Covid 19 Part XXXV-956,720 ROI (5,952 deaths) 452,946 NI (3,002 deaths) (08/01) Read OP

When more than 9 out of 10 adults in the UK now have some form of antibodies according to PHE you have to say it's pretty much game over. Natural infection plus vaccination will get them to 95-98% coverage fairly soon.

We aren't far behind. Vaccines are estimated to have prevented 46k hospitalisations in over 65s alone. In Europe its very close to be becoming endemic and that needs to be recognised. It's still potentially dangerous to a certain cohort of people but vaccinations are more effective than flu and mortality rate is currently lower in Covid than flu in the USA anyway (as a result of vaccine). Haven't seen stats for Europe

Also needs to be an eye on vaccinating the rest of the world soon. Uptake will be lower and access to vaccines is going to be a huge issue going forward in the developing world

Someone earlier was talking about cases "doubling" every two weeks. This only makes sense if there's the assumption of exponential growth. However there's no evidence for this in the UK data at present. In fact if we take the data at face value, current growth in the last couple of weeks is not even linear.

Another point to note is that we're not seeing the sharp rise in deaths with which previous waves have been associated. Either the lag is much greater (previously it has been about two weeks) or else the link has largely been broken.

We tend to think of the UK as taking a big risk and Ireland learning from this experiment, but it may be that we're biased due to having had restrictions for so long. It may be Ireland that is taking the risk.

Something having doubled doesn't mean exponential growth. A number could rise linearly (as seems to be happening in the UK currently) over a period of time and still double at some point but it would not be exponential growth.

Consistent doubling (or some other multiplier) over a time period, does indeed mean exponential. I've already shown how the values have consistently doubled over a given time period. Thus, exponential.

If you take a linear example, let's say deaths increase by 1/day. They double from 1 to 2 on day 1. Then it takes 2 days to double from 2 to 4. 4 days to double from 4 to 8. And so on. That's not exponential. The doubling time is getting consistently longer.

Deaths going from 9 to 16 in 15 days. Then 16 to 38 in 15 days. That's exponential. The doubling time is (practically) consistent.

We’re going to need to get seriously huge levels of vaccination by the looks of it, or some % of some cohort is going to just keep ending up in hospital.

We've a huge advantage in the sense of our uptake being very high and conspiracy theory buy in seems very low. I think we can get carried away with how big that is because there’s a noisy group of a few hundred people, who are very active on social media and a lot of crazy from the USA being heard over here. It seems to be completely unrepresentative of reality.

It’s probably lots of things. Im hopeful that the good weather might keep us outdoor for a month or so as the vaccines get to really high levels.

I'm scheduled for a second shot of Pfizer soon, and more of my family and friends seem to be heading towards full vaccination or first doses or Janssen 1 dose, so hopefully as the summer progresses this grim picture will get a lot brighter.

If I was in my early twenties I would be partying every second day and taking new girls out. This is what your life for. Not for that miserable existence young people (and not only young) experienced in the last 1.5 years. Tony and his crew of pretty much useless academics can just f off.

The spikes are also likely to be in that age group due only being relatively recently reached by vaccines in the U.K. and only just beginning to be here.

Hopefully the HSE will fly though the age groups.

The 35-45 “bulge” is really huge btw. That’s our largest demographic. So the likelihood is they’ll get though younger cohorts much more rapidly.

If you look at Ireland’s population, our “boomers” are 30 years younger than the US equivalent. So you’ve a different profile of rollout. The same is true with comparisons with Germany etc

We're going to need more hospital capacity in the short to medium term, this looks like it's heading towards a similar profile to flu where everyone will be slightly at risk, and a certain number of people are going to end up in hospital every year. We can't shut down the country as a consequence, but neither can we allow our hospitals to become over-loaded (which they already are during flu season). We do need to get through the next few months as carefully as we can until we get to that stage where we have large numbers of vaccinated people, and then we'll be generally fine with some work to do. Thankfully the actual number of anti-vaxxers in Ireland looks pretty small, and none of us really care as much for them or their "rights" as they seem to think we should.

Double post..

Still no daily death figures, without them the daily case figures are pretty much worthless as a warning or as an indication of how good the vaccines are doing in preventing srious illness, making things worse instead of better.

While it would be good to see them staying low, case numbers do not really matter to any great extent if there is no corresponding increase in hospital and ICU numbers.

Friend made this, the deaths are brought forward 14 days on this graph so the cases correspond to the deaths roughly (the peaks line up etc)

It's very telling for the vaccines working. There is a much more dampened curve for deaths this time around!

UK data for this as they're ahead of us in most regards