I thought I'd do a summary thread of my various trawls of COVID data and reports this week. So as to try and give an overall sense of where I think we are.

First things to be positive about.

The lockdown is working. Cases have fallen around 25% this week; that has flowed through to hospital admissions which are down nationally over the week. We should see number of deaths start to fall in 5-10 days or so.

We also now have pretty firm evidence from Israel that the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine does reduce infections and serious cases. And preliminary evidence that the second dose v significantly boosts immunity. We should start seeing the impact here in one to two weeks.

Of the things I'm worrying about the main one is the preliminary/emerging evidence that vaccines may be less effective against some variants - particularly from South Africa and Braxil. We don't have clear findings on this yet though.

The other thing I'm worrying about is the intense pressure on the vaccine supply chain with AZ and Pfizer both cutting promised deliveries to the EU and Pfizer doing the same to us. This threatens the global speed of rollout + feels like an urgent focus for G7 investment.

Yesterday we saw some emerging evidence that the "British" strain is more deadly. This is certainty a concern but the data is very noisy and it doesn't seem to be leading to higher deaths in hospitals which is puzzling but not necessarily inconsistent. More evidence needed.

Overall I'm cautiously optimistic. Things are finally moving in the right direction and that's before the impact of the vaccines hits. As long as we can maintain supply and don't get banjaxed by a vaccine evading new strain, the picture will look much more positive soon.

In terms of when restrictions might reduce my base case would be some loosening in March (maybe tier 3 in most places) but significantly loosening (tiers 2 and 1) not until April. But a lot of variables that could speed things up or slow them down.

Next week I'll be continuing to look closely at data from Israel in particular and hoping that towards the end of the week we see some signs of vaccine effectiveness here in the 80+ group.