UK COVID data, week starting 12th December

(8.30am 15/12/22) This week I was really excited to get the first proof copies of my book. Although it’s not published until March, that’s starting to feel really close now, and I can’t wait for more people to be able to read it. As well as giving my final lectures of the calendar year, I also wrote about the German tank problem on an earlier Substack post.

Anyway, as I’ve been banging on here and on Twitter for a few weeks, we are now into a phase of growth of COVID numbers. This is happening across various places, for example in France, and is likely caused by a few more spreadable variants (BQ.1.1 and CH.1.1 for example) displacing less spreadable ones in the mix, as well as socialising in the general run-up to Christmas. It’s important to emphasise that this growth is slow compared with December 2020 and 2021 though.

Oliver Johnson @BristOliver

This is probably stating the extremely obvious, but just in case, I thought it was worth saying why although we have returned to modest COVID growth (see bristoliver.substack.com/p/uk-covid-dat… for collated graphs) it is very likely nothing like the last two Decembers.

bristoliver.substack.comUK COVID data, week starting 28th November 2022Down the gutter in the drain, Back to wherever they came

However, growth it is. ZOE, which last week was on 174k incidence is now on 219k, or up about 26% in a week. And after a week of slower growth last week, we can see a much more significant increase in the admissions numbers. The seven day average is now up to exactly 750. Still lower than even previous omicron peaks, but also with potential to grow for the next couple of weeks at least until Christmas closures kick in.

From the blue line, you can see that we are now in the 2-4 week doubling territory, confirming the fact that growth was faster this week.

(4pm 15/12/22) Case data now released via the penultimate dashboard of the year. Again, compared with this time last year when Omicron BA.1 was starting to show its hand in case numbers (particularly in London) it seems relatively tame. I feel like I’m running out of ways to say “it is going up, but not hugely fast”. Overall, growth is about 20% per week, or about four week doubling.

And also via the dashboard, there’s a nice visualisation of what’s been causing this, as the BQ.1 family (red) have grown in prominence lately. Incidentally you can see how the September/October wave was the odd one out in not being associated with a particular new variant sweeping to prominence.

(Midday, 16/12/22) Just for completeness, here’s ONS, which similarly is going up but not as fast as previous omicron waves.