Daily data:

Cases 30597 (38,975 last Wednesday)
Deaths 201 (191)
Patients admitted 836 (933 on the 2nd)
Patients in hospital 8,340 (7,907 on the 7th)
Patients in ventilation beds 1,060 (1,047 on the 7th)
People vaccinated up to and including 14 September 2021:
First dose: 48,480,178
Second dose: 44,170,373

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now down 18.4% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is up 4.4%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 139.0 today.

Speaking from the American side of the Atlantic, the last group truly is running rampant here. In the past, the conspiracy theorists did not get any overt support from elected officials. Now, several of them (the Governors of Florida and Texas especially) see a political opportunity in embracing these theories--while, of course, making sure that they themselves are fully vaccinated and affording themselves of the best treatment options possible, just as President Trump was able to do in 2020 when he contracted covid, received an experimental treatment (though scientifically valid unlike most of the stuff he'd been advocating to his followers), and then almost immediately upon discharge, started acting as if it had never happened.

To anyone else in this position, your best advice would be to go to a vaccination site, particularly the larger ones. You will never be forced to having a vaccine but there will be a senior clinician on site - perhaps at Clinical Director level (highly respected GP who oversees a group of GPs looking after about 40,000 patients). They will have had conversations like this before and can discuss in details both their specific medical records and the impact on vaccinations, side effects and so on. They are paid (by taxpayers) to give this advice, it's not anything to be shy about but you may need to wait 10 minutes or so if the clinical lead is busy. For allergies there are very few concerns, the main one being where a severe allergy - anaphylaxis territory - hasn't been fully diagnosed. So they are badly allergic to something but they don't know what. For someone on blood thinning drugs (which, incidentally, don't actually thin blood) - so anticoagulents - most are fine, the one that we do need to know about is Heparin. But Apixaban, aspirin, warfarin are not an issue per se, but as with all injections we need to know so that we press down immediately on the arm, after the vaccine, to arrest any blood flow and to aid clotting. Turning up freezing cold helps, the blood vessels and fat layer tend to sludge up nicely.

Those who are on blood thinning medication would normally have an underlying condition which makes it quite important to get vaccinated (e.g. heart condition or stroke) since multiple health conditions and COVID is the sort of mix that has very serious and negative implications.

The biggest problem I've seen in this area relates to those who are pregnant. Midwives vary, some are very much encouraging their patients to get vaccinated, having COVID and late pregnancy can put relatively young women into Intensive Care. But other mid wives are perhaps a bit too even handed with their informed consent piece and end up with the unhelpful final clause "but it's entirely up to you".

Going to a site was also an option. I don't know, really, what happened to my friends with regards to their vaccination status; both of them are on the continent and, at the end of the day, I didn't want to press the matter further as they were already getting so much flak by others for not 'doing the right thing' which, to me, isn't helpful. I found some experts they could speak to and that was it for me. But thanks for the detailed explanation!

Even with cases dropping,we are very much so still an outlier in terms of having far more cases than anywhere else in Europe, and I don't get why places like Germany never saw a delta peak.

Maybe Germany did not have a peak yet ? Or the regulations since June (essentially a vaccine passport) were efficient enough. I am more curious about Poland or Sweden. Either they are manipulating the numbers or the rules they have plus the fact that those are not tourist destination avoided the introduction of Delta on their territory. This could be important, specially Poland, and demonstrate potentially a tighter border control would have avoided all of this.

Its hardly a surprise that the country with the largest number of cases to begin with and that removed pretty much all mitigating measures months ago still has the highest number of cases!?

Germany is currently reporting more than 10,000 cases per day with the total number of cases is over 4 million compared to the UK's 7 million. So the same order of magnitude. It is true that Germany appears to have had a lower delta peak (if it has peaked), but it may have been hit harder with the earlier variants. Poland's figures have been questioned, as have Sweden's FWIW. I am sceptical about the foreign travel being the dominant factor in this - obviously the first cases have to come in with travellers. Australia is now taking a beating from delta and there is hardly anywhere with tighter restrictions than them. I think we need to be looking for other reasons for the outcomes we are seeing.

Perhaps surprising that cases down given that term time is fully underway (both school and university) or can we expect it to start creeping back up again? Are we seeing the first signs of some level of community immunity?

I would say it is premature to say cases are going down based on a few days data, but let's hope. I have always been sceptical about the role of schools (at least at infant/primary level) in the spread of COVID. Cases did rise in Scotland after schools re-opened, but I am not sure there is a proven link there. As for immunity (herd or otherwise), that has been speculated over each time cases fall. It remains hard to predict where we are going.

I believe cases are coming down because the festival and teenagers-on-Cornwall's-beaches season has ended.

University term is not really fully underway yet - there are exceptions but generally there is a ramp up of activities in September but the lecture rooms won't be in full flow until the end of the month.

The 7-day average number of daily covid cases in Germany per million people is about a quarter of that in the UK (120 vs 459). It's of "the same order of magnitude" from a mathematical point of view, but in the real world it represents a very significant difference in outcomes.

The positivity rate in Germany is also about 2-3 times as high as the UK, and the rate of testing is 10 times less. It may be that the figure of 120 in Germany is not a realistic reflection of the actual infection rate there.

I agree: there are numerous difficulties and traps in comparing different countries' figures, and it is quite likely that the UK's figures look so bad partly because our testing regime is better.