>We are facing a major crisis<

The current wave of the Coronavirus crisis is in many ways *worse* than the original spring surge. Quick thread:

The proportion of people tested who test positive has gone screaming up everywhere. Data up to 29th December:

The number of positive tests is going up everywhere - and is sky high in the greater south east...

Though this is absolutely NOT a south-east problem. Zoom in on the other regions of England and the rate of positive tests is zooming up. The reduction from lockdown 2 is being unwound v quick.

You could think of the size of the problem being the number of positive tests multiplied by the proportion testing positive.

On this graph you are 'winning' if you're moving down and left.

We are screaming up and to the right.

And hospitalisations reflect where cases were a while back. In the greater south east (London, South East and East) we now see admissions of those hospitalised by Covid running 16% above the peak rate we saw in the spring crisis...

But in spring we were starting from scratch. This time we have not just a larger inflow, but also hospitals that already have many more Covid patients.

There are now just under 50% more Covid patients in hospitals in the greater south east than there were in the spring peak.

...Though numbers hospitalised by it are going up in all parts of England

Feels difficult to escape the conclusion that:

>as well as going as fast as we can with mass vaccination, we need to do something big to slow the explosive growth and stop hospitals being further overwhelmed.