If you thought Covid was all over this short thread from the quite amazing Prof Christina Pagel suggests otherwise:
Those graphs should end any sense of complacency.
And come September schools and universities are back - and these are now, glaringly obviously, the conduits for transmission and very many students and pupils remain unprotected, either by their choice, or grossly negligently by government omission.
Add onto that the failure of the government to address issues around ventilation in schools - which could have been addressed by now as they have been in many parts of the USA - and we're still sitting on a potential nightmare.
No wonder the rumours of potential lockdowns during Christmas and Easter, and maybe even half-term holidays, are swirling. Circuit breakers are going to be needed.
The idea that we are returning to anything like normal as yet is absurd: we're not.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
There are links to this blog's glossary in the above post that explain technical terms used in it. Follow them for more explanations.
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
Buy me a coffee!
Probably the Covid situation will get worse later in the year. The question is by how much. According to some models it was already meant to have become very much worse than it has by now.
https://tinyurl.com/mm68c779
So we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile, we see that the Aussie strategy hasn’t worked out quite so well. The criticism there is that they have become a ‘hermit kingdom’ with no end in sight.
Another Brit who thinks they understand Australia but fail miserably. There is no “Australian strategy”. There is however a New Zealand strategy that has worked well for 18 months and continues to do so. In Australia there are seven different state/territory strategies and also a federal government strategy. The Feds are useless, like the U.K. They fucked up their two responsibilities: border quarantine and vaccination. The smaller states have done well and continue to: Sourh Australia, Tasmania, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. They lockdown fast for short periods, have excellent contact tracing and on the whole pretty good support for isolation, and control their borders with other states. I lived a normal life in SA almost all of the last year. Cases today, like every day: 0. Victoria and Queensland learned their lessons and are doing the right thing. But they are too connected to New South Wales to fully insulate from the idiotic Tory government there, with its federal backers. NSW has always tried to respond late and lightly just like the U.K. Until Delta their excellent contact tracing was enough to control outbreaks, but now it isn’t and they need a short sharp lockdown as well, but the NSW govt is resisting. I’ve spent the last two years in Victoria, South Australia, New Zealand and New South Wales, so believe me.
That is an interesting local insight, Nigel. Thanks. Is there a clear economic impact from their slow and ineffective measures, compared to swift effective action taken elsewhere? Are the Tory government in NSW being blamed for their failures compared to other states? Will they suffer electorally?
@ Nigel,
The vaccination uptakes in NZ and Australia are, for whatever reason, comparable and both woefully low.
I just wondered how you see the end game playing out in both countries?
Agreed.
Well, frankly, things are a lot better than I had expected them to be right now, looking forward from a month ago. 75% of the adult population with two vaccinations is great, not quite at the level required for herd immunity (and even if it was, we’d still see an overshoot of cases before the pandemic died out) but it all helps to push down the R rate, along with other measures people are taking voluntarily. We don’t appear to have a dangerous new variant, yet.
The exponential growth in cases that we saw through late May, June and early July thankfully broke just before 19 July (I don’t think anyone has yet presented a convincing explanation why) and since then we’ve had a few weeks of around 25,000 cases per day or around 200,000 per week. That is an elevated rate, above the rate that saw a lockdown last November. A percentage of those (some vaccinated, some not) will become hospital cases and deaths, plus more suffering from long COVID.
Hospital admissions are flat at around 800 per day, with around 6,000 COVID patients at any time. That is a significant amount of our overall hospital capacity, which is reduced by COVID precautions to prevent cross-infection (many other patients will be vulnerable – a double-vaccinated 80 year old will be at substantially greater risk that a younger person).
Worryingly, daily deaths are still creeping up, now around 80-100 per day instead of around 40-50 per day a month or so ago. A small fraction of the 1,800 or so deaths per day from all causes, but 5% is sizeable nonetheless. The numbers from death certificates (by date registered) for the last four reported weeks, from the week ending 2 July to the week ending 30 July, go 132, 217 (+85), 268 (+51), 392 (+124), 468 (+76) .
And it would only take one or two doublings of hospitalisations or deaths to get us back to a state where we might need to consider another lockdown..
No one I know is living a “normal” life. People are still working at home most of the time where they can, schools and universities are out, social contacts are substantially curtailed, masks are being worn, etc. The government have been woefully negligent in addressing risks at schools, particularly the need for ventilation. Hospital staff are near breaking point, In short, there is a long way to go.