Chat about Novel Coronavirus - 2019-nCoV - COVID-19

Good chart showing fewer hospitalisations per case. (on the correct y scale)

https://i.imgur.com/RBsx5ec.jpg

It's good but it's still concerning, especially given the percentage of people who've had one or both jabs.

The numbers and the anecdotal evidence of interviews with NHS staff show that instead of the ICU wards being inundated with Covid patients they're still seeing a lot of patients coming in, and it's the general respiratory wards that are filling up.

Compared to the previous peaks there are fewer patients coming in, and fewer serious cases, and average patient stay in hospital is lower, but there's still a growing number of people coming in and requiring hospital treatment. And it's growth that is the concern.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare

We're back up to 300 people on mechanical ventilation up from the recent low of ~120 in mid-May. (The peak in late Jan was ~4,000.)

The other way to read this is that the first two waves killed off a lot of the most vulnerable people, and now the more transmissible and more virulent strains are going to give people serious enough doses to get them into hospital but without killing anywhere near as many. The question is what is the long term outcome for these people that are being saved from death?

Getting death figures down is obviously a good thing, but death figures alone do not show the full picture. We could get the death figures right down, but instead of hundreds of people dying each day we may end up with hundreds of people with life changing complications from serious Covid-19 infections each day instead.

The "patients in hospital" and "patients in mechanical ventilation beds" will be the figures to watch over the next few weeks/months.

On a more positive note (as I realise the above is a bit doom and gloom) but the vaccination program will reduce the number of deaths, and hopefully also the number of patients being admitted to hospital, and also reduce the average length of stay in hospital, and the average effect on the health of each individual patient (which is hard to measure directly).