True. It's obviously encouraging though that, even as case rates appear to be going through the roof, the hospitalisation, ventilation and death rates are only rising gradually (and at a fraction of what they were at similar stages in previous waves).
As an aside, I'm wondering whether, given the ages of many of the new cases, the 6-week school holidays are going to act like a mini-lockdown for this current wave?
Yeah, definitely. The concern now, is that the changes in deaths could be subtle among the low figure noise, and we wouldn't see death increases at low levels anyway, not based on the low-level cases we've had. As cases rocket, deaths will, albeit comparatively and starting at a very low level, as the link has not been broken, it's just being gradually weakened.
Most in the know seem to reckon the hospitalisations lag after cases is about 10 days, and now we're really getting into cases being noticeable, and increasing rapidly numerically, not just as percentages. Should all become much clearer now and over the next two weeks, with less noise.
The latest daily admissions was 263 on Saturday 26th, so base that on cases from around the 16th, 10 day lag (average was about 10k), and you're at about 2.5% admissions rate. That does seem to be bottoming out at 2%, so if we get to 50k cases (by July 19th, which is likely not the peak), then we're on for 1,000 admissions a day from them (10 days later). Deaths now are based on cases before admissions, so maybe the 5th (so 5k cases). Effectively we were getting 15 deaths from 5k cases, so if we get 50k cases then it's likely going to convert into 100-150 deaths, or something around that.
I don't think many expected us to see numbers like those again, prior to Delta, but that's the road we're on, and I don't think we will come off it as we need the peak of this in August, not Autumn/ Winter. 50k cases would have got us 1k deaths before, so we've come a long way. It's going to suck that we kind of have to just accept 100 deaths a day, but at least that should be near the end of it. It may even burn out sooner, tough to say.
I don't see schools closing making much of a difference (the peak looks like end Aug/ early Sept anyway), the schools seem to be playing by the rules and testing loads, I'd be more concerned with what's going on outside of schools and the "catching" of school cases may actually be helping now, not hindering. The under 25's are the ones least covered, that socialise the most, in groups, so unless something curtails those, then I don't see it stopping. Not saying we should curtail them mind, I think now it just is what it is, we've pretty much done all we can I think, and need this over and done with before winter. Just need to stick to getting people double jabbed ASAP.
