UK COVID data, week starting 16th January
Cheer up my brother, live in the sunshine
Not a long one this week, because there isn’t a huge amount to talk about and I’m extremely busy with other things. TLDR: all looking good.
ZOE has continued to fall in spectacular fashion this week. I mentioned that the estimated incidence figure on Wednesday last week was 170k. Well, a week later the figure was 105k. That’s down 38% in a single week. In fact, the latest (Thursday) figure is 95k - down 64% from its New Year peak of about 263k. It’s not been this low for a long time.
The XBB.1.5 variant continues to grow in share, but the rate of increase seems to have slowed down. That’s good! It was doubling roughly weekly in market share, which as described in our explainer would lead to a straight line on logistic (no, this is not a typo) axes. Well, the curve in question definitely seems to be flattening:
(I put confidence intervals on the last five points, just to indicate the randomness associated with different sample sizes - the last point is quite uncertain, but the previous one less so). As a result, any forecasts for impending doom can probably be put back later in time and scaled back in size compared to what we maybe thought two weeks ago (or as the man put it “In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die”).
Hospital admissions are also falling fast.
4. As are dashboard cases .. (like a stone)
5. And also a big drop on the ONS
