From initial reports I've read, hospital admissions of young children are up with omicron (from almost zero), but the majority of the cases are not of serious illness and hospital stays are brief, which hopefully is reflected in the death figures there - one baby that week, by the looks of it, but nobody else under 15.
Such discussions are hampered by the low numbers in absolute terms. And the attitudes people have towards deaths that primarily occur in people already classed as vulnerable. There is also an association between certain ethnicities and child death risk.From initial reports I've read, hospital admissions of young children are up with omicron (from almost zero), but the majority of the cases are not of serious illness and hospital stays are brief, which hopefully is reflected in the death figures there - one baby that week, by the looks of it, but nobody else under 15.
I would still argue that covid-19 remains a very minor threat to the health of the under-18s, whether they are vaccinated or not, but that it is making some very young children ill is new.
I don't know how that compares to flu. I suspect it may not be very different.
Officials said several hospitals prepared to declare a 'red alert' barring all but emergency admissions amid the growing epidemic. Different strains of the flu have killed at least 158 people this year.
It was the first influenza epidemic to hit Britain since 1975-76, when more than 1,200 people died from the virus.
Newspapers said the latest victims of the virus were a 16-month-old girl, a 7-year-old boy and a 79-year-old man. The boy died in his sleep after complaining of a severe headache, sore eyes and difficulty in standing up, The Independent newspaper said.
The elderly, young children with asthma or cystic fibrosis, or those with heart or lung diseases are especially at risk, officials said.
Doctors said flu vaccines should be reserved for the most vulnerable people and antibiotics were not effective in combatting the disease. The best cure, they said, was old-fashioned bed rest, aspirin and lots of fluids.
An outbreak is classified as an epidemic when 100 people out of 100,000 are documented as suffering from a virus.
The worst flu epidemic in 14 years has strong-armed its way through Britain, claiming lives, forcing hospitals to postpone surgery and dominating conversation with worries over who has it, how to avoid it or how to get rid of it.
Government statistics released this week showed that 102 people in England and Wales died of illnesses related to flu in the first week of December, bringing the total such deaths so far this year to 276. In the corresponding week last year, there were seven flu-related deaths.
The virus is said to be similar to the strain that killed a total of 1,283 people in the winter of 1975-76. The highest number of flu cases ever recorded by the research unit was 918 for every 100,000 people during the winter of 1969-70.
Nonetheless, the Department of Health said it would continue to recommend that people in high-risk groups -those who have chronic chest, heart or kidney disease, diabetes, or who are taking certain drugs - be vaccinated against the flu. Elderly people in those groups are considered particularly vulnerable. Most of the flu-related deaths have been among people over 65, Government statistics show.
Some hospitals have asked for volunteers to ''adopt a grandparent'' over the Christmas holidays in an attempt to keep the flu epidemic from sweeping through hospital wards reserved for the elderly.
The name influenza, is very old and precedes the first identification of an influenza virus by several centuries. The clinical syndrome which is labelled influenza is not exclusively caused by the influenza virus either A or B. Nor can this ever be, because virus infections are so variable in their clinical manifestation, and routine virolo'gical investigation of patients with influenza illneses is not justifiable.
Clifford and colleagues estimated that there were approximately 15000 excess deaths attributable to influenza during epidemic years, one third in persons under 65 years of age. During the period 15 November to 31 December 1989 the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys reported 112697 deaths from all causes compared with an expected value of 89900. Of the 22797 excess deaths, only 1919 were directly attributed to the influenza or influenzal pneumonia (OPCS Monitor, registrar general's weekly return for England and Wales).
An epidemic of upper respiratory disease in the UK occurred during the last seven weeks of 1989. This was almost certainly due to influenza virus A/England/H3N2. During the epidemic there were almost 22000 more deaths than expected for this time of year but only one tenth of them were attributed on death certificates to influenza.
This is my BBC News app today.
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Figures for England show that covid is on the rise in young children - quite sharply in those under 10, and a bit less sharply in 10-14. It's also rising slightly in their parents' age group. It is still falling among other age groups. The overall effect in England is that total case numbers are more or less flat, and have been for the last two weeks, at about half their peak.This is my BBC News app today.
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That thought has occurred to me as well.A final though on my recent flu posts:
Frankly the amount of testing for influenza and the nature of sentinel surveillance, and almost non-existent surveillance of the other existing human coronaviruses means that I cannot even be sure that every bad epidemic and wave of death this country experienced in the last 50 years was actually a straightforward story of influenza epidemics. I'm not going to make wild claims about whether we had a bad wave of coronavirus deaths as part of the real picture of those years, but neither can I entirely exclude the possibility.
I know what you mean and I dont need to pick it apart because you were careful to say 'the way omicron is affecting the population now', which is a combination of the intrinsic properties of omicron along with the high levels of infection from previous strains and the massive number of vaccines given (ie population not naive to this virus in its broadest sense).That thought has occurred to me as well.
If the initial wave had been of a virus that affected the population in the way omicron is affecting the population now, tests for it wouldn't have been developed. It would just have been 'a bad cough that's going around', I would have thought. We might well not ever have identified it, especially given the speed at which it spreads.
Not really that surprising, tbh. If the peak ends up being 15 Jan, that's almost exactly two weeks after the peak in cases at the end of last year, which is more or less what you'd expect.
I get that, and your rational, level analysis is always welcome.Yes and the prolonged plateau isnt unexpected either, given differences in regional timing, the possibility of outbreaks in certain settings coming a bit later (eg care home and hospital outbreaks were often a bit later in the first waves, not sure about this time). Also when we see incredibly sharp spikes in the daily positive case number. peaks, I tend to assume these are a bit of a distortion of the actual picture, which still has pronounced peaks but probably not quite as abrupt in reality.
Not really because thats deaths by reporting date, as in:I get that, and your rational, level analysis is always welcome.
That said, in the context of the tory triumphalism, and vibe that it's all over...439 is a bit "fuck", no?
Let's take a moment to look at the current Covid situation in the UK. The rapid drop in detected cases has come to an end.
Week on week cases are down by just over 3% now when at one point they were falling by well over 30%.
It seems likely we will soon start to see cases tipping back up. This was to be expected. The Omicron peak at the start of the year was caused by two things – levels of immunity and behaviour.
By the end of December the amount of mixing people were doing had dropped to the sort of levels seen in the first lockdown. As schools have returned and people are back at work, that has changed, making it easier for the virus to spread.
It's not clear exactly what will happen next.
Modellers believe any rise will be relatively short-lived or there could be an extended period where cases remain relatively flat, bobbling around up and down, as happened after restrictions were eased last summer.
What looks certain is that the Omicron wave will have a fairly long tail to it.
Yep that. And also, while the average between testing positive and death may be around 2 weeks, that covers a wide variation from a few days to a couple of months. That will also flatten the peak compared to cases.Yes and the prolonged plateau isnt unexpected either, given differences in regional timing, the possibility of outbreaks in certain settings coming a bit later (eg care home and hospital outbreaks were often a bit later in the first waves, not sure about this time). Also when we see incredibly sharp spikes in the daily positive case number. peaks, I tend to assume these are a bit of a distortion of the actual picture, which still has pronounced peaks but probably not quite as abrupt in reality.
On the dashboard, this means:
UKHSA is working with the devolved administrations to align definitions across the UK.
- cases in England by report date will change to the new definition of an episode of infection
- historical numbers by report date will not be revised, so there will be a step increase in the cumulative numbers of cases on that date
- specimen date metrics will be revised back to the beginning of the pandemic.
- the same metric names will still be used
- new metrics will show first episodes of infection (equivalent to the current case definition) and episodes of reinfection, shown by specimen date only.
UK public health agencies are now updating surveillance data to count infection episodes, including reinfection episodes. Infection episodes will be counted separately if there are at least 90 days between positive test results. Each episode begins with the earliest positive specimen date. If someone has another positive specimen within 90 days of the last one, this is included in the same episode. If they have another positive specimen more than 90 days after the last one, this is counted in a separate episode (a possible reinfection episode).