Just_a_fan wrote: ↑Tue Jul 06, 2021 4:28 pm
henry wrote: ↑Tue Jul 06, 2021 3:55 pm
The government is playing some of its cards close to its chest.
I think they have only one card and it's full view on the table in front of them - it's the vaccination programme. They're gambling on the vaccination programme being sufficient to protect enough people for long enough that they can roll out boosters with new variants incorporated in the vaccine recipe.
I think they're planning to deal with Covid as they do seasonal 'flu - offer annual "updated" jabs to those most likely to be badly affected and trust that the rest of the population will be ok.
If their gamble works, we're looking good. If not, it's going to be a long 2021-22 winter.
They definitely intend to do as you say. But it’s not the winter that concerns me it’s the summer.
Since the beginning of the year I have maintained a set of ratios on the high level Covid data.
I record: cases reported,
proportion of that number of hospital admissions 10 days later,
proportion of the case number that are in MV beds 12 days later
proportion of fatalities 21 days later.
The time intervals roughly match the distance between peaks in earlier data.
Right now these ratios are, 3.3%, 2.8%, 0.23%
Roughly speaking at those rates today’s reported cases (28000) will potentially convert to 920 hospital admissions and 780 MV beds in use in 10 and 13 days time and 64 fatalities in 3 weeks time. That daily fatality rate is higher than a bad year of Flu. These rates are trending down slowly. So the actual numbers will be slightly lower.
As a comparison last January, before Covid, Flu admissions ran at around 500 to 1000 per Week. And intensive care beds one tenth of that number.
Vaccinations and infections will push us down towards herd immunity and reduce the at risk population. But I suspect a very large number of people will fall ill before then.
So the gambling question is what level of cases, hospitalisations and deaths will cause the government to go to plan B?
On a final note. Chris Witty, Chief Medical Officer, has just told a Local Government meeting that Long Covid cases are rising and it’s a non-trivial problem.
What the government will do in the autumn seems quite sensible. Time will judge whether what they are doing now is.
Fortune favours the prepared; she has no favourites and takes no sides.
Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty : Tacitus