DOOM: "Omicron Covid cases ‘doubling every two to three days’ in UK"

[minestrone]

It's everyone, as they have to be sectioned off.

[AtW]

It's pretty easy (for those in charge) to determine people who arrived to hospital with Covid and people who already were in hospital and later tested positive for Covid.

My understanding is that published numbers are the former.

[ladymuck]

Hospital Acquired Infection has been common for years but getting reliable stats on it doesn't seem to be straightforward.

We all know of people who went in for a routine op, caught an infection, and left in a box. Covid hasn't changed that in the slightest.

[SueEllen]

I'm pretty sure someone has already explained we need to look at "because of Covid" and "with Covid" carefully. It's spread so far, it seems a lot of people have it coincidentally - or catch it at hospital. Making things even harder to analyse.

During the first wave they hid how many people who caught it in hospital and died.

We still don't know the figures but their relatives have been and are speaking out.

[d000hg]

17276 in hospital with Covid as of 4 Jan, close to 50% up on previous week.

I'm pretty sure someone has already explained we need to look at "because of Covid" and "with Covid" carefully. It's spread so far, it seems a lot of people have it coincidentally - or catch it at hospital. Making things even harder to analyse.

Hospitalisations DO seem to have started rising and given the incredible velocity of the trend in cases, this is the moment we find out if we're screwed or not. One fear of "wait and see" was by the time things are bad enough you lockdown, you still have another 2 weeks of it getting worse.

Squeaky bums. We've already heard locally that people are being told it will be quicker to drive your spouse to A&E with stroke/heart attack symptoms than wait for an ambulance. If hospitals can't provide critical services, it really hits the fan.

[minestrone]

I would be very sure they now have the ability to accurately predict what the numbers will eventually be and we are no longer basing everything on professor pantsdown's iffy C code whilst all manically chanting "we need to flatten the curve". The decision has been taken just to go with it.

The canary in the coal mine will be Sturgeon screaming for a full lockdown. She will only only hold as long as what she has been told will happen is happening. If the estimates are off then it means the UK government is wrong and she will not hesitate to take an opportunity to look as if she is right on something.

[AtW]

17276 in hospital with Covid as of 4 Jan, close to 50% up on previous week.

[mattster]

If the gamble to ride it out doesn't end in disaster, this has to lend huge popularity back to Boris - "bravely England alone refuses to be cowed by a harmless variant that closes the EU and devolved nations?"

Dunno. The problem is that it *was* a gamble, because we really didn't have enough information at the time to be able to say with certainty how much milder it was going to be in a UK setting etc. I think the probability that we would get away with it was always reasonably high (after the SA data, at least), but taking any sort of gamble which puts such a catastrophic outcome on the losing side of the bet doesn't sit easily with me. It remains to be seen how the great British public view it - and indeed, it remains to be seen if we truly do "get away with it".

[d000hg]

Currently the bigger problem seems to be not too many people hospitalised because of/with Covid, but too few people to treat them due to the contradiction that we are making no effort to curb transmission of the virus now, but still requiring everyone who gets it to isolate. Assuming we don't see a big influx of serious illness/death this month, something has to give.

If the gamble to ride it out doesn't end in disaster, this has to lend huge popularity back to Boris - "bravely England alone refuses to be cowed by a harmless variant that closes the EU and devolved nations?"

[Whorty]

It isn't and in early March 2020 everything was fine too, until it wasn't.

Look back at start of this thread - less than a month ago and now we have 5 times more infections, Omicron would have to be 5 times less severe than Delta to deal with the spike.

So what if 1/3 had Covid on top of other stuff when hospitalisations going up by 50% a WEEK now and infections are at crazy levels and only limited testing capacity would prevent us from seeing far bigger numbers.

Read the article. It's more than just numbers.

only limited testing capacity would prevent us from seeing far bigger numbers.

a) you've made that up
b) testing was even less last year and 2020 so you can easily argue that numbers of +ve people could/was higher then but we didn't know

I'm not saying we're in a good place. I'm not defending the numbers. But you're just scare mongering and picking the bits you want to talk about, and ignoring the rest. Very poor fella. Grow some eh? Be a man