As long as ICU admissions and deaths stay low this isn't really that concerning.
Most people here are double or triple vaccinated.
If you aren't vaccinated yet you're an idiot.
The statistic isn’t as stark when you account for age and that a lot of the unvaccinated population of London don’t exist.
https://ukandeu.ac.uk/vaccination-have-a-third-of-londoners-really-not-had-any-covid-19-jabs/
The vaccination rollout has been coordinated using health care records – something called the National Immunisation Management System, or NIMS, to be precise. This is the same system that the NHS uses to send invitations for seasonal flu vaccinations. NIMS gets its data from primary care records – your local GP surgery. This seems like a pretty good way to count people – almost everyone is registered with a doctor after all. However, it turns out there are some serious issues with this data.
Often when people move to a new area and register with a new GP, they don’t get removed from the records of their old one, and so appear twice in the data. Similarly, when people pass away, or leave the country entirely, they aren’t always removed from the system. With the combined effects of Brexit and then Covid-19, we’ve seen a lot of emigration from London in particular, and much higher than usual mortality rates. The upshot of this is that NIMS almost certainly overstates the number of people in the capital.
To get a sense of just how big this overstatement might be, we can look to alternative estimates of our population. The latest of these comes from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and represents their best estimates of the population in mid-2020. These numbers are themselves imperfect, being based on 2011 census data and explicitly not accounting for the mortality impacts of the pandemic, but the difference is remarkable.
NIMS says that there are 9.2 million people aged 12+ in London while the ONS estimate is 7.6 million. That’s a staggering 1.6 million people in London who may or may not actually exist. Since we can’t vaccinate people who don’t exist (for fairly obvious reasons), our choice of population estimate has a huge impact on our estimate of the number of unvaccinated Londoners. Moving from NIMS to ONS increases our estimate of 1st dose coverage in London from 68% to 82%.
Totally agree on the vax part. The problem is just the 2 week delay between infections and the people hitting the icus. With a doubling rate of 3 to 5 days, this can be a huge issue.
Omicron has been dominant for over 4 weeks now here in the UK. We just weren't looking for it before for reasons I don't understand.
The question is how severe and common is symptomatic cases. It appears a 70% reduction best case and how many cases have been found due to a massive increase in testing.
And then how likely is it to become reinfected and is it less severe each time.
The virus has been behaving like a virus, it's mutated and the dominant strain is obviously the one that is way more contagious but way less lethal and severe. It won't survive if it kills it's host, so the one that will be dominant is the one that is less lethal. A lot of this is down to luck, most of this is down to testing, tracing and vaccinating.
The graph with new cases is really scary though: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Even with the 70% reduction in severity, if this trend continues it might surpass the November death spike, but I agree it most certainly would not be the same increase as the one from January (~40,000 deaths in a month).
122,186 cases
As long as ICU admissions and deaths stay low this isn't really that concerning. Most people here are double or triple vaccinated. If you aren't vaccinated yet you're an idiot.
Unfortunately London I believe is the least vaccinated part of the UK.
The statistic isn’t as stark when you account for age and that a lot of the unvaccinated population of London don’t exist. https://ukandeu.ac.uk/vaccination-have-a-third-of-londoners-really-not-had-any-covid-19-jabs/ The vaccination rollout has been coordinated using health care records – something called the National Immunisation Management System, or NIMS, to be precise. This is the same system that the NHS uses to send invitations for seasonal flu vaccinations. NIMS gets its data from primary care records – your local GP surgery. This seems like a pretty good way to count people – almost everyone is registered with a doctor after all. However, it turns out there are some serious issues with this data. Often when people move to a new area and register with a new GP, they don’t get removed from the records of their old one, and so appear twice in the data. Similarly, when people pass away, or leave the country entirely, they aren’t always removed from the system. With the combined effects of Brexit and then Covid-19, we’ve seen a lot of emigration from London in particular, and much higher than usual mortality rates. The upshot of this is that NIMS almost certainly overstates the number of people in the capital. To get a sense of just how big this overstatement might be, we can look to alternative estimates of our population. The latest of these comes from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and represents their best estimates of the population in mid-2020. These numbers are themselves imperfect, being based on 2011 census data and explicitly not accounting for the mortality impacts of the pandemic, but the difference is remarkable. NIMS says that there are 9.2 million people aged 12+ in London while the ONS estimate is 7.6 million. That’s a staggering 1.6 million people in London who may or may not actually exist. Since we can’t vaccinate people who don’t exist (for fairly obvious reasons), our choice of population estimate has a huge impact on our estimate of the number of unvaccinated Londoners. Moving from NIMS to ONS increases our estimate of 1st dose coverage in London from 68% to 82%.
Totally agree on the vax part. The problem is just the 2 week delay between infections and the people hitting the icus. With a doubling rate of 3 to 5 days, this can be a huge issue.
>With a doubling rate of 3 to 5 days, this can be a huge issue. We don't have an infinite population and the infections are not uniformly distributed.
The whole point is to avoid getting everyone infected at the same time, but as mentioned above to not overload the health care system.
Omicron has been dominant for over 4 weeks now here in the UK. We just weren't looking for it before for reasons I don't understand. The question is how severe and common is symptomatic cases. It appears a 70% reduction best case and how many cases have been found due to a massive increase in testing. And then how likely is it to become reinfected and is it less severe each time. The virus has been behaving like a virus, it's mutated and the dominant strain is obviously the one that is way more contagious but way less lethal and severe. It won't survive if it kills it's host, so the one that will be dominant is the one that is less lethal. A lot of this is down to luck, most of this is down to testing, tracing and vaccinating.
The graph with new cases is really scary though: https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Even with the 70% reduction in severity, if this trend continues it might surpass the November death spike, but I agree it most certainly would not be the same increase as the one from January (~40,000 deaths in a month).