I feel the same for family reasons. However if there HAS to be a lock down then waiting till January (100k + cases a day) will have a different bad result. Especially for schools and hospitals.
Regarding numbers and timing like that, and peoples response to this wave in terms of behaviours etc, here are some things I will highlight. I already ranted about the shitty 'analysis' bit of this article in the main UK thread so not repeating that here at this time.
Two epidemics at once and the threat to the NHS - three takeaways on the effect of Omicron.
www.bbc.co.uk
The doubling time is only around 2 days, maybe a bit less, maybe now a bit more because of behavioural changes but we wont be able to see that in data properly straight away.
But there is an ongoing delta wave that Omicron sits on top of, so we cant just double todays total detected case figures every couple of days to estimate where we will be at for the rest of December. And behaviours and opportunities for Omicron will change further.
But we could use the numbers from that article, estimated 20,000 of todays figures being Omicron, and combine them with the doubling time in order to get a rough idea of Omicrons growth potential in the days ahead. It doesnt take very long at all for the Omicron cases to go over 100,000 if we do that exercise. And then add the 'relatively stable' delta case numbers back on top.
Other complications also mentioned in the article include that the testing capacity wont actually allow the same proportion of cases as are currently officially recorded to be detected in the daily data once the number and test demand goes above a certain level.
If the two-day doubling continues, by Christmas day 640,000 Omicron infections would be being recorded and early in the new year the whole population will have been infected.
That said, the cases would never be spotted as testing capacity is limited to less than one million a day.
Clearly, however, that rate of growth will slow. There are already signs this has started happening in South Africa.
But not before we get to - in the words of UK Health Security chief Dr Jenny Harries - staggeringly high rates of infection.
In my book 'the whole population would have been infected by New Years day' stuff is not what will actually happen, things tend to be messier than that and some people will manage to hide from the virus this time around, or otherwise be protected, and others will never officially be recorded as having caught it in this wave. So I mention this stuff mostly to give an indication of what sort of timescales the simplistic version of the maths leads to within days.
