Covid in Scotland - the bad news and the good

[andrewducker]

The bad news:
992 cases today in Scotland. 7-day average of 654 cases, which has doubled in the last 15 days.
Daily hospital admissions have also doubled - from 8 to 16. This took 10 days.

Both of these numbers are still low compared to the peaks we've had in October and January, but doubling that fast is worrying, to put it mildly.

The good news:
The vast majority of those cases are in the under 65s - 97.6% are under that age. 45-64 year olds are also not being that heavily hit, compared to people in their 20s. And we know that the danger is largely age-related.

So we might still be able to solely vaccinate our way out of this - but we might be in for another tightening of restrictions, to slow things until we can work our way through things. The data here to look for is the hospitalisation rate - because that will tell us whether we're going to overwhelm NHS capacity or not. As you can see from the second graph, those admissions are currently a tiny blip compared to how they were a few months ago. It's just that doubling speed that's worrying.

Comments

[alithea]

I'd be less worried if further opening up was being delayed. I certainly don't feel safe enough to sit inside at a restaurant all evening. And the schools haven't even broken up yet - once folks with kids start holidaying and moving about more, it's going to get worse.

[rmc28]

The thing about exponential curves is taking action now is always better than waiting, but I feel like all the people in charge don't understand how fast they go, even after multiple examples in the past year eighteen months.

(We have one starting in England, and we still have our sodding prime minister saying there's "no reason yet" to delay lifting all restrictions on 21 June. We should definitely not be doing that, and we should almost certainly not have lifted all the restrictions we did on 17 May.)

Well!

[lsanderson]

I ain't a doctor, nor do I play one on TV, but the CW is that you cannot vaccinate your way out of the exponential curve. Shutting down and vaccinating, OTOH, is the way to beat it. The claim, and it involves math and math is hard, is that the two weeks required for vaccines to fully provide increased resistance/immunity (plus the number of days between jabs if more than one is required) can't decrease the exponential curve fast enough.

--OR--

That's just what everybody was saying to defend not sending vaccine to India.