(9am 9/3/23) Well, Numbercrunch is out there now. I’m very happy to see people sharing photos and telling me about how they are finding it - do please leave reviews and ratings on Amazon or Goodreads though! Hopefully there’ll be a few more Numbercrunch things in the media soon - but for now here’s a video of the interview I did on GB News last week.
COVID-wise, it’s another relatively quiet week, with nothing changing very much. To be honest, as I’ve been saying for a while, until and unless we see a big jump into a different area of the variant space, my feeling is that this is just how things may be now. For what it’s worth, Eric Topol’s Substack more or less says the same this week from a US point of view.
It’s getting harder to think how further mutations added on to Omicron will pose a major threat, given how the population immunity wall that has been progressively built over 3 years—from infections, vaccination, boosters and their combinations— seems capable of fending off major waves vs this family of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
UK data wise, ZOE is trending down still, the variant percentages are fairly stable (XBB.1.5 continues to grow in share and is probably now just over 50%, but isn’t growing fast enough to cause huge damage, compared with previous omicron waves).
Last week saw the first fall in admissions for a few weeks, which was always welcome. However, there has been somewhat of a rebound in the latest numbers ..
with the blue line climbing back over 1 (into growth), and back into the “slightly slower than 4 weekly doubling” territory we were in previously. I guess it’s possible this dip was some kind of half-term effect, but of course there may be other explanations.
(Midday 10/3/23) You can see a similar picture with a return towards growth in the case numbers
The ONS (RIP) is showing a distinct flattening (though this is “week ending 28th February”, so not as up-to-date as the other measures).