UK COVID data, week starting 2nd January
Train kept a-rolling all night long
(8.45am 5/1/23) Happy New Year - hope you all had a restful break! It seems like COVID is back on the menu again, mainly due to speculation about the XBB.1.5 variant which has reached a significant proportion of cases in the USA (see also the Guardian explainer).
This variant is also growing in the UK, but in much smaller absolute numbers so with bigger uncertainty about its growth rate. But broadly speaking, it represented 4% or so of sequenced cases at the end of the year, so if it doubled in relative share weekly (which is the rough territory it is in at the moment - a similar growth advantage to the BA.5 variant which caused the June/July 2022 wave) then in around 3 weeks it might well hit a big enough share to be influencing the admissions curve.
So I don’t think it’s nothing. It’s certainly more tangible to my mind than the currently speculative possibility of variant threats from China. But as I said here, I don’t think it’s worth being too panicked about XBB.1.5 if this new variant remains in the post-vaccination omicron-type severity levels we’ve seen for a year now:
And as I said in a thread here I certainly wouldn’t get hung up on ZOE local estimates, which seem to have significant local spikes which don’t feed into admissions. (So it seems to me that either these big spikes are ZOE artefacts, or they don’t matter as much as you might think).
In any case, it feels far too early to see an XBB.1.5 wave, even locally. On the other hand, national ZOE still seems faintly useful as a guide to trends, and it’s worth noticing that their estimate of daily incidence is now down to 217k, from a peak of around 263k (so about 18% below the peak value).
Anyway, onto hospital admissions. We did get data last week, but I didn’t bother Substacking it because of the Christmas effect. Even now, there are all kinds of Christmas effects (some days heavier and lighter than you’d expect because of admissions getting pulled back and forward, and hence some admissions ratios larger and smaller), so worth taking with a small pinch of salt.
But bearing, all that in mind, it’s certainly clear that admissions are no longer growing exponentially as they were in December. In fact, I think it’s possible to be fairly confident they have peaked, as I suggested they might.
Here are the admissions ratios, which tell the same story another way.
So overall, I think we can be optimistic for a couple of weeks of decline at least before XBB.1.5 starts to take effect.
(6.15pm 5/1/23) After a two-week gap, the dashboard shows that cases are falling (though care here too with Christmas reporting and measuring effects
And lest I be accused of spreading too much hopium, here are the latest figures for severe Long COVID, which show a modest rise (not as large as the Russian roulette model I’ve written about before might suggest, but a rise nonetheless). I think this dates back to new infections from the September and October wave, so perhaps we will see a fall in next month’s data.
(Midday 6/1/23) ONS showing a big rise (more or less doubling!) but it’s worth bearing in mind the timings of all this - this more or less all refers to growth before Christmas.
Additionally there is a roughly 3 week period over which this growth has happened, so the caveats I mentioned in the thread here
are even more relevant than I thought they would be!