Closed pending moderator review.

stutModerator
UK & Ireland

I am going to pop this in this thread since the regular one is closed for cleaning.

Daily data:

Cases 10,321 (7,738 last Saturday)
Deaths 14 (12)
Patients admitted 226 (187 on the 8th)
Patients in hospital 1,316 (1,091 on the 10th)
Patients in ventilation beds 210 (161 on the 11th)
People vaccinated up to and including 18 June 2021:
First dose: 42,679,268
Second dose: 31,087,325

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now up 33.2% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is up 23.3%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 10.6 today.

The vaccination figures are the previous day's. So the correct Saturday figures (for jabs up to midnight Friday)
Dose 1 administered = 42,679,268 =81.06% of adults
Dose 2 administered = 31,087,325 =59.05% of adults.

We've been seeing 10-11k cases for a few days in a row now, do you know if the slowdown in the North West carries on? It'd be good news.

Generally yes. So the worst place in the UK remains Blackburn and this is the most recent published data. The thick blue line shows the rolling 7 day average and the published figure is 114.7, the unpublished latest data is 110.5, the peak you see was 142.7 on 4 June. That's total cases in Blackburn with Darwen per day, the 114.7 figures gives a figure of 536 per 100k, (so Blackburn has a population of 22,000 approx).

https://imagizer.imageshack.com/v2/1...922/vIOSmy.jpg

Blackburn is suffering more than Bolton since there was an unusually large cohort of those over 50 who were not vaccinated, whereas Bolton was close to the regional average. Bolton is well into a slow reduction, it's gone from top of the table to 6th place, and has been falling pretty much daily since 22 May. Manchester is still increasing but only by small amounts, so more or less flat-lining.

On the downside the Delta variant is slowly spreading out more widely, but the uptick seems much slower than it was with the January Alpha surge. To be clear cases are still rising overall, but there are several signs it will peak mid next week.

Daily data:

Cases 9,284 (7,490 last Sunday)
Deaths 6 (8)
People vaccinated up to and including 19 June 2021:
First dose: 42,964,013
Second dose: 31,340,507

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now up 31.1% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is up 12.5%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 10.3 today.

Reopening thread. Apologies for the delay, was at Duxford all day and couldn't get my phone to do what I wanted!

Anyway, I've split the political discussion around much of UEFA and G7 into its own thread, which is now here:

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/omni...s-g7-uefa.html

Please remember that this is an informative thread first. Political discussions around Covid and it's handling are a subject for other threads elsewhere.

Many thanks
stut
Moderator
UK & Ireland

A little late with this but we now have some better data on Delta fatalities rate. Now some deaths will have been unsequenced, but what we know is that from 1 February 2021 to 14 June 2021 there have been 73 known Delta variant deaths. This is quite a long period, most of the deaths have been in the last few weeks of that period. It compares to the 1,400 a day figure at the peak of the Alpha variant, in January. The Delta peak may be in the next few days, the death peak will be a few weeks after that. But that figure alone says we are in a much, much better space now, despite dealing with a variant more transmissible, and perhaps slightly more harmful for those who catch it than Alpha. So of the 73 fatal cases
34 were unvaccinated
4 were very recently vaccinated with dose 1
10 were vaccinated with dose 1 and at least 3 weeks past that vaccination
26 had both vaccines and were more than 2 weeks past that vaccination.
So something like half the fatalities were unvaccinated, compared to just 5% of the plus 50 year cohort unvaccinated on 1 June 20021 and who still represent 70% of these casualties. At that point, 25% of the total adult population were unvaccinated. And I reiterate these death rates are much lower than the Alpha stage anyway.

Thanks for this tip - it paid off! Saturday morning I headed into London on the first train, with a route planned through the sites listed as having walk-in doses on https://www.nwlondonccg.nhs.uk/coron...urplus-vaccine . First up was Marble Arch, who had a sign up outside saying they had AZ 2nd dose walk-ins. Bit of a queue to reach the first volunteers, who seemed to be mostly turning away Pfizer walk-ins. Said I was there for a 2nd AZ dose, and was directed to an empty queue. Next set of volunteers really wanted to see my vaccination card to check when my first dose was, and made it very clear that it needed to be 8+ weeks ago to be let into the building. I decided that trying to show them their own website saying only 4 weeks was needed was unlikely to end well, so I just lied and said it had been 8 weeks, and told the truth and said I had forgotten to bring the card, but I had remembered my NHS number. Once inside and funnelled down the AZ side (most people there were waiting for Pfizer), I was quickly checked in and dispatched to a waiting vaccinator. No comment or question on it only being 7 weeks, just personal details check + safety warning on AZ + chat about side effects. Was done within 30 minutes of arriving into Paddington! NHS app updated late afternoon today to show the 2nd dose.

For anyone wanting to try the same, having your NHS number handy but forgetting your vaccination card seems to be the trick to get past the volunteers and onwards to the vaccinators.

Given the Pfizer queues vs AZ emptiness, and the number of Pfizer walk-ins being turned away, one really must wonder if the "40+ safe, 39- terrible" hard cut-off currently being enforced is the right thing. A volunteer outside reading off all the risks to walk-in 30-somethings, followed by one of the much-less-busy AZ vaccinators doing proper informed consent then jabbing with the spare doses would seem to be a viable option. The fact that we aren't is veering towards OMNI territory, so I'll stop now!

Today's papers are reporting on plans (by Matt Hancock allegedly) to remove quarantine requirements for vaccinated amber list travellers. The Times has this:

The rest is paywalled, but you get the idea. The Telegraph runs with the same story with the emphasis on the fact that no variants of concern were detected in travellers from amber list countries. That would be from the day 2 tests which are all sequenced if positive. I don't know how that would work with India since test positivity was very high from there before it was red listed. I guess Delta was not a VOC until very late meaning it was not counted.

I'd have thought that 1 in 200 arrivals testing positive for covid is a significant number, particularly as they will presumably have presented negative test results prior to departure.

The latest estimate by the ONS suggests that the proportion of the population with covid is about 1 in 500 in England, 1 in 600 in Scotland and 1 in 1,500 in Wales.

I have not posted this for a while, but here is an update to the figures for the Managed Quarantine Service in England. This would be everyone entering England from non green list countries and who is not super exempt.

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...a4dc0682c4.png

I think the data relates only to the recent 3 week interval. So India was put on the Red list on 23 April and thus not showing in the Amber data. This set of "leaks" has the hallmarks of Grant Shapps reporting on what he thinks Matt Hancock thinks, in order the bounce the Thursday meeting into opening up more from mid July. Matt Hancock does little or no leaking (he is somewhat busy) hence this is my reading of a story in 4 separate newspapers this morning, and the lead in the Mail print edition.

[There is another way to look at this: travellers have more than twice the amount of Covid than the UK population, where the ONS Infection Survey estimates that the UK has one person infected per 520 people. If you believe in vaccines then this doesn't matter too much if the population is, or will be, double vaccinated by mid July].

That 1 in 200 will become even more diluted though surely if the majority of amber travellers are double jabbed?

Well that is a positivity rate of 0.5%. Arrivals would have taken a test up to 72 hours before their flight, and that gives people plenty of time to pick up an infection before they get on that flight back to the UK. Furthermore, the testing for people before departure back to the UK is not a PCR and can be a variety of different tests that are apparently much less reliable, so if only 0.5% of these travellers are positive, I would have thought that is an amazing figure.

Finally you mention the ONS figures - these are only estimates, because not every single person in the UK is being tested. EVERY SINGLE passenger coming back is being tested - so you can't really compare those two without providing this context. If we look at our current 7-day average of actual tests and actual positives in the UK, our positivity is approximately 1%.