Norman Potting
Well-known member
Much to my surprise had no difficulty in booking for eldest Potting's vaccinations yesterday evening - Sunday week at a nice easily accessible rural location.
Cases going up and up and up, and now hospitalisations and deaths are rising too - oh dear! Pfft...whilst all of that's true here's why it doesn't matter.
I've re-pulled some data looking at the effective death rate in the UK, by linking rolling daily cases with rolling daily deaths, the latter offset by two weeks for hopefully obvious reasons. Here's what that looks like:
View attachment 137898
So what does that tell us? In effect, back in early Jan when rolling daily cases peaked to over 60,000 approximately 2.5% of those cases would sadly go on to die, resulting in around 1,500 deaths a couple of weeks later. We're now down to a figure of 0.16% thanks to the power of vaccinations, although given that figure is effectively two weeks out of date it's likely we're even lower.
In effect, the current death rate is between 15 and 20 times lower than where it was in January. Now, those 60,000 cases would result in roughly between 60 and 100 deaths - not 1,500. To put it another way, to get back to the same kind of level of death as we saw in January we would need to be seeing over a million daily cases. And all that's as of now. The death rate is consistently declining.
I'm not an expert, but I have a reasonable background in interpreting data - my advice is not to obsess too much about case rates anymore. Cases will continue to rise and it may be a while before we see the same kind of almost-zero Covid the likes of Israel are currently enjoying, but this illness is hardly killing anyone in this country anymore. We might as well start publishing daily cases for the common cold. We shouldn't fear big numbers when they have little statistical significance.
Being reported today that Covid antibody rates are more than 50 per cent higher than roadmap predictions
Eight in 10 people over the age of 16 now have a level of immunity against coronavirus, ONS figures show. Antibody rates are now more than 50 per cent higher than epidemiologists predicted they would be when they published models which informed the Covid roadmap.
In February, Imperial College warned that only 44.6 per cent of the population would be protected by the original lockdown release day of June 21.
But the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that eight in 10 people over the age of 16 now have antibodies to Covid.
Now this may be a silly question and I’m certainly not looking to be negative, not at all, but how do they know that 8 in 10 have antibodies?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
They’ve been doing sample antibody testing right from the start.
Now this may be a silly question and I’m certainly not looking to be negative, not at all, but how do they know that 8 in 10 have antibodies?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
Correct, I was part of Imperial's ongoing study last year.