Last week I did a round-up thread on COVID stats/reports which people seemed to find useful so I thought I'd make it a weekly thing...

Positive news first. Lockdown continues to work.

The fall in cases in accelerating (chart by @BristOliver). Hospital admissions are down by about 15%. And we are now past the peak of deaths.

There are some hints emerging that the vaccine effect is starting to push case numbers down along with the lockdown. This chart from @jburnmurdoch shows a larger fall in cases amongst over-80s. Apparently Govt will publish initial data on vaccine effectiveness next week.

We also have pretty much conclusive proof now from Israel that the Pfizer vaccine has worked there with a v large study showing first dose effectiveness from 18 days and studies post 2nd dose showing barely any cases. https://twitter.com/alvie_barr/status/1355181676343787521

And critically we have two new working vaccines - Novavax and J+J. Efficacy is in a similar range to other vaccines and they do give protection against all variants - though less so to the SA one. V encouragingly the 1-shot J+J vaccine gets more protective over time.

On the concerns side, my worry last week about global vaccine supply has blown up with the EU Commission panicking as countries across Europe suspend first dose vaccinations. It's going to be a tricky few months until supply really ramps up across multiple vaccines.

As part of this general panic we saw some outrageous comments from Macron suggesting the AZ vaccine is ineffective for over 65s. This is not true. The antibody effect was the same in this group but there weren't enough older people in the trial to provide any data on infections.

The other concern was about new variants. We have now seen that the vaccines tested against the SA variant are protective but at a lower level. Manufacturers are now developing booster doses to combat this which should be ready later in the year.

A new concern this week: in both Israel and here we're seeing a pattern that the (typically more marginalised) communities most at risk from COVID seem least likely to take the vaccine which is bad for them and community transmission. More focus needed on this.

Overall my optimism dial has ticked towards the positive this week. The accelerating fall in cases plus good vaccine news makes 8th March realistic for the start of reopening with more substantial reductions in restrictions in April.