UK COVID data, week starting 20th February
I’m on waves, out being tossed
(9am 23/2/23) I’m definitely into the final countdown to the publication of Numbercrunch. I’ve posted an extract from the audiobook, am working my way through the list of chapters telling you more about them, and am very excited by how good the finished product looks!
But in the meantime, things continue in COVID land. The XBB.1.5 share is continuing to gradually increase, but not as fast as previous waves. There are some other variants that are perhaps worth keeping an eye on, but there’s nothing I’ve noticed that is particularly in the dangerous quadrant of “here in large numbers and growing fast”. However, XBB.1.5. is still growing in share, and still spreading.
There’s also been a certain amount of excitement this week about the ONS data showing that vaccines continue to offer protection from death. To be honest, I wasn’t particularly surprised by this. It’s nice to see that vaccination isn’t associated with a spike in all-causes death, but my sense is that it was only a very fringe minority that ever believed that it might be, and I’m not sure those peoples’ minds will be changed by anything at this stage! Nonetheless, it’s still an important contribution and the raw data has led to some nice graphs.
In terms of the latest COVID data itself, I’m still nervous about ZOE after their recent retcon of the data, but it’s nice to see that (if anything) their daily incidence estimates have been heading downwards over the last week, and are still below 100k.
However, the latest hospital data continues to show that admissions are still rising. The average is now just under 900 (was 800 last week). It’s a way off even the levels of recent omicron peaks still, but it’s just starting to get towards the level where we’ve seen problems with NHS services before.
And overall, there are fluctuations, but admissions are still in the “slightly slower than 4 week doubling” range. It would definitely be nice to see a slowdown in next week’s data!
Indeed the last three points show only very slow week on week growth (between 1 and 5%) but it’s probably too early to start calling that a trend, though we can always hope!
(7.15pm 23/2/23) Case ratios are also showing somewhat stubborn growth, and the blue line moving towards 1 last week turns out to have been a bit of a false dawn.
(Midday 24/2/23) As you’d probably expect, the ONS also shows a fairly consistent rate of increase:
