuse a vaccine are the sort of people who didn't take restrictions seriously in the first place, and are therefore pretty likely to have caught Covid over the winter. Though I couldn't prove this generalisation of course.

I'd say that's a pretty safe generalisation to be fair.

[d000hg]

Well the hospitalisations are scaled 10x according to the graph, so it is not as bad as your figures, but then both are rising exponentially. I know exponential increases are hard for people to get their head around generally, but surely some in the government would have cottoned on by now?
I guess the question is just how many people are left for the virus to infect before it inevitably runs out of steam - but that number could be quite large still (millions).

Well yes if cases are growing exponentially so are hospitalisations and deaths, but that doesn't automatically imply both will get very large if the multiplier is very small now. More complicated, the multiplier is probably shrinking because people are still getting vaccinated, and this takes time to catch up.

Whitty/Valance did say at the last news conference that their modelling predicted the epidemic would peak before hospitalisations reached a level that would stress NHS capacity.

[mattster]

Well yes if cases are growing exponentially so are hospitalisations and deaths, but that doesn't automatically imply both will get very large if the multiplier is very small now. More complicated, the multiplier is probably shrinking because people are still getting vaccinated, and this takes time to catch up.

Whitty/Valance did say at the last news conference that their modelling predicted the epidemic would peak before hospitalisations reached a level that would stress NHS capacity.

Yes. I think we could very well get away with it, albeit it won't feel that way for anyone unfortunate enough to succumb over the next few months. There is undeniably a risk of a new, vaccine escaping variant, but that is possible anywhere in the world. We should also end up with a very good handle on just how effective the various vaccines are, which will be interesting.

[d000hg]

Daily deaths are now in high 20s also which is certainly an increase on single figures. I have no idea in the grand scale of things if 20-30 deaths a day is insignificant compared to, say, number of people who die choking on fish bones or whatever.

[northernladuk]

Daily deaths are now in high 20s also which is certainly an increase on single figures. I have no idea in the grand scale of things if 20-30 deaths a day is insignificant compared to, say, number of people who die choking on fish bones or whatever.

There is that way of looking at it yes. A week and a bit a go it was half what it is now. Next week? The week after? Where is the threshold that X number of deaths a day becomes insignificant? I get if you take the bigger picture as you say it's got some way to go before it goes beyond the average death rate of stuff that's been with us for ever but I don't think we should be complacent about it. Time has shown every time someone has rolled out the 'normal death rate' argument the graph far exceed it eventually.

With half the population thinking 19th is too early and rates rising it's going to be an interesting week.

[d000hg]

There is that way of looking at it yes. A week and a bit a go it was half what it is now. Next week? The week after? Where is the threshold that X number of deaths a day becomes insignificant? I get if you take the bigger picture as you say it's got some way to go before it goes beyond the average death rate of stuff that's been with us for ever but I don't think we should be complacent about it.

I'm not being complacent, and that is a question that should have a somewhat concrete answer IMO. In the most recent reporting period, about 1% of deaths were Covid: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulat...ding25june2021

Is that a lot, or insignificant, or neither? What should we be comparing it to?