Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
Except that we can have confidence that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will not simply continue to multiply out of control without lockdowns, as in previous waves, because sooner or later they'll run up against the barrier of the vaccinated population. Which was not a factor in those previous waves, of course.
If this is untrue then why has a runaway healthcare catastrophe not occurred in Bolton, Blackburn or the other localities in the vanguard of Delta? And where, with vaccine take-up looking so stellar and the effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta proven, are the mountains of dead bodies meant to come from this time around? Moreover, even the patients who are in hospital are, on average, younger and less ill than in previous waves.
It's not even as if the positive noises are all coming from the lockdown sceptics. Far from it: the Chief Exec of NHS Providers has already come out and said that the link between cases and hospital admissions appears to have been broken. The Editor of the Health Service Journal stated tonight via Twitter that "Growth in Covid hospitalisation slowing sharply now. Actually falling in London [calculated on a week on week basis]." Even Professor Ferguson is sounding broadly optimistic about how things are going.
We can confidently expect that more people will be infected, more will end up in hospital and some more will even kick the bucket, but there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be another death tsunami, or that the hospitals will be swamped: the sole original justification for restrictions. So, then one has to consider whether or not the limited number of serious illnesses and deaths that will be prevented by months more of precautionary restrictions is worth the continuing sacrifice in terms of the non-Covid harms which are caused. It looks as if, unless something goes badly wrong in the next few weeks, the Government might actually decide that they aren't worth it, and scrap most of the restrictions. And if so, then why is this not something to be celebrated?
Covid is a serious matter, but life really shouldn't be lived around it for any longer than is strictly necessary.
So what are your estimates of those vital numbers?
It's all very well saying "things aren't as bad as they were because of vaccines", but the point is - if we let cases just carry on increasing by 30% or 40% a week without any attempt to control them - and perhaps remove such restrictions as are still in place next month - just what percentage of those cases do YOU think will end up in hospital, and what level of confidence do you have that it won't exceed the capacity of the NHS?
It can't be done by platitudes and handwaving.
How many will end up in hospital etc? In general, for any particular area, fewer than in the recent hotspots of Bolton and Greater Manchester. Most of us don’t see that as presenting an insurmountable problem.
How many do you think? You just keep saying “30%, 40%” week on week increase. But make no acknowledgement of the possibility of a ceiling on that rise.
I note there is still a complete absence of any kind of estimates of anything whatsoever from the "optimists", but still, I've given up expecting any substantive counter-arguments.
As far as the ceiling on further cases goes, IF all restrictions are removed, it will only stop when herd immunity is reached. Or rather, some distance beyond herd immunity, because a large wave of infection has something analogous to momentum that takes it well beyond the point where R=1.
That depends on the efficacy of vaccines, the number of people already infected, the transmissibility of the delta variant and so on and so forth. But the best answer I can give is that if we start from here, with only about 60% of the population fully vaccinated, I have trouble getting us to herd immunity, even on the most optimistic assumptions, without another 10-15 million infections.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
In a worst-case scenario, how many more people in Britain do you think would die, if we did nothing, and let cases rise unhindered by nothing except vaccines and hand-washing?
That's the question that should be answered by the people who want to remove all the counter-,measures, for heaven's sake!
No, you're the one proposing to restrictions people's liberty and cause huge economic damage. The onus to explain how bad you think it's going to get to justify doing so lies with you.
Absolutely. Those in favour of the continuation of “emergency” economically destructive restrictions on fundamental liberties have a responsibility to justify this every single day. If that can be done then fine.
But at no point should anybody be allowed to argue that, in effect, the restrictions should be seen as the status quo that requires opponents to make the case for their removal. The case for their removal is simple. They are temporary emergency restrictions. That is all that is needed. Anything else is only needed as a counter argument after a serious prima facie case is put for their continuation.
We can probably do the maths. Let's say 15m of the population (i.e. around 1/3 of adults, 25% of total) have insufficient antibodies to avoid infection. Herd immunity, taking into account some overshoot if there's an epidemic, is conservatively say 90% so 90-75=15% i.e. 9m people catching Covid.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
I really hope we don't start having to worry about adding to the quality of debate, I get anxious enough as it is without seeking to impress.
It's like covid case numbers, if the base calibration point is very low to begin with one doesn't need to contribute much in absolute terms to proportionally add a substantial amount to the quality. Or something.
We can probably do the maths. Let's say 15m of the population (i.e. around 1/3 of adults, 25% of total) have insufficient antibodies to avoid infection. Herd immunity, taking into account some overshoot if there's an epidemic, is conservatively say 90% so 90-75=15% i.e. 9m people catching Covid.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
Don't forget that more and more people are being vaccinated. So the pool of potential cases is decreasing all of the time.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
Except that we can have confidence that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will not simply continue to multiply out of control without lockdowns, as in previous waves, because sooner or later they'll run up against the barrier of the vaccinated population. Which was not a factor in those previous waves, of course.
If this is untrue then why has a runaway healthcare catastrophe not occurred in Bolton, Blackburn or the other localities in the vanguard of Delta? And where, with vaccine take-up looking so stellar and the effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta proven, are the mountains of dead bodies meant to come from this time around? Moreover, even the patients who are in hospital are, on average, younger and less ill than in previous waves.
It's not even as if the positive noises are all coming from the lockdown sceptics. Far from it: the Chief Exec of NHS Providers has already come out and said that the link between cases and hospital admissions appears to have been broken. The Editor of the Health Service Journal stated tonight via Twitter that "Growth in Covid hospitalisation slowing sharply now. Actually falling in London [calculated on a week on week basis]." Even Professor Ferguson is sounding broadly optimistic about how things are going.
We can confidently expect that more people will be infected, more will end up in hospital and some more will even kick the bucket, but there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be another death tsunami, or that the hospitals will be swamped: the sole original justification for restrictions. So, then one has to consider whether or not the limited number of serious illnesses and deaths that will be prevented by months more of precautionary restrictions is worth the continuing sacrifice in terms of the non-Covid harms which are caused. It looks as if, unless something goes badly wrong in the next few weeks, the Government might actually decide that they aren't worth it, and scrap most of the restrictions. And if so, then why is this not something to be celebrated?
Covid is a serious matter, but life really shouldn't be lived around it for any longer than is strictly necessary.
So what are your estimates of those vital numbers?
It's all very well saying "things aren't as bad as they were because of vaccines", but the point is - if we let cases just carry on increasing by 30% or 40% a week without any attempt to control them - and perhaps remove such restrictions as are still in place next month - just what percentage of those cases do YOU think will end up in hospital, and what level of confidence do you have that it won't exceed the capacity of the NHS?
It can't be done by platitudes and handwaving.
How many will end up in hospital etc? In general, for any particular area, fewer than in the recent hotspots of Bolton and Greater Manchester. Most of us don’t see that as presenting an insurmountable problem.
How many do you think? You just keep saying “30%, 40%” week on week increase. But make no acknowledgement of the possibility of a ceiling on that rise.
I note there is still a complete absence of any kind of estimates of anything whatsoever from the "optimists", but still, I've given up expecting any substantive counter-arguments.
As far as the ceiling on further cases goes, IF all restrictions are removed, it will only stop when herd immunity is reached. Or rather, some distance beyond herd immunity, because a large wave of infection has something analogous to momentum that takes it well beyond the point where R=1.
That depends on the efficacy of vaccines, the number of people already infected, the transmissibility of the delta variant and so on and so forth. But the best answer I can give is that if we start from here, with only about 60% of the population fully vaccinated, I have trouble getting us to herd immunity, even on the most optimistic assumptions, without another 10-15 million infections.
You have been given the actual figures, which are totally out of line with your own extrapolations.
You have not yet falsified them.
When there are statistics, and there are extrapolations, and the two do not match, the burden of proof is on those claiming the extrapolations are more accurate to prove their case.
As it happens, the historical extrapolations are clearly not going to work because vaccines have completely changed the equations. So I’m not quite clear why you’re still continuing to push them.
It is however in its own way encouraging that we have pro-lockdown zealots as well as anti (and pseudo-anti, in the case of Contrariran). It shows the board can attract people from both extremes.
And it reassures the rest of us in the middle that we’re probably on the right track.
Yes, but Germany go out if it stays the same....every cloud and all that.
But we play Portugal in the R16 as it stands.
Heh, I'm planning on attending the victory parade when we win the tournament.
If England look like reaching the semis, the demands that the games get moved from Wembley will be enormous. Some excuse will be found - probably insistence on 25% opposition supporters or something. All Covid, and nothing to do with the fact that they will be at home with 60,000 supporters behind them...
Spent an hour on the Labour national phone bank for Batley & Spen with several dozen others. Hard going, not because of hostility (everyone was scrupulously polite) but because most people just weren't answering. Possibly watching the footie! One Green switching to Labour, everyone else Lab or Con like last time except for one "don't know". Didn't encounter a Galloway supporter, but really not enough contacts to be a useful indication of anything.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
I would generally see myself as a centrist on all things Covid, but I do think if the virus appeared for the first time now, with the current proportions of both hospitalisation and death to cases, we may well not have ever imposed restrictions beyond suggesting people wash their hands and avoid coming into work if they are sick.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
We can probably do the maths. Let's say 15m of the population (i.e. around 1/3 of adults, 25% of total) have insufficient antibodies to avoid infection. Herd immunity, taking into account some overshoot if there's an epidemic, is conservatively say 90% so 90-75=15% i.e. 9m people catching Covid.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
Worth remembering that the CFR has never been a flat 1%. It varied from essentially about 0.01% if that for children, to about 30% for 80 year olds.
The vulnerable have been double vaccinated, so barring any antivaxxers (who can live or die with the consequences of their own choices) the remaining 15% or so are from the miniscule risk category.
0.1% CFR would be overly conservative from here, it would be lower than that.
Am I the only one to be able to see @chris' point. And the point being raised against him. And appreciate that there isn't really any contradiction there?
We can probably do the maths. Let's say 15m of the population (i.e. around 1/3 of adults, 25% of total) have insufficient antibodies to avoid infection. Herd immunity, taking into account some overshoot if there's an epidemic, is conservatively say 90% so 90-75=15% i.e. 9m people catching Covid.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
Don't forget that more and more people are being vaccinated. So the pool of potential cases is decreasing all of the time.
Indeed, "Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour."
We can probably do the maths. Let's say 15m of the population (i.e. around 1/3 of adults, 25% of total) have insufficient antibodies to avoid infection. Herd immunity, taking into account some overshoot if there's an epidemic, is conservatively say 90% so 90-75=15% i.e. 9m people catching Covid.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
Don't forget that more and more people are being vaccinated. So the pool of potential cases is decreasing all of the time.
Indeed, "Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour."
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the hundred were spread throughout the population because of a lack of vaccines, and the thousands were in the miniscule risk category because they're the only ones unvaccinated, then no it won't be 30.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, can't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
Er...yes it is. Because it depends on who those three are.
If of the 1000 people the 450 of the 500 most vulnerable are vaccinated, considerably reducing the severity of the symptoms, that totally alters the equation. At that point you would expect not 30, but around seven or eight.
And if of your sample there are not 1000 possible hosts because of vaccines, then the equation alters again.
You are the one who is showing a lack of grasp of basic statistics here.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, aren't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
Depends on the age and vaccination profile of those infected, I would have thought. Currently the biggest reservoir of potential hosts is the unvaccinated youth, as well as some older anti-vaccine holdouts. The former may make up most of the cases, while the latter make up most of the hospital admissions/deaths.
We can probably do the maths. Let's say 15m of the population (i.e. around 1/3 of adults, 25% of total) have insufficient antibodies to avoid infection. Herd immunity, taking into account some overshoot if there's an epidemic, is conservatively say 90% so 90-75=15% i.e. 9m people catching Covid.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
Don't forget that more and more people are being vaccinated. So the pool of potential cases is decreasing all of the time.
Well also there comes a point where the level of restrictions does nothing except lengthen the period of time before everyone who is going to catch it, does. So, in the absence of extraneous events contributing to additional deaths (eg. Health services being overwhelmed) then lockdowns/restrictions serve no purpose whatsoever. Restrictions/lockdowns serve two basic purposes - to buy time (to allow eg. Development and distribution of vaccines), and to slow spread and limit peaks to prevent overwhelming of health services.
Once everyone who is going to get vaccinated has been the first justification disappears. Once sufficient numbers of vaccines distributed means the NHS won’t be overwhelmed, so does the second.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
Except that we can have confidence that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will not simply continue to multiply out of control without lockdowns, as in previous waves, because sooner or later they'll run up against the barrier of the vaccinated population. Which was not a factor in those previous waves, of course.
If this is untrue then why has a runaway healthcare catastrophe not occurred in Bolton, Blackburn or the other localities in the vanguard of Delta? And where, with vaccine take-up looking so stellar and the effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta proven, are the mountains of dead bodies meant to come from this time around? Moreover, even the patients who are in hospital are, on average, younger and less ill than in previous waves.
It's not even as if the positive noises are all coming from the lockdown sceptics. Far from it: the Chief Exec of NHS Providers has already come out and said that the link between cases and hospital admissions appears to have been broken. The Editor of the Health Service Journal stated tonight via Twitter that "Growth in Covid hospitalisation slowing sharply now. Actually falling in London [calculated on a week on week basis]." Even Professor Ferguson is sounding broadly optimistic about how things are going.
We can confidently expect that more people will be infected, more will end up in hospital and some more will even kick the bucket, but there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be another death tsunami, or that the hospitals will be swamped: the sole original justification for restrictions. So, then one has to consider whether or not the limited number of serious illnesses and deaths that will be prevented by months more of precautionary restrictions is worth the continuing sacrifice in terms of the non-Covid harms which are caused. It looks as if, unless something goes badly wrong in the next few weeks, the Government might actually decide that they aren't worth it, and scrap most of the restrictions. And if so, then why is this not something to be celebrated?
Covid is a serious matter, but life really shouldn't be lived around it for any longer than is strictly necessary.
So what are your estimates of those vital numbers?
It's all very well saying "things aren't as bad as they were because of vaccines", but the point is - if we let cases just carry on increasing by 30% or 40% a week without any attempt to control them - and perhaps remove such restrictions as are still in place next month - just what percentage of those cases do YOU think will end up in hospital, and what level of confidence do you have that it won't exceed the capacity of the NHS?
It can't be done by platitudes and handwaving.
How many will end up in hospital etc? In general, for any particular area, fewer than in the recent hotspots of Bolton and Greater Manchester. Most of us don’t see that as presenting an insurmountable problem.
How many do you think? You just keep saying “30%, 40%” week on week increase. But make no acknowledgement of the possibility of a ceiling on that rise.
I note there is still a complete absence of any kind of estimates of anything whatsoever from the "optimists", but still, I've given up expecting any substantive counter-arguments.
As far as the ceiling on further cases goes, IF all restrictions are removed, it will only stop when herd immunity is reached. Or rather, some distance beyond herd immunity, because a large wave of infection has something analogous to momentum that takes it well beyond the point where R=1.
That depends on the efficacy of vaccines, the number of people already infected, the transmissibility of the delta variant and so on and so forth. But the best answer I can give is that if we start from here, with only about 60% of the population fully vaccinated, I have trouble getting us to herd immunity, even on the most optimistic assumptions, without another 10-15 million infections.
You have been given the actual figures, which are totally out of line with your own extrapolations.
I assure you, I've followed the "actual figures" very closely indeed, and that is my best estimate based on the scientific data I've seen.
If you know better, by all means provide chapter and verse. But my strong impression is that you haven't got the slightest clue of what you're talking about.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, aren't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
Depends on the age and vaccination profile of those infected, I would have thought. Currently the biggest reservoir of potential hosts is the unvaccinated youth, as well as some older anti-vaccine holdouts. The former may make up most of the cases, while the latter make up most of the hospital admissions/deaths.
If your optimism is really based on future vaccination significantly reducing the percentage of cases that will require hospitalisation, then I think you are mistaken.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
In particular, the people prioritised for vaccination had a massively higher death risk- from memory, it roughly doubles with each decade of age.
So let's say you vaccinate down to age 70 and then stop. There are still plenty of people who can catch Covid and get sick, but the death rate will have fallen by about 90%. Saying the case-death link is broken is pushing things a bit too far, but it's massively weaker.
It would be really interesting to add vaccination progress by age to @Malmesbury 's graph upthread.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, aren't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
Depends on the age and vaccination profile of those infected, I would have thought. Currently the biggest reservoir of potential hosts is the unvaccinated youth, as well as some older anti-vaccine holdouts. The former may make up most of the cases, while the latter make up most of the hospital admissions/deaths.
If your optimism is really based on future vaccination significantly reducing the percentage of cases that will require hospitalisation, then I think you are mistaken.
If it can reach those in the at risk groups that haven't taken it, why not? Vaccinating more people also reduces the chance to spread the disease to those more at risk. You seem to assume that the number of people at risk of infection is static, but it is decreasing all the time.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
Except that we can have confidence that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will not simply continue to multiply out of control without lockdowns, as in previous waves, because sooner or later they'll run up against the barrier of the vaccinated population. Which was not a factor in those previous waves, of course.
If this is untrue then why has a runaway healthcare catastrophe not occurred in Bolton, Blackburn or the other localities in the vanguard of Delta? And where, with vaccine take-up looking so stellar and the effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta proven, are the mountains of dead bodies meant to come from this time around? Moreover, even the patients who are in hospital are, on average, younger and less ill than in previous waves.
It's not even as if the positive noises are all coming from the lockdown sceptics. Far from it: the Chief Exec of NHS Providers has already come out and said that the link between cases and hospital admissions appears to have been broken. The Editor of the Health Service Journal stated tonight via Twitter that "Growth in Covid hospitalisation slowing sharply now. Actually falling in London [calculated on a week on week basis]." Even Professor Ferguson is sounding broadly optimistic about how things are going.
We can confidently expect that more people will be infected, more will end up in hospital and some more will even kick the bucket, but there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be another death tsunami, or that the hospitals will be swamped: the sole original justification for restrictions. So, then one has to consider whether or not the limited number of serious illnesses and deaths that will be prevented by months more of precautionary restrictions is worth the continuing sacrifice in terms of the non-Covid harms which are caused. It looks as if, unless something goes badly wrong in the next few weeks, the Government might actually decide that they aren't worth it, and scrap most of the restrictions. And if so, then why is this not something to be celebrated?
Covid is a serious matter, but life really shouldn't be lived around it for any longer than is strictly necessary.
So what are your estimates of those vital numbers?
It's all very well saying "things aren't as bad as they were because of vaccines", but the point is - if we let cases just carry on increasing by 30% or 40% a week without any attempt to control them - and perhaps remove such restrictions as are still in place next month - just what percentage of those cases do YOU think will end up in hospital, and what level of confidence do you have that it won't exceed the capacity of the NHS?
It can't be done by platitudes and handwaving.
How many will end up in hospital etc? In general, for any particular area, fewer than in the recent hotspots of Bolton and Greater Manchester. Most of us don’t see that as presenting an insurmountable problem.
How many do you think? You just keep saying “30%, 40%” week on week increase. But make no acknowledgement of the possibility of a ceiling on that rise.
I note there is still a complete absence of any kind of estimates of anything whatsoever from the "optimists", but still, I've given up expecting any substantive counter-arguments.
As far as the ceiling on further cases goes, IF all restrictions are removed, it will only stop when herd immunity is reached. Or rather, some distance beyond herd immunity, because a large wave of infection has something analogous to momentum that takes it well beyond the point where R=1.
That depends on the efficacy of vaccines, the number of people already infected, the transmissibility of the delta variant and so on and so forth. But the best answer I can give is that if we start from here, with only about 60% of the population fully vaccinated, I have trouble getting us to herd immunity, even on the most optimistic assumptions, without another 10-15 million infections.
You have been given the actual figures, which are totally out of line with your own extrapolations.
I assure you, I've followed the "actual figures" very closely indeed, and that is my best estimate based on the scientific data I've seen.
If you know better, by all means provide chapter and verse. But my strong impression is that you haven't got the slightest clue of what you're talking about.
Why should I, when they’ve been provided and all you’ve done is disagree with them without providing any reason for doing so other than ‘that can’t be right?’
And then demonstrated, embarrassingly amateurishly, that you don’t know how to form basic statistical groupings or deal with nuances of probability.
Your strong impression may well be that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, largely because you are demonstrating at every stage you don’t know what you’re doing so it’s understandable that you’re getting confused.
But I really don’t understand why you are showing so little grasp of statistics and yet so dogmatically standing on your flawed position. Are you a member of Indie Sage by any chance?
The bookies will piss themselves laughing if Germany go out. I reckon a lot of money went on them after the Portugal game.
If it gets very much wetter in Munich then they won't be playing football anymore, it'll be a water polo match. A Hungarian speciality, I seem to recall.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, can't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
No, not at all. Because the vaccines are constantly slicing the top element of risk away.
So yes the most vulnerable have had their doses, meaning they're not at risk of getting vaccinated. But the people who are getting vaccinated now are the now most vulnerable. That they're not especially vulnerable compared to 80 year olds isn't relevant - the comparison you need to make is how vulnerable they are compared to whoever will be left after they've been vaccinated.
So currently second doses are going to 40 year olds. 40 year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than 20 year olds, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
Currently first doses are going to 18+ year olds. 18+ year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than children, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
If you're constantly removing whatever is most risky remaining, the risk is constantly going down.
I wonder what planet anyone talking about UEFA officials is on.
Cases up 44% week-on-week, and deaths up 53%. So much for the link having been broken.
How many bloody times do we have to keep going through the same cycle before people learn better?
The last time the UK was at 15k cases a day deaths were at about 450 a day. What are they now?
You're saying the fatality rate has dropped by how much exactly?
You were comparing the rises of cases and deaths, I was comparing the absolute number. There are fewer deaths now than at the same point in the cycle last October.
So what are you saying the fatality rate is now?
So small that we can happily sail on towards a million cases a week, without even trying to do anything to limit the growth?
Indeed, that we can remove all limits on the spread of the virus altogether next month?
I think so, the virus seems to peak around 12% of tested - so 120k/day or thereabouts. One big push through to the peak of the SEIR curve.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
In particular, the people prioritised for vaccination had a massively higher death risk- from memory, it roughly doubles with each decade of age.
So let's say you vaccinate down to age 70 and then stop. There are still plenty of people who can catch Covid and get sick, but the death rate will have fallen by about 90%. Saying the case-death link is broken is pushing things a bit too far, but it's massively weaker.
It would be really interesting to add vaccination progress by age to @Malmesbury 's graph upthread.
Of course, against that if hospitals really are overwhelmed that causes the death rate to rise again among younger age groups - because people don’t get treated and die when they could have been saved.
But there is no sign whatsoever at the moment of Covid overwhelming hospitals. In fact, the figures demonstrate the opposite - that it is rising but being contained within capacity.
Am I missing something, or is it way too late to be making that threat?
That's like the UK saying "give us what we want, or we'll invoke article 50".
Not only that, but the EU can't make Pfizer vaccines without ingredients from the UK.
So, it's a completely retarded threat. If, indeed, it is really a threat at all.
The quotes are hilarious:
The dependence on imports could increase with the need for third doses to combat the Delta variant, Breton added, and “the people and perhaps the British government had not noticed that”.
“The United Kingdom depends more than ever on Europe.”
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
Your logic is completely flawed and wrong.
Cases, hospitalisations and deaths are dramatically reduced by doses given. You're wrong to think that doses given now don't have any impact, they will: double-dosing 40-somethings which is happening now means their risk of hospitalisation plummets; single-dosing 18-25 year olds which is happening now means their risk of getting the disease, spreading it, getting hospitalised or dying drops dramatically too.
Yes it drops from a lower level for both than what the elderly had, but they're dropping from what is the highest-risk remaining.
Our vaccines are constantly iterating to remove the communities biggest risks remaining. That style of iteration works and you're wrong to deny that it does.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, can't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
No, not at all. Because the vaccines are constantly slicing the top element of risk away.
So yes the most vulnerable have had their doses, meaning they're not at risk of getting vaccinated. But the people who are getting vaccinated now are the now most vulnerable. That they're not especially vulnerable compared to 80 year olds isn't relevant - the comparison you need to make is how vulnerable they are compared to whoever will be left after they've been vaccinated.
So currently second doses are going to 40 year olds. 40 year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than 20 year olds, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
Currently first doses are going to 18+ year olds. 18+ year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than children, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
If you're constantly removing whatever is most risky remaining, the risk is constantly going down.
Again, of course you can wave your arms and talk about the effect of the vaccines getting better and better, but if you look at the numbers, you'll see that the risk of death was overwhelmingly concentrated in the age groups that were doubly vaccinated some weeks ago - or refused vaccination months ago. And a large proportion of deaths are now among the doubly vaccinated and the unvaccinated. There is not going to be a lot more benefit to the hospitalisation and death rates from further vaccination.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities from the Delta variant had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
Except that we can have confidence that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will not simply continue to multiply out of control without lockdowns, as in previous waves, because sooner or later they'll run up against the barrier of the vaccinated population. Which was not a factor in those previous waves, of course.
If this is untrue then why has a runaway healthcare catastrophe not occurred in Bolton, Blackburn or the other localities in the vanguard of Delta? And where, with vaccine take-up looking so stellar and the effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta proven, are the mountains of dead bodies meant to come from this time around? Moreover, even the patients who are in hospital are, on average, younger and less ill than in previous waves.
It's not even as if the positive noises are all coming from the lockdown sceptics. Far from it: the Chief Exec of NHS Providers has already come out and said that the link between cases and hospital admissions appears to have been broken. The Editor of the Health Service Journal stated tonight via Twitter that "Growth in Covid hospitalisation slowing sharply now. Actually falling in London [calculated on a week on week basis]." Even Professor Ferguson is sounding broadly optimistic about how things are going.
We can confidently expect that more people will be infected, more will end up in hospital and some more will even kick the bucket, but there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be another death tsunami, or that the hospitals will be swamped: the sole original justification for restrictions. So, then one has to consider whether or not the limited number of serious illnesses and deaths that will be prevented by months more of precautionary restrictions is worth the continuing sacrifice in terms of the non-Covid harms which are caused. It looks as if, unless something goes badly wrong in the next few weeks, the Government might actually decide that they aren't worth it, and scrap most of the restrictions. And if so, then why is this not something to be celebrated?
Covid is a serious matter, but life really shouldn't be lived around it for any longer than is strictly necessary.
So what are your estimates of those vital numbers?
It's all very well saying "things aren't as bad as they were because of vaccines", but the point is - if we let cases just carry on increasing by 30% or 40% a week without any attempt to control them - and perhaps remove such restrictions as are still in place next month - just what percentage of those cases do YOU think will end up in hospital, and what level of confidence do you have that it won't exceed the capacity of the NHS?
It can't be done by platitudes and handwaving.
Cases were increasing at 70-80% per week a couple of weeks ago and the same self assured what ifs were being proposed by the smartest guy in the room.
83% of eligible adults have been given their first dose, that number is increasing by 2.5-3% per week. In less than three weeks the first dose programme is functionally complete, in less than 8 weeks the whole thing is done.
What do you propose we should do if cases are still rising at 30-40% at that point? Lockdown forever?
“ Seeing lots of unhelpful panic over today’s numbers. Obviously caution needed but most important marker is whether link between cases and moderate to severe disease being broken. This is a different wave than previous ones. We are in new territory.”
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
It's sad to think that they may have actually been infected while getting the second dose.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
Vaccines.
I don't think you've even tried to think about the question I asked.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
If the thousand cases occur after the hundred cases it will be proportionally less, because of vaccines.
But the 60% most vulnerable - or at least those who are willing to be vaccinated - have already had their two doses.
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, can't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
No, not at all. Because the vaccines are constantly slicing the top element of risk away.
So yes the most vulnerable have had their doses, meaning they're not at risk of getting vaccinated. But the people who are getting vaccinated now are the now most vulnerable. That they're not especially vulnerable compared to 80 year olds isn't relevant - the comparison you need to make is how vulnerable they are compared to whoever will be left after they've been vaccinated.
So currently second doses are going to 40 year olds. 40 year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than 20 year olds, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
Currently first doses are going to 18+ year olds. 18+ year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than children, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
If you're constantly removing whatever is most risky remaining, the risk is constantly going down.
Again, of course you can wave your arms and talk about the effect of the vaccines getting better and better, but if you look at the numbers, you'll see that the risk of death was overwhelmingly concentrated in the age groups that were doubly vaccinated some weeks ago - or refused vaccination months ago. And a large proportion of deaths are now among the doubly vaccinated and the unvaccinated. There is not going to be a lot more benefit to the hospitalisation and death rates from further vaccination.
It doesn't matter where the risk of death was.
It matters where the risk of death (or hospitalisation) is today.
Today the highest risk of hospitalisation is not the over 65s, it is 18-50s and every week the 18-50 age group is getting better vaccinated. Every week the risk of hospitalisation is coming down.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
Thanks @Chris - this is a sensible and thoughtful response. Albeit one that is wrong.
Firstly, where is your evidence that it has reduced the likelihood of hospitalisation by only half? If you look at the England numbers for new admissions they have barely grown at all. For 21 June, which is the latest date when admissions data is available, it is just 181. That's actually down week-over-week.
If you "lag" cases by seven days to see a hospitalisations as a percent of new cases, the line keeps heading down.
Would you like to guess where it is today, and where it was at the peak?
And as we continue to vaccinate the more vulnerable (and yes 30 year olds are an order of magnitude more vulnerable than 13 years olds), then you'd expect that trend to continue.
Secondly, the amount of time people seem to spend in hospital (which you can back out by dividing admissions by total in hospital at any time) also seems to be in decline. That's highly suggestive of hospitalised cases actually becoming less severe.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
It's sad to think that they may have actually been infected while getting the second dose.
It’s certainly a grim irony.
But what is the alternative? We can’t get full immunity without vaccines, and we can’t get the vaccines without risk.
The risk is small compared to the potential reward. Unfortunately, for some people it doesn’t come off.
But then the same is true of motorway driving. Or air travel. Should air travel have been banned following the Tenerife disaster?
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyond most of the people here.
Except that we can have confidence that cases, hospitalisations and deaths will not simply continue to multiply out of control without lockdowns, as in previous waves, because sooner or later they'll run up against the barrier of the vaccinated population. Which was not a factor in those previous waves, of course.
If this is untrue then why has a runaway healthcare catastrophe not occurred in Bolton, Blackburn or the other localities in the vanguard of Delta? And where, with vaccine take-up looking so stellar and the effectiveness of the vaccines against Delta proven, are the mountains of dead bodies meant to come from this time around? Moreover, even the patients who are in hospital are, on average, younger and less ill than in previous waves.
It's not even as if the positive noises are all coming from the lockdown sceptics. Far from it: the Chief Exec of NHS Providers has already come out and said that the link between cases and hospital admissions appears to have been broken. The Editor of the Health Service Journal stated tonight via Twitter that "Growth in Covid hospitalisation slowing sharply now. Actually falling in London [calculated on a week on week basis]." Even Professor Ferguson is sounding broadly optimistic about how things are going.
We can confidently expect that more people will be infected, more will end up in hospital and some more will even kick the bucket, but there is no particular reason to suppose that there will be another death tsunami, or that the hospitals will be swamped: the sole original justification for restrictions. So, then one has to consider whether or not the limited number of serious illnesses and deaths that will be prevented by months more of precautionary restrictions is worth the continuing sacrifice in terms of the non-Covid harms which are caused. It looks as if, unless something goes badly wrong in the next few weeks, the Government might actually decide that they aren't worth it, and scrap most of the restrictions. And if so, then why is this not something to be celebrated?
Covid is a serious matter, but life really shouldn't be lived around it for any longer than is strictly necessary.
So what are your estimates of those vital numbers?
It's all very well saying "things aren't as bad as they were because of vaccines", but the point is - if we let cases just carry on increasing by 30% or 40% a week without any attempt to control them - and perhaps remove such restrictions as are still in place next month - just what percentage of those cases do YOU think will end up in hospital, and what level of confidence do you have that it won't exceed the capacity of the NHS?
It can't be done by platitudes and handwaving.
How many will end up in hospital etc? In general, for any particular area, fewer than in the recent hotspots of Bolton and Greater Manchester. Most of us don’t see that as presenting an insurmountable problem.
How many do you think? You just keep saying “30%, 40%” week on week increase. But make no acknowledgement of the possibility of a ceiling on that rise.
I note there is still a complete absence of any kind of estimates of anything whatsoever from the "optimists", but still, I've given up expecting any substantive counter-arguments.
As far as the ceiling on further cases goes, IF all restrictions are removed, it will only stop when herd immunity is reached. Or rather, some distance beyond herd immunity, because a large wave of infection has something analogous to momentum that takes it well beyond the point where R=1.
That depends on the efficacy of vaccines, the number of people already infected, the transmissibility of the delta variant and so on and so forth. But the best answer I can give is that if we start from here, with only about 60% of the population fully vaccinated, I have trouble getting us to herd immunity, even on the most optimistic assumptions, without another 10-15 million infections.
I mean the football is on and it's the end of the day, my laptop is off and won't be turned on until tomorrow at half 8.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
It's sad to think that they may have actually been infected while getting the second dose.
It’s certainly a grim irony.
But what is the alternative? We can’t get full immunity without vaccines, and we can’t get the vaccines without risk.
The risk is small compared to the potential reward. Unfortunately, for some people it doesn’t come off.
But then the same is true of motorway driving. Or air travel. Should air travel have been banned following the Tenerife disaster?
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
It's sad to think that they may have actually been infected while getting the second dose.
When Israel started its vaccinations they found that people were more likely to be infected the week they got vaccinated than if they were unvaccinated.
Either they were getting infected while being vaccinated, or they were reacting to being vaccinated by taking risks they would have avoided without realising the vaccine hadn't started working yet.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
The only way out long term is through herd immunity. Do you propose the death of the night time economy forever ?
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
It's sad to think that they may have actually been infected while getting the second dose.
I am surprised we haven't had a story of a mass spreading event at a vaccine centre.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
Thanks @Chris - this is a sensible and thoughtful response. Albeit one that is wrong.
Firstly, where is your evidence that it has reduced the likelihood of hospitalisation by only half? If you look at the England numbers for new admissions they have barely grown at all. For 21 June, which is the latest date when admissions data is available, it is just 181. That's actually down week-over-week.
If you "lag" cases by seven days to see a hospitalisations as a percent of new cases, the line keeps heading down.
Would you like to guess where it is today, and where it was at the peak?
And as we continue to vaccinate the more vulnerable (and yes 30 year olds are an order of magnitude more vulnerable than 13 years olds), then you'd expect that trend to continue.
Secondly, the amount of time people seem to spend in hospital (which you can back out by dividing admissions by total in hospital at any time) also seems to be in decline. That's highly suggestive of hospitalised cases actually becoming less severe.
Additionally that third of deaths in the double vaxxed is a seriously dishonest sleight of hand given that unvaccinated groups are all younger who have a significantly lower CFR. Adjusted for age and underlying conditions that tiny number indicates efficacy against death of well over 99% for double vaxxed people.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
That is a very foolish misquotation of a PHE study published just over a fortnight ago and deliberately falsified by Deepti Gurdasani.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
It's sad to think that they may have actually been infected while getting the second dose.
When Israel started its vaccinations they found that people were more likely to be infected the week they got vaccinated than if they were unvaccinated.
Either they were getting infected while being vaccinated, or they were reacting to being vaccinated by taking risks they would have avoided without realising the vaccine hadn't started working yet.
At no point during my two doses did anybody mention about 3wk/2wk period before you really have the effect from the vaccination.
Repeated information about possible side effects and what to do, but no mention (or signage) about time to build protection.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
Thanks @Chris - this is a sensible and thoughtful response. Albeit one that is wrong.
Firstly, where is your evidence that it has reduced the likelihood of hospitalisation by only half? If you look at the England numbers for new admissions they have barely grown at all. For 21 June, which is the latest date when admissions data is available, it is just 181. That's actually down week-over-week.
If you "lag" cases by seven days to see a hospitalisations as a percent of new cases, the line keeps heading down.
Would you like to guess where it is today, and where it was at the peak?
And as we continue to vaccinate the more vulnerable (and yes 30 year olds are an order of magnitude more vulnerable than 13 years olds), then you'd expect that trend to continue.
Secondly, the amount of time people seem to spend in hospital (which you can back out by dividing admissions by total in hospital at any time) also seems to be in decline. That's highly suggestive of hospitalised cases actually becoming less severe.
The ratio of hospitalisations to cases keeps going down every single week and it will continue to do so for as long as the vaccine rollout continues. Because every single week we're vaccinating those who are currently the most vulnerable.
You've spoken before many a time about the benefits of iteration in a process. The JCVI's vaccine rollout program is a fantastic example of iteration at its best. Every week we vaccinate the most vulnerable. As time goes on the most vulnerable is getting younger and younger, but its still every week the most vulnerable being done.
I'm in my thirties and getting my second dose on Saturday. Over 40s will be just about done by then meaning thirty-somethings like myself and many others on the site will be the highest risk remaining needing their second.
Do you think the fatality rate is unchanged or something?
Why on earth should you think something so stupid?
Incomprehensible.
I'm not sure where you are coming from then. What's your beef about the claim that there are fewer deaths now than there were in October?
Where on earth did you get such a stupid idea as that?
I really cannot fathom the level of confusion.
What I am pointing out is simply that both cases and deaths are rising at roughly the same rate. The link has not been broken. It's just that the constant of proportionality has changed.
That means that we cannot simply let cases rip and witter on about "50% of nothing being nothing".
It is so simple, and yet it seems completely beyong most of the people here.
But the absolute numbers are much better, suggesting that the vaccines are successfully reducing the chance of someone dying from it. Isn't that the link that was supposed to be broken?
Look.
The rate of hospitalisation per infection has maybe halved.
That is reducing the rate of hospitalisation per infection. It is not "breaking the link" between infection and hospitalisation. If one doubles, the other still doubles. If one increases exponentially, the other still increases exponentially.
If you want to argue that the rate of infection doesn't matter any more, you need to estimate how high infections are going to go, and you need to estimate what proportion of infections are going to lead to hospitalisations, and then you need to check that is manageable.
None of which is done by any of you people. All we have is an endless barrage of mindless mantras and straw man misrepresentations, ranging from "Vaccines will make it all OK", through "Oh so you want to keep us in lockdown for ever", to "Oh so you don't think the rate of hospitalisation has dropped at all".
I make no apology whatsoever for characterising the standard of debate here as absolutely moronic!
Look, you shouldn't do yourself down. You're a valuable member of the community, and you should have more confidence in your intellectual abilities.
That being said, the number of people in hospital with Covid is growing dramatically less quickly than the number of people being diagnosed with Covid.
In the past three weeks, the number of people being diagnosed with Covid has risen from around, 1,800 to 16,000 today. That's a roughly ten-fold increase.
By contrast, the number in hospital hasn't even doubled: it's gone from a low of 750 in England to 1,255. Furthermore the increase in "in hospital" numbers has slowed to its lowest rate in ten days.
Now it's entirely possible that reverses, and we see a dramatic increase. But right now, the number in hospital is growing at around one fifth the rate of the number of Covid cases.
You think the probability of a particular COVID-19 case ending in hospitalisation is somehow inversely proportional to the total number of COVID-19 cases in the country?
I think if you're putting your faith in such a remarkable proposition as that, you should at least have some kind of idea why the normal laws of statistics don't apply to COVID-19 cases.
Do you?
I didn't say that the hospitalisation rate was inversely related, I said the number is hospital was growing dramatically slower.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
The flaw is simply this.
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
Thanks @Chris - this is a sensible and thoughtful response. Albeit one that is wrong.
Firstly, where is your evidence that it has reduced the likelihood of hospitalisation by only half? If you look at the England numbers for new admissions they have barely grown at all. For 21 June, which is the latest date when admissions data is available, it is just 181. That's actually down week-over-week.
If you "lag" cases by seven days to see a hospitalisations as a percent of new cases, the line keeps heading down.
Would you like to guess where it is today, and where it was at the peak?
And as we continue to vaccinate the more vulnerable (and yes 30 year olds are an order of magnitude more vulnerable than 13 years olds), then you'd expect that trend to continue.
Secondly, the amount of time people seem to spend in hospital (which you can back out by dividing admissions by total in hospital at any time) also seems to be in decline. That's highly suggestive of hospitalised cases actually becoming less severe.
The ratio of hospitalisations to cases keeps going down every single week and it will continue to do so for as long as the vaccine rollout continues. Because every single week we're vaccinating those who are currently the most vulnerable.
You've spoken before many a time about the benefits of iteration in a process. The JCVI's vaccine rollout program is a fantastic example of iteration at its best. Every week we vaccinate the most vulnerable. As time goes on the most vulnerable is getting younger and younger, but its still every week the most vulnerable being done.
I'm in my thirties and getting my second dose on Saturday. Over 40s will be just about done by then meaning thirty-somethings like myself and many others on the site will be the highest risk remaining needing their second.
Huh. Lucky git
I need to try and rebook mine. But I don’t really want to get vaccinated until the start of the holidays now. I’m just too fecking busy to take time off at the moment in the event of a bad reaction.
Especially since trying to sort out some of the confusion and mess fromhe last year and a half has left me with actually more teaching than I had before 11 and 13 left - and goodness knows I had a full enough timetable then.
Comments
France and Hungary win and we might as well start planning for the semi final now!
As far as the ceiling on further cases goes, IF all restrictions are removed, it will only stop when herd immunity is reached. Or rather, some distance beyond herd immunity, because a large wave of infection has something analogous to momentum that takes it well beyond the point where R=1.
That depends on the efficacy of vaccines, the number of people already infected, the transmissibility of the delta variant and so on and so forth. But the best answer I can give is that if we start from here, with only about 60% of the population fully vaccinated, I have trouble getting us to herd immunity, even on the most optimistic assumptions, without another 10-15 million infections.
But at no point should anybody be allowed to argue that, in effect, the restrictions should be seen as the status quo that requires opponents to make the case for their removal. The case for their removal is simple. They are temporary emergency restrictions. That is all that is needed. Anything else is only needed as a counter argument after a serious prima facie case is put for their continuation.
3% of them end up in hospital based on current trends - that's probably a significant overestimate as not all who catch Covid are tested, and a large chunk of those lacking immunity are school aged children who rarely end up hospitalised, but let's go with it - that is 9m x 3% = 270,000 people, over presumably about 4-5 months. Admissions of 2,000 - 2,500 a day or thereabouts? Deaths wise, if CFR is the original 1% then it's another 90,000 deaths. If it's 0.1% then 9,000 deaths. And so on.
Things that would then weigh down on deaths and hospitalisations would include continued vaccination and self-induced shielding behaviour.
If a zombie variant arrives with full vaccine escape and higher CFR then obviously all bets are off, but that's kind of irrelevant to the current debate which is about unlocking under the Delta variant.
You have not yet falsified them.
When there are statistics, and there are extrapolations, and the two do not match, the burden of proof is on those claiming the extrapolations are more accurate to prove their case.
As it happens, the historical extrapolations are clearly not going to work because vaccines have completely changed the equations. So I’m not quite clear why you’re still continuing to push them.
It is however in its own way encouraging that we have pro-lockdown zealots as well as anti (and pseudo-anti, in the case of Contrariran). It shows the board can attract people from both extremes.
And it reassures the rest of us in the middle that we’re probably on the right track.
A hundred people catch COVID-19, and three of them end up in hospital.
If a thousand people catch COVID-19, how many would you expect to end up in hospital? The normal laws of statistics say 30.
"No because vaccines" isn't much of a counter-argument.
The vulnerable have been double vaccinated, so barring any antivaxxers (who can live or die with the consequences of their own choices) the remaining 15% or so are from the miniscule risk category.
0.1% CFR would be overly conservative from here, it would be lower than that.
https://twitter.com/indiespiritbath/status/1406182904397504512?s=20
Any further benefit beyond this point is going to be relatively marginal.
So essentially, hospitalisations can be expected to be proportional to cases, can't they?
Unfortunately, I get the impression that people don't believe that, and that that kind of wishful thinking is what their optimism is based on.
If of the 1000 people the 450 of the 500 most vulnerable are vaccinated, considerably reducing the severity of the symptoms, that totally alters the equation. At that point you would expect not 30, but around seven or eight.
And if of your sample there are not 1000 possible hosts because of vaccines, then the equation alters again.
You are the one who is showing a lack of grasp of basic statistics here.
Once everyone who is going to get vaccinated has been the first justification disappears. Once sufficient numbers of vaccines distributed means the NHS won’t be overwhelmed, so does the second.
England v france next?
If you know better, by all means provide chapter and verse. But my strong impression is that you haven't got the slightest clue of what you're talking about.
My point, which is not a particularly controversial one, is that the number in hospital is growing less quickly than the number of cases.
You agree, right?
Every day the number of people double vaccinated rises.
This means that the number of people for whom hospitalisation is likely falls.
I don't think this should be controversial, either. The more vaccinated people there are, the fewer hosts for the virus there are.
In other words, so long as the number in hospital is growing relatively slowly (as currently), then the virus will run out of potential hosts before hospitals get anywhere near overwhelmed.
Let's do some maths.
Current week-over-week growth in "in hospital" is 19%. But let's go with 25% shall we. Let's assume that every week the number in hospital increases by that. That means that by the end of August, we're at 12,000 people in hospital. Which would be a lot.
But by the end of August, we'll also have everyone who wants to be double jabbed, double jabbed, and with fast acting mRNA vaccines too.
These are my assumptions. What are yours? What's the flaw in my reasoning?
Look if I can do it so can the rest of you.
So let's say you vaccinate down to age 70 and then stop. There are still plenty of people who can catch Covid and get sick, but the death rate will have fallen by about 90%. Saying the case-death link is broken is pushing things a bit too far, but it's massively weaker.
It would be really interesting to add vaccination progress by age to @Malmesbury 's graph upthread.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/comply-with-brexit-deal-or-well-block-vaccines-eu-commissioner-thierry-breton-suggests-282q25fvh
And then demonstrated, embarrassingly amateurishly, that you don’t know how to form basic statistical groupings or deal with nuances of probability.
Your strong impression may well be that I don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, largely because you are demonstrating at every stage you don’t know what you’re doing so it’s understandable that you’re getting confused.
But I really don’t understand why you are showing so little grasp of statistics and yet so dogmatically standing on your flawed position. Are you a member of Indie Sage by any chance?
So yes the most vulnerable have had their doses, meaning they're not at risk of getting vaccinated. But the people who are getting vaccinated now are the now most vulnerable. That they're not especially vulnerable compared to 80 year olds isn't relevant - the comparison you need to make is how vulnerable they are compared to whoever will be left after they've been vaccinated.
So currently second doses are going to 40 year olds. 40 year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than 20 year olds, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
Currently first doses are going to 18+ year olds. 18+ year olds are more likely to be hospitalised than children, so once they're done the risk goes down considerably.
If you're constantly removing whatever is most risky remaining, the risk is constantly going down.
blow the bloody doors offnot lose to Portugal.That's like the UK saying "give us what we want, or we'll invoke article 50".
But there is no sign whatsoever at the moment of Covid overwhelming hospitals. In fact, the figures demonstrate the opposite - that it is rising but being contained within capacity.
I mean last week they kept out the Germans for 90 minutes which is a new record for France.
So, it's a completely retarded threat. If, indeed, it is really a threat at all.
The dependence on imports could increase with the need for third doses to combat the Delta variant, Breton added, and “the people and perhaps the British government had not noticed that”.
“The United Kingdom depends more than ever on Europe.”
Vaccination has decreased the percentage of cases that result in hospitalisation. By something like a factor of two. But as 60% of the most vulnerable have already been double vaccinated, it will not fall much further. (Remember that 30%+ of deaths are still among the doubly vaccinated, and a large proportion of the others are among the vulnerable who have refused vaccination.)
For that reason, hospitalisations will not carry on growing at 19% a week or 25% a week or whatever (and I suspect that low figure is more to do with the time lag behind cases than the increase in vaccinations in the last few weeks). They will grow at pretty much whatever rate cases grow at.
That is my whole point. If it takes 20% more of the population to be infected before we get to herd immunity, then the best estimate for the number of hospitalisations and deaths is going to be based on the current rates of hospitalisations and deaths per case, not an extrapolation of the hospitalisation and death rates of the last few weeks.
I was at the Etihad when he refereed the City v. Liverpool 2018 CL QF 2nd leg.
He sent off Pep Fraudiola and we won. Love him.
Cases, hospitalisations and deaths are dramatically reduced by doses given. You're wrong to think that doses given now don't have any impact, they will: double-dosing 40-somethings which is happening now means their risk of hospitalisation plummets; single-dosing 18-25 year olds which is happening now means their risk of getting the disease, spreading it, getting hospitalised or dying drops dramatically too.
Yes it drops from a lower level for both than what the elderly had, but they're dropping from what is the highest-risk remaining.
Our vaccines are constantly iterating to remove the communities biggest risks remaining. That style of iteration works and you're wrong to deny that it does.
The actual figure was 12 out of 42 fatalities from the Delta variant had had their second dose more than a fortnight before dying.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the issues raised by the small sample size, I think you will find if you do some of this funny stuff we call ‘arithmetic’ that the actual rate is 28.6% not ‘30%+’.
The issue is that it appears vaccines take slightly longer to build full immunity against Delta. And if you would think carefully, you would note that ‘death’ occurring two weeks after vaccination doesn’t mean infection happened then.
83% of eligible adults have been given their first dose, that number is increasing by 2.5-3% per week. In less than three weeks the first dose programme is functionally complete, in less than 8 weeks the whole thing is done.
What do you propose we should do if cases are still rising at 30-40% at that point? Lockdown forever?
https://mobile.twitter.com/devisridhar/status/1407716978362564616
“ Seeing lots of unhelpful panic over today’s numbers. Obviously caution needed but most important marker is whether link between cases and moderate to severe disease being broken. This is a different wave than previous ones. We are in new territory.”
It matters where the risk of death (or hospitalisation) is today.
Today the highest risk of hospitalisation is not the over 65s, it is 18-50s and every week the 18-50 age group is getting better vaccinated. Every week the risk of hospitalisation is coming down.
Firstly, where is your evidence that it has reduced the likelihood of hospitalisation by only half? If you look at the England numbers for new admissions they have barely grown at all. For 21 June, which is the latest date when admissions data is available, it is just 181. That's actually down week-over-week.
If you "lag" cases by seven days to see a hospitalisations as a percent of new cases, the line keeps heading down.
Would you like to guess where it is today, and where it was at the peak?
And as we continue to vaccinate the more vulnerable (and yes 30 year olds are an order of magnitude more vulnerable than 13 years olds), then you'd expect that trend to continue.
Secondly, the amount of time people seem to spend in hospital (which you can back out by dividing admissions by total in hospital at any time) also seems to be in decline. That's highly suggestive of hospitalised cases actually becoming less severe.
But what is the alternative? We can’t get full immunity without vaccines, and we can’t get the vaccines without risk.
The risk is small compared to the potential reward. Unfortunately, for some people it doesn’t come off.
But then the same is true of motorway driving. Or air travel. Should air travel have been banned following the Tenerife disaster?
Either they were getting infected while being vaccinated, or they were reacting to being vaccinated by taking risks they would have avoided without realising the vaccine hadn't started working yet.
Repeated information about possible side effects and what to do, but no mention (or signage) about time to build protection.
You've spoken before many a time about the benefits of iteration in a process. The JCVI's vaccine rollout program is a fantastic example of iteration at its best. Every week we vaccinate the most vulnerable. As time goes on the most vulnerable is getting younger and younger, but its still every week the most vulnerable being done.
I'm in my thirties and getting my second dose on Saturday. Over 40s will be just about done by then meaning thirty-somethings like myself and many others on the site will be the highest risk remaining needing their second.
I need to try and rebook mine. But I don’t really want to get vaccinated until the start of the holidays now. I’m just too fecking busy to take time off at the moment in the event of a bad reaction.
Especially since trying to sort out some of the confusion and mess fromhe last year and a half has left me with actually more teaching than I had before 11 and 13 left - and goodness knows I had a full enough timetable then.
Anyway, on that cheering thought, goodnight.
England really dominating.
Bring it on!