I’ve been surprised by this too, and my best explanation so far is schools. Evidence in favour is that Scottish school holidays start end-of-June, while English school holidays start middle-of-July, and indeed there looks to be a two-week difference in the peaks for the two nations.
A good test for this will be this week’s ONS report. This doesn’t have the English turn-around in it yet, but if it is schools then there should be an extremely sharp drop in the school-age rates.
All that said, it’s only my best hypothesis. A strong piece of evidence against it is that we haven’t seen the same effect in the US, where school holidays started a while ago.
One piece of evidence in favour of this is that the Scottish schools finish earlier than the English schools. Correspondingly, the Scottish case rates started dropping earlier than the English rates.
However the Northern Ireland dates don’t appear to match up so nicely—they have an early summer holiday but the case rates peaked roughly when England’s did.
It seems Netherlands summer holidays depend on which region you’re in (North, Central, South) each of which is separated by a week (10th, 17th, 24th July respectively). However it seems that no matter which region you look at the peak is pretty close to the 17th.
Possibly with enough mixing between the regions this still kinda works but I feel like it’s a strike against the theory.
I see people wonder about what happened in the Netherlands. And though drop might have been accelerated by school holidays, seems like a lot of people are not aware about what was the reason for the sharp rise on the prior week. From locals’ perspective it went like this: the government allowed night clubs to open, requiring patrons to either be [fully? don’t remember] vaccinated or show recent negative test. Pretty quickly some vaccinated asymptomatic positives infected a lot of unvaccinated negatives and the thing was spreading like wildfire among 20- and 30-year-olds within a week of jam-packed night clubs. (It also so happened that there was a big music festival during those days.) After a week of this, government called in an emergency restriction for all venues to close at midnight (in effect till today). That seemed to help a lot.
I’m pretty sure it’s not schools, unless private schools somehow have a massive impact. The case rates were already dropping on July 21st, which is presumably a couple of days after The Event anyway; the summer holidays for state schools (i.e. the vast majority of children) started on the 25th.
I’ve been surprised by this too, and my best explanation so far is schools. Evidence in favour is that Scottish school holidays start end-of-June, while English school holidays start middle-of-July, and indeed there looks to be a two-week difference in the peaks for the two nations.
A good test for this will be this week’s ONS report. This doesn’t have the English turn-around in it yet, but if it is schools then there should be an extremely sharp drop in the school-age rates.
All that said, it’s only my best hypothesis. A strong piece of evidence against it is that we haven’t seen the same effect in the US, where school holidays started a while ago.
One piece of evidence in favour of this is that the Scottish schools finish earlier than the English schools. Correspondingly, the Scottish case rates started dropping earlier than the English rates.
However the Northern Ireland dates don’t appear to match up so nicely—they have an early summer holiday but the case rates peaked roughly when England’s did.
So I’m not really sure!
The Netherlands had a similar trajectory. Would be interesting if their holidays matched.
It seems Netherlands summer holidays depend on which region you’re in (North, Central, South) each of which is separated by a week (10th, 17th, 24th July respectively). However it seems that no matter which region you look at the peak is pretty close to the 17th.
Possibly with enough mixing between the regions this still kinda works but I feel like it’s a strike against the theory.
I see people wonder about what happened in the Netherlands. And though drop might have been accelerated by school holidays, seems like a lot of people are not aware about what was the reason for the sharp rise on the prior week. From locals’ perspective it went like this: the government allowed night clubs to open, requiring patrons to either be [fully? don’t remember] vaccinated or show recent negative test. Pretty quickly some vaccinated asymptomatic positives infected a lot of unvaccinated negatives and the thing was spreading like wildfire among 20- and 30-year-olds within a week of jam-packed night clubs. (It also so happened that there was a big music festival during those days.) After a week of this, government called in an emergency restriction for all venues to close at midnight (in effect till today). That seemed to help a lot.
I’m pretty sure it’s not schools, unless private schools somehow have a massive impact. The case rates were already dropping on July 21st, which is presumably a couple of days after The Event anyway; the summer holidays for state schools (i.e. the vast majority of children) started on the 25th.