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176 more completely needless fatalities from Covid-19 in the UK today. Tragic. Rather than start with the overall graph today, here's where we were after yesterday. Yes. I know. We blew way through those projections and its terrifying. (1) https://twitter.com/gnomeicide/status/1278014996677615622
Here's the overall picture. Always eyeball a graph first. At best, we're flatlining. (2)
Here's a closer look at that. Remember, the 7 day rolling average rather drags things back a bit. Does that look like its going down any more? (3)
And the 7 day running total maybe shows this more clearly. We're flatlining. Maybe going up. (4)
The R value when the people who died today (on average) caught it was more or less 1. (5)
But as you can see, it was trending upwards. I ummed and ahhed about line fitting this, but I don't know I've got a great fit at all. Up. Thats all we can say for sure. Infection rate was rising. (6)
Another proxy for R is to look at deaths 23 days ago compared with today, again with smoothing to 7 day totals. And here's that. Its also 1 (0.998) (7)
And the trend for 7 day rolling fatalities, dividing by the previous days to get a brute force trend based on where death rate is going in the immediacy, we've been rising steadily from below 1 now to above 1. (8)
And as I keep saying, drop a log on regular curve and it becomes straight. If instead its a flat line then you're not changing values at all. It is now trending flat or perhaps upwards. We need it to be going down. (9)
As for Wednesdays, here's what they look like. Getting rather spoon shaped, its not gong down. Might be going up. (10)
Purely on the 7 day projections, the change in fatalities over the last 7 days, we're going up. I actually worked out yesterday that somewhere around 170 we were at an R value of above 1. I didn't post because it just didn't seem feasible. (11)
But we blew right through the 'well above and death rate is still slowing' point and into a point of a terrifying rise in deaths. (12)
We're not in a position where we can project the velocity if the increase yet - indeed, perhaps over the next couple of days it will correct and go down again. You may however recall that I said we needed to see that correction before the middle of this week. We have not... (13)
...and right on schedule we're going up. If we take the average rate that death rate is changing and extrapolate, 7 day rolling death totals look like this (14)
At this point, we're rising. Will we continue? I don't know. I hope not. But, please, don't go to the pub on Friday? Stay home. Keep your distance from people. Will perhaps post more on future projections later. It isn't looking great right now (fin)
