Does anyone have any idea what's going to happen now? Neither case numbers and certainly not hospitalizations having reached anywhere near peak yet, I imagine, and the lockdown still so much looser than March..?
What is the plan, if indeed there is one? Nightingales occasionally being mentioned but the staffing question never answered.
I am beyond terrified now for myself and friends who might be in need of any kind of hospital care.
Public data doesnt give me much ability to predict the future.
It is possible to see which way the deaths will go in the next few weeks by looking at positive case & hospital admissions data. But beyond that, so far in this pandemic, byt the time data is published there is not very much timing difference between hospital admissions and positive case data, to the extent that it has not been a worthwhile exercise to try to use one to predict the other. So I wont have a better idea of when hospitalisations will peak than anyone else, no matter how hard I study data and past correlations. So I cannot predict hospitalisation peaks before they happen. Number of people in hospital does lag behind number of hospital admissions, so I can use one to come up with expectations about the other.
The authorities likely have a modest data advantage compared to what & when I can see publicly. They have a significant modelling advantage.
I should start looking at mobility data again, since that can offer clues of various sorts.
In terms of plans, a lot of it will be of the disaster and emergency response sort, and a lot of that stuff is stuff I dont want to go on about constantly unless we actually reach that point. And plenty of public comms related stuff, and probably some moments where they will take the opportunity to tighten up on certain things.
In terms of people having gloomy expectations in terms of how strong lockdown is and how well it will work, I would not want to put people off from examining the large holes and failures there, but I recommend looking at things from several other angles too. Behaviours that are incompatible with halting pandemic spread stick out like a sore thumb, but should not detract from thoughts about all the areas where behaviours have massively changed. Some very large brakes have been slammed on by shuting schools, joining the brakes applied with hospitality & retail got shuttered. And the authorities probably know that in order to bring things back down to a level they can cope with better, they dont need to close every single door in the face of this virus, as long as they close most of the largest doors. If they leave some stuff going in a way that allows infection to carry on spreading within that sector, they may still manage to get their overall numbers to come to where they need them to be, and then later they can zoom in and start to tackle some of these areas. That is not the approach I would have taken, far from it, Im just suggesting that even in acute moments of danger where they have run out of wiggle room to avoid some of the biggest brakes being applied, they can still hope to get away with not engaging every single smaller brake at the same time. And I'd have to anticipate them being that slack, because a regime that wasnt sloppy like that would have been more likely to do the right things long ago to prevent us getting anywhere near this level of doom in the first place.
