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Tragically yet another 678 Covid-19 fatalities announced in the UK today, and it looks like we're starting to see the decline in fatalities settle into a trend. Here's the overall picture (1)
Have a closer look at the recent trends for both fatalities and infections on a log scale. You see how they're now settling in to kind of straight lines there? (2)
Just taking out the line for rolling 7 day average deaths per day, its a far clearer trend. We've got a straight line on the log plot, so for now at least we've got a proportional rate of decline. Thats... Well, I'll explain. (3)
We're sort of settling down into each day having about 96% of the fatalities the day before. Roughly (4)
Its actually about 4.1% or so drop per day right now, on average (5)
And that means when I put the numbers into the projection spreadsheet its back to being pretty predictive - todays total was spot on the 7 day trend. And the 7 and 14 day trends are converging now, the course is getting more predictable (6)
This also means that the current landing point we've hit is reflected in what was happening in R when people who died today caught it. Calculated from deaths it had settled down to about 0.8 or so. Thats obviously lagging behind the same calculation done with infections (7)
But it looks like the two, which largely track each other over the longer term, were converging about the same point - we might anticipate looking at this that the death totals will fluctuate around the same point. (8)
Each days trend (we see huge variation in daily reporting, its more ) is still quite quick, and we'll see that start to slow. Each day is about 75% of the same day the previous week, give or take (9)
So what does this mean? Well it means that the second wave of infection is, at least for the moment, acting like the first. While recovery from that was a little wavey (reflecting VE day, shops reopening, lockdown softening etc.) it was a straight log line (10)
And while numerically its a relief seeing hundreds fall from the death total, this should serve as a reiminder that we have a hell of a long way to go. Positive tests are still crazy high, but falling (11)
We're a long way from being out of this. But we've got a heck of a lot of people who should be showing increased resistance and better surviability after vaccines that should be kicking in soon, and we really should see this rate increase. Cross your fingers (12)
We're staring down the highest per capita death total of any country of more than 20 million people in the world, and the biggest economic hit of any major economy. Our response has thus far been an unmitigated disaster, we have, demonstrably, handled this worse than anyone (13)
And the one saving grace, the one thing we may have got right (which didn't necessitate sacrificing well over 100,000 lives for) is vaccination - if new strains don't reduce the efficacy of vaccines we have, this should show up in the data soon (14)
We hadn't fully recovered from wave 1. Thats why wave 2 happened - we dashed to open up while infection was still present, and we immediately saw an exponential rise in infection. We cannot, we must not, risk that again. (15)
The more infection is caused, the more risk of yet more dangerous strains emerging. Demand better of our political leaders. Stay strong, and remember that was their callous disregard for the lives of you and your loved ones that created this god awful mess. Never forget. (fin)
