How's the pandemic doing in the first 3 months of 2021? (In Scotland)

[andrewducker]

After spending the whole of March hanging around the 500 mark (about 10/100k) we've finally dipped a bit over the last few days - bringing our 7-day average down to 460, the lowest it's been since September last year.


The case count not dropping has been worrying me a bit, but I've been cheered by some of the other stats, which show that the vaccination strategy has *really* been working.
You can see that the rate has plummeted for the over 65s, and stayed very low, which it's higher for younger people (who are less affected).


And the testing positivity rate has been very low, and slowly dropping, which is great.


Hospital admissions have also been dropping


And for the first time today, second-vaccinations outnumber the first-vaccinations, as the people who were vaccinated as part of the first batch get their second lot delivered. This should hopefully bring down the case and death rates even further amongst the elderly and in the care homes.


So it looks like opening nurseries (and some schools) a month ago brought the rate up, but the continuing vaccination has kept it steady and now it's dropping again.

Fingers crossed that things continue the way they are, if not better!

(All graphs from the ever-aweseome Travelling Tabby. There's a tracker for the whole of the UK there if you want to see that too.)

Comments

[anna_wing]

That looks like good news, congratulations and I hope it continues!

[andrewducker]

Thank you! I hope everyone gets similar improvements soon.

[alithea]

That does look pretty hopeful.

I admit I'm working on the assumption we'll be back in lockdown in the autumn as far as planning family visits etc goes, but I'd be very happy to be proved wrong.

I think the big test will be when the travel restrictions are lifted.

[andrewducker]

Stay At Home is lifted today. Travel restrictions on the 26th, so we'll see how that goes. Fingers crossed!

[alithea]

Yep, we are having our first garden visitors on Monday, cannot wait!

Fingers crossed indeed, we're heading down south to finally see my mum mid May.

[andrewducker]

Same for us in July. Really really think that things should be okay by then.

[channelpenguin]

Good to see. Less worry for my parents and friends. Total envy. Half-assed non-lockdown plus federalism plus really slow vaccinations mean here in Germany we're heading the other way. Most regions over 100/100k mine closer to 200 and some up at 500/100k. All still rising. Germany-wide death rate is however, still heading down, albeit more slowly than it was. Not sure if it's just a long lag. But it doesn't look so... guess we'll find out in the next months.

Second Dose Trend

[danieldwilliam]

That's a very high second dose number I think.

Looking at the data dashboard

https://public.tableau.com/profile/phs.covid.19#!/vizhome/COVID-19DailyDashboard_15960160643010/Overview

We've had 2,493k first vaccinations in total and by 6th of January (roughly 12 weeks ago) we'd had 136,523. So we've got a pool of about 2,357k people who need to have their second dose over the next 12 weeks. About 28k a day. We seemed to be a little ahead of vaccinating the first dose people from before the 6th of January. So that 2,357k people will be a little less. We're turning in 40k in one day. Which is interesting.

I wonder if that is just a fluke, the first day of a trend of getting all the second dose people done whilst we have vaccines in hand or perhaps the figures 21st to 29th March are below the required rate and this is a catch up. (I think the third option is probably most likely.)

Re: Second Dose Trend

[andrewducker]

Agreed. Not worried so long as they can keep it up.