> If cases keep rising I don't see any reason why hospitalizations and deaths won't follow.
They already have. Hospitalization rates have multiplied by a factor of nearly 4x from the 12,000 COVID hospitalizations in early July to the 40,000 COVID hospitalizations today in early August.
Yeah but there wasn't really an increase in covid related hospital admissions until recently. Given the issues with the uks testing (and reporting) regime it's rather difficult to draw any conclusions about infection rates from the most widely cited set of figures which are numbers tested (or tests mailed out, or tests manufactured or possibly some other definition of test known only to Matt Hancock). The ONS estimates based on random sampling however show that the infection rate only started increasing again at the beginning of September, which explains why we've only seen hospital admissions rising over the last couple of weeks and deaths haven't climbed much yet. Also, so far, it seems not to have started spreading through care homes again like earlier in the year, which is one of the things which seems to have driven up the death rate so high.
I reported the death rate. It didn't increase dramatically yet; only from 12 per day to 30 per day; and that in theory could also be "patient died with Covid" and not "because of Covid". Yes, number of ventilated didn't increase as sharply as would be expected from Delta. So it does look less severe, from the number of ventilated. Oxygenated did increase from around 400 to 800; here as well we are not sure about the cause.
> I think the point here is that hospitalizations in general aren't necessarily increasing.
You are right, the data on this web site doesn't show the total number of hospitalizations (irrespective of Covid).
> there is at least some reason to be hesitantly optimistic.
No, my comment wasn't "factually untrue". The 7-day rolling average is steady at 9 or 10 according to the covid data on google. It hasn't changed (at least, up until yesterday's data). Things may change now, as there were 57 deaths just announced today.
> I'd like to see a source for your claim that numbers in hospitals are decreasing.
> In the last 24 hours 40 more people were hospitalised with covid-19
Without context this doesn't sound super alarming. In a country of 10 Million, at ostensibly the peak of a wave of infection, 40 people per day are hospitalized. How does that differ from seasonal flu? Or from regular variations in hospitalization? It sounds like it could be a rounding error...
Looking at the official data[0], the number of daily hospital admissions is still increasing: https://i.imgur.com/XkbImVg.png
But hospital admissions usually lag behind the number of infections. If in a week or two admissions are still going up while the number of new infections drops, then this theory may be correct.
That makes sense top of my head. Hospitals overfilled with patients and understaffed with medical pros and resources means more sick people will go untreated and hence higher probability of deaths. So if what you state holds water then in two/three weeks we should be seeing the rate go up drastically. Right in time for the economy to be “raring” to go according the nations leaders and imbecile in chief
According to your link there's definitely a bump in hospital admissions. Only time will tell how high that bump goes. Let's play it safe and reserve judgement just a little longer...
> why hospitalizations keep going up in this roadmap when every country that has put strict social distancing measures in effect starts to see a leveling-off and decrease in hospitalization after around the 3 week mark
Because that's not a safe assumption. Hospitalizations are still going up in areas across the US, even in areas of US that are now on week 4 or 5 of lockdown.
> but I don't get why (from what I've seen) hospitalizations don't seem to be all that important when reporting on COVID numbers in general.
To an extent, by the time the hospital numbers are going up sharply, it's too late, and the hospitals will inevitably be overwhelmed, so it's not a good guide of policy. New case count is the only vaguely timely indicator we have.
Admissions to ER have halved. It breaks it down by reason for admittence to quite a granular level. Especially worrying: cardiac admissions halved at the lowest point. Fortunately it seems the messaging about how hospitals aren't overwhelmed and never were is getting through and they've started going up again. They're still far below normal for this time of year.
Unless you think people routinely go to ER with cardiac problems unnecessarily, it's hard to see how this won't translate into excess deaths that aren't COVID related. The UK sees about half of all excess death certificates right now not mention COVID, which makes sense.
Other crazy things about those graphs: pneumonia and other breathing related problems have also all collapsed. Not only are hospitals not overwhelmed but you can't even really see an uptick in admissions for COVID related problems, unless there's some odd data collection error like those cases not showing up in any of the graphs at all.
>The NHS England presentation, seen by HSJ (see slides below story), showed that even if the number of covid patients grew at the lowest rate considered likely
Covid rates have consistently grown at the lowest rate considered likely.
For the past couple months people have been predicting an increase in deaths to follow the increase in cases, but it hasn't happened.
reply