The UK still has vaccination rates just around 50%, and we can assume that they focused on the elderly first. The control system is first and foremost about preventing hospitals from being swamped and causing politicians to have a bad press day, so with most of the most likely to die off the table, case counts and hospitalization counts will have to be much higher.
Since May, the UK has seen its cases go up ~7x, its hospitalizations go up ~2x, and deaths hover around the same level (maybe they’ve gone 2x? hard to tell). To have US 2020 Summer Surge levels of death, their death rate would have to go up 13x, and their case rate would presumably have to go up 26x.
Given that Delta looks like it is going exponential in the UK, and it is doubling between 1-2 weeks, it would be at that high case count by August. However, that rate would be multiple times higher than the UK’s existing peak.
To clarify that 50% figure: According to [official figures](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations) -- see “Vaccination uptake, by report date”—about 63% of the eligible population in the UK has had two vaccine doses, and about 85% have had two. But it’s about 50% of the whole population, including infants and children, and infants and children are not being vaccinated.
So far as I can tell, the UK government’s intention is just to let every schoolchild in the UK get COVID-19. At least, there’s no serious plan to start vaccinating them any time soon, and in the face of rapidly increasing case numbers in schools I’m hearing much more ”… so we have to find a way to let schools send fewer pupils home when cases occur, to keep children in school” than ”… so we have to get stricter about sending pupils home when cases occur, to reduce the spread”.
It’s just as well children seem to be less badly harmed than adults by getting COVID-19. (Though they are certainly not guaranteed no serious harm, and given the enormous numbers of children likely to get it I suspect the absolute number of cases of serious harm will be pretty large.)
Good call out. I don’t know how contagious Covid/Delta is with children, but my intuition is that it is less contagious, which means your clarification is good news.
The UK still has vaccination rates just around 50%, and we can assume that they focused on the elderly first. The control system is first and foremost about preventing hospitals from being swamped and causing politicians to have a bad press day, so with most of the most likely to die off the table, case counts and hospitalization counts will have to be much higher.
Since May, the UK has seen its cases go up ~7x, its hospitalizations go up ~2x, and deaths hover around the same level (maybe they’ve gone 2x? hard to tell). To have US 2020 Summer Surge levels of death, their death rate would have to go up 13x, and their case rate would presumably have to go up 26x.
Given that Delta looks like it is going exponential in the UK, and it is doubling between 1-2 weeks, it would be at that high case count by August. However, that rate would be multiple times higher than the UK’s existing peak.
Is that worrying?
To clarify that 50% figure: According to [official figures](https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations) -- see “Vaccination uptake, by report date”—about 63% of the eligible population in the UK has had two vaccine doses, and about 85% have had two. But it’s about 50% of the whole population, including infants and children, and infants and children are not being vaccinated.
So far as I can tell, the UK government’s intention is just to let every schoolchild in the UK get COVID-19. At least, there’s no serious plan to start vaccinating them any time soon, and in the face of rapidly increasing case numbers in schools I’m hearing much more ”… so we have to find a way to let schools send fewer pupils home when cases occur, to keep children in school” than ”… so we have to get stricter about sending pupils home when cases occur, to reduce the spread”.
It’s just as well children seem to be less badly harmed than adults by getting COVID-19. (Though they are certainly not guaranteed no serious harm, and given the enormous numbers of children likely to get it I suspect the absolute number of cases of serious harm will be pretty large.)
Good call out. I don’t know how contagious Covid/Delta is with children, but my intuition is that it is less contagious, which means your clarification is good news.