Do you find the UK data worrying? Cases up 5x in a month with high vaccination rate. My rough impression is they still haven’t opened up that much. I’m sure the control system will get it under control but I thought high vaccination rates would make that unnecessary.
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.
My presumption is that UK has a bunch of AZ vaccinations in its mix that aren’t that good at stopping Delta from spreading (but are very good at preventing hospitalization/death) and so it’s not as vaccinated as the numbers suggest. But yeah, it’s gotta be frustrating since it means UK won’t be able to go back to normal for a while unless they can up their vaccination numbers.
One piece of evidence against this: almost all the uptick in the UK is in folks under 40. Under 40s have a much lower vaccination rate due to the age-dependent rollout, but because of the blood clot scare under 40s have preferentially gotten Pfizer. Over 40s meanwhile have a very high vaccination rate but it’s mostly AstraZeneca. Their case rate is flat.
Those lines aren’t flat, they’re just hard to read on that scale. I made my own based on the heatmap of case rates for england (there doesn’t seem to be a whole-UK heatmap).
I’ve seen graphs on /r/CoronavirusUK showing AZ and Pfizer roughly equal in count, and Moderna a tiny sliver. Couldn’t find any of those on demand, though. (I thought the data was available somewhere in the adverse effects reports, but I can’t find those now either.)
Do you find the UK data worrying? Cases up 5x in a month with high vaccination rate. My rough impression is they still haven’t opened up that much. I’m sure the control system will get it under control but I thought high vaccination rates would make that unnecessary.
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.
My presumption is that UK has a bunch of AZ vaccinations in its mix that aren’t that good at stopping Delta from spreading (but are very good at preventing hospitalization/death) and so it’s not as vaccinated as the numbers suggest. But yeah, it’s gotta be frustrating since it means UK won’t be able to go back to normal for a while unless they can up their vaccination numbers.
What about Israel? R-value is the highest since the first wave despite ~60% vaccinated with afaict mostly mRNA vaccines: OurWolrdInData Link.
Luckily hospitalizations/deaths also appear to be not strongly affected.
One piece of evidence against this: almost all the uptick in the UK is in folks under 40. Under 40s have a much lower vaccination rate due to the age-dependent rollout, but because of the blood clot scare under 40s have preferentially gotten Pfizer. Over 40s meanwhile have a very high vaccination rate but it’s mostly AstraZeneca. Their case rate is flat.
Source
Those lines aren’t flat, they’re just hard to read on that scale. I made my own based on the heatmap of case rates for england (there doesn’t seem to be a whole-UK heatmap).
I think the great majority of UK vaccinations are AZ.
I’ve seen graphs on /r/CoronavirusUK showing AZ and Pfizer roughly equal in count, and Moderna a tiny sliver. Couldn’t find any of those on demand, though. (I thought the data was available somewhere in the adverse effects reports, but I can’t find those now either.)