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Coronavirus in the UK - news, lockdown and discussion

Yes, they had a notice on there yesterday, saying a new colour would be added today, for any areas with 1600+ cases per 100k.
And BOOM, half of inner London goes black 😭
Anyone remember at the start of this, when they introduced travel restrictions for any countries on 20+ cases per 100k?


It's hard to believe now.
Can someone wake me up when this is 'over'..?
 
And BOOM, half of inner London goes black 😭

Yep, and you can see how it's spreading out of London, with most surrounding counties now dark purple.

West Berkshire will go that way tomorrow, closely followed by Hampshire, us in West Sussex, then East Sussex soon after. It's just like watching the spread from north Kent last Dec., and into Jan. :(
 
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Well, January and February are going to be, erm... interesting...
Pagel gives it two options:
:(
Last Thursday, Sage estimated that without reducing transmission further (over and above plan B), there will be at least 3,000 daily admissions to hospital in England (equivalent to the first wave in 2020), and it could be much worse even than last January. So the question is not whether it will be bad for the NHS, but whether it will be just dreadful or catastrophic.
 
Traansmission will be reduced further than Plan B because of all the behavioural changes due to the much worse mood music. Really difficult for me to guess to what extent though, or the extent to which extended family contact patterns over Christmas remove the advantages from workplace contacts and school contacts being reduced by the holiday period. ie similar to last year where people were on the lookout for a dreadful Christmas-induced spike in cases, but I felt the need to keep waffling on about the effect of school holidays etc.

I cant even use the daily hospital admissions data to form a strong opinion because although the numbers have been going up quite quickly in the London region, it would still take more time before they reached doom levels, and there will be some large disruptions to publication of that data over the holiday. Also given the increased Omicron transmissiveness I dont know to quite what extent I should attribute the rise in daily hospital admissions/diagnoses to spread within hospitals and people tsting positive when they are in hospital for other reasons. And of course the condition they are in for other reasons makes a difference to the implications for them when they happen to catch covid without the covid being the original cause of their admission.

My adherence to precautionary principals mean that the above would not stop me from taking further action, but those and many other unknowns mean I dont really have a solid prediction for quite what to expect in January.
 
A similarly worrisome article from The Conversation:

big factor in this change was a surge in cases in schoolchildren in the least deprived areas. But the same change occurred in older age groups, too. So what was going on?

There are many possible explanations, but one contributing factor is likely to be the fact that, having had high case rates for so long, more deprived areas had much higher levels of infection-acquired immunity. Essentially, so many people had had COVID already that the virus started to run out of susceptible people to infect. Many more affluent areas, however, had seen relatively fewer cases and so had greater exposure to new outbreaks, particularly among schoolchildren who didn’t have the additional protection of vaccines.

Unfortunately, there has been a major new development since then: omicron has arrived. The new variant appears to be even more infectious than previous variants of concern, and it has some degree of immune escape, which means it is much better at reinfecting people who have some degree of immunity, whether that is through having been infected or being vaccinated.

...

The fact that omicron can overcome the wall of protection that has been built up in deprived areas through such high levels of prior infection means that there is a risk that these inequalities are going to be repeated in the coming weeks and months. Just when it seemed as though there was a light at the end of the tunnel for many living in deprived areas, the light began to fade.


Thankfully we've got a government that's always got the interests of the most deprived and dispossessed at heart and the efficiency of the private sector is pulling out all the stops to help the NHS.
 
Whats the betting on post-clusterfuck the only way deemed plausible to provide the necessary investment in the NHS will be to privatise it?
 
Covid hospital admissions/diagnoses data for England to go with my previous post.

The (presumably) infection rate for London is pretty impressive, with the rest of the country broadly stationary - suggesting that the huge increases in cases every day are predominantly London-only? I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only person in Lambeth never to have got it.

Do your sources for stats have separate data for hospital admissions only in London itself? Seeing as it appears to be London leading the omicron charge starting about a month ago it'd be very interesting to see what the London hospital admissions started looking like a fortnight ago.
 
The (presumably) infection rate for London is pretty impressive, with the rest of the country broadly stationary - suggesting that the huge increases in cases every day are predominantly London-only? I'm beginning to wonder if I'm the only person in Lambeth never to have got it.

Do your sources for stats have separate data for hospital admissions only in London itself? Seeing as it appears to be London leading the omicron charge starting about a month ago it'd be very interesting to see what the London hospital admissions started looking like a fortnight ago.
Large numbers of locations around the country are showing big leaps in case numbers, but these only showed up more recently than London and it takes time to filter through into hospitalisations.

The graphs I included show London as an entire region. To zoom in more than that you need to look at data per hospital trust, which only comes out once a week (Thursdays if I recall properly). It is available on the main UK dashboard using dropdown menus. And I'm not a Londoner so I have a bit of trouble putting individual NHS trusts into context.

Just to give one example, this link should show the data for Barts. Currently only covers admissions up to the 12th December.

 
Traansmission will be reduced further than Plan B because of all the behavioural changes due to the much worse mood music. Really difficult for me to guess to what extent though, or the extent to which extended family contact patterns over Christmas remove the advantages from workplace contacts and school contacts being reduced by the holiday period. ie similar to last year where people were on the lookout for a dreadful Christmas-induced spike in cases, but I felt the need to keep waffling on about the effect of school holidays etc.

I cant even use the daily hospital admissions data to form a strong opinion because although the numbers have been going up quite quickly in the London region, it would still take more time before they reached doom levels, and there will be some large disruptions to publication of that data over the holiday. Also given the increased Omicron transmissiveness I dont know to quite what extent I should attribute the rise in daily hospital admissions/diagnoses to spread within hospitals and people tsting positive when they are in hospital for other reasons. And of course the condition they are in for other reasons makes a difference to the implications for them when they happen to catch covid without the covid being the original cause of their admission.

My adherence to precautionary principals mean that the above would not stop me from taking further action, but those and many other unknowns mean I dont really have a solid prediction for quite what to expect in January.
Anecdotally, there's been a HUGE increase in mask wearing in the street and in shops. Why we couldn't have just stuck with an enforced requirement to wear masks on public transport and shops baffles me. Well it would if we didn't have a bunch of fucking clowns in government.
 
Anecdotally, there's been a HUGE increase in mask wearing in the street and in shops. Why we couldn't have just stuck with an enforced requirement to wear masks on public transport and shops baffles me. Well it would if we didn't have a bunch of fucking clowns in government.
Well, it would reduce transmission. And just imagine being trapped in an ideological and political place where you can't do that? Killers.
 
What is happening in South Africa? They have much lower vaccination rates, so just wondering if that helps to build a picture of what it might be like? Given they discovered it so are presumably ahead of us…
 
What is happening in South Africa? They have much lower vaccination rates, so just wondering if that helps to build a picture of what it might be like? Given they discovered it so are presumably ahead of us…

Younger average population though.

I think things are doing ok there at the moment but not paying that much attention.
 
What is happening in South Africa? They have much lower vaccination rates, so just wondering if that helps to build a picture of what it might be like? Given they discovered it so are presumably ahead of us…
Data I've seen has cases dropping (quite fast) but I think the question is to what extent that is a true picture and/or an artefact of various factors
 
I wore myself out with that stuff via past waves peak predictions and trying to decode data, so I'm not going to try this time, I'll quit while I'm ahead (the July peak that somehow commentators and experts didnt see coming despite the same thing having happened in Scotland earlier due to earlier school holidays in Scotland back then). And I've bored myself going on about reasons for actual peaks that dont involve the classic formal lockdowns. Certainly with every day that passes there will be more people drawing attention to that data on twitter etc, but I'll take a break instead. My focus will be on cases by age group since these sometimes tell a different story to the peaks in overall case numbers. And I'm sure I will keep looking at hosiptal data one we reach a point where I can make more confident claims about such things, probably after the Christmas pause to hospital data at this rate. eg the July case peak I mentioned did not lead to the peak in hospitalisations for that wave following soon after in a straightforward manner, since the peak was dominated by younger age groups and case number in older people grew more later.
 
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Theres lots of different ways to look at it and different headlines can be constructed as a result.

There are 7 day averages. There are positive cases reported per day. There are positive cases by test specimen date (current peak of those is still December 15th but that could still change later).

And then there are other forms of surveillance which arent so reliant on number of tests done and attitudes to testing. eg things like the ONS study that does random sampling of households and tends to generate news items once a week. But thats a laggy form of surveillance so people will still tend to resort to daily data when trying to tell peak stories at the very earliest opportunity (or prematurely).

For England ones of the clues about testing numbers we have these days is that if you drill down to England on the test section of the dashboard and scroll down a fair bit, you can see how many lateral flow tests are recorded as having been taken each day. So far these also peaked on the 15th but I wouldnt call the drop off since then staggering.


Other clues are obtained via weekly reports and via things like the percentage of tests that are positive. I might focus on the positivity rate at some point, but for now I will see how long I can go without the temptation to keep making posts like these.

Oh and people could also look at daily data for the Christmas period last year, to see what sort of festive season & school holiday induced changes happened to the figures that time around.
 
Anecdotally, there's been a HUGE increase in mask wearing in the street and in shops. Why we couldn't have just stuck with an enforced requirement to wear masks on public transport and shops baffles me. Well it would if we didn't have a bunch of fucking clowns in government.
I was thinking this yesterday - was on the tube and FINALLY almost 100% compliance in our carriage and I just thought 'See? It's not that fucking hard; we needed to have been doing this since first lockdown last year and to keep doing it next year. If you can do it now, you can keep doing it!'

Would it have stopped COVID in its tracks? No. Would we have been in a much better position with 1000s fewer dead or left with chronic illness? Yes.
 
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