This goes to the heart of all these restrictions. They are rushed in without due consideration (for entirely understandable reasons) but it takes forever, and a mountain to climb, to remove each one. We'll be living with COVID bureaucracy years after this is all a horrible memory.

I'm wondering if the value of the "Patients in hospital" figure is somewhat diminished, at the moment, bearing in mind lots of those are likely to be in hospital with it rather than because of it.

Yeah 100% Also many articles now on how SAGE are pushing a lockdown agenda and manipulating figures, e.g. 5000 deaths a day, 3000 admissions a day etc. Let's see what happens after XMAS, either way all this fear-mongering has done a lot of damage to the economy even thought everything is still technically open.

What I like in the Irish covid app is people in/people out of hospital. I did read in one of the reports about the average stay in hospitals with omicron if vaccinated, unvaccinated and it was interesting. I'll probably never find it again but it's definitely shorter. Even SAGE and Ferguson are backpedalling so it must be good news.... :)

Yes, this is a similar argument as the figures for deaths. Was the death because of it or with it. Before COVID, you would expect about 16,000 admissions per day averaged across the year in England. A week ago 1/45 people were estimated to have COVID. If you apply that to the 16,000 then it is just 355. That could be much higher this week.

With the figure for deaths there is the possibility that it is less relevant for omicron if the risk of death from omicron is much lower. This figure is the number that die within 28 days of a positive test. In the past this worked when compared later with excess deaths. Imagine a scenario where omicron was totally non lethal. We would still be recording anyone with it who dies within 28 days of a positive test as having died from it. For the time being we can only be aware of the potential problem and correct it later when data is available.

I guess we find out next week. I think if the govt holds out their nerve until New Year, then there won't be any restrictions as the omicron wave is about to peak in the UK, if not already having peaked. Hope they remove Plan B soon, no one is returning to the office until 2nd week of January anyway.

There will be no data published on Christmas Day or Boxing day, so whatever happens we will have two days respite from any rising figures. That could reduce the chances of anything changing soon unless there is some disaster at the hospitals.

Prof Lockdown's 'apocalyptic' omicron claims undermine faith in vaccines and have fuelled unnecessary shutdowns

The Covid modellers at Imperial College have begun to back down. About time too. Over the past few weeks, they have made extreme claims about the omicron variant that cannot be fully justified by fundamental science, let alone by clinical observation.

Academic etiquette restrains direct criticism, but immunologists say privately that Professor Neil Ferguson and his team breached a cardinal rule by inferring rates of hospitalisation, severe disease, and death from waning antibodies, and by extrapolating from infections that break through the first line of vaccine defence.

The rest are entitled to question whether they can legitimately do this. And we may certainly question whether they should be putting out terrifying claims of up to 5,000 deaths a day based on antibody counts.

“It is bad science and I think they’re being irresponsible. They have a duty to reflect the true risks but this is just headline grabbing,” said Dr Clive Dix, former chairman of the UK Vaccine Task Force.

There is also behavioral effect. It is fairly well known that people do not want to spend Xmas in the hospital, admissions always decrease during this time of year. There was a similar effect for COVID last year.

There is always Zoe to get a sense of the direction of travel.

I was sent a similar message, on day 9 after my exposure. I already knew about it, as out of a group of 6, 4 were feeling unwell and testing positive. (As an aside, the two of us feeling okay and testing negative were the only two in the group that had a booster yet, and both of us were about a month out from the booster).

The text I got had me go through a series of questions - of which I think the most important thing to determine was a vaccinated and past the final dose more than two weeks ago. It then told me that as I was fully vaccinated, I didn't need to self-isolate, but should take daily LFT tests until the end of the 10 day period (thus, I should take one test, as they only sent me the message on day 9). It did say explicitly that I didn't need to isolate unless I got a positive test.

A little more on this. The Telegraph has a relevant story:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/202...spital-making/

Telegraph paywalled.

This is probably happening in part because many NHS staff are asymptomatic. As people are typically infectious for a couple of days before a proactive LFT picks up that one staff member is positive for COVID, the trust's internal track and trace tries to work back and do the risk assessments and it all unravels...


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I was going to say, without seeing the Telegraph article that the "in hospital plus covid discovered" is about 20% to 30% usually, going up during surges, down during lower infection rates. Some shades of grey since those with multiple problems is a common aspect of hospital admission, someone entering hospital with an asthma attact, turns out to be COVID positive, would they have needed a hospital admission if they were COVID negative? I can imagine it being above 30% at the moment, given the high number of cases and lower impact.

10 days is the maximum and then you can't have another PCR for 90 days in a usual UK context. The testing for travel is a separate issue (and does lead to early PCRs), and won't lead to another 10 days self isolation. Obviously I would leave it as late as possible. When was your booster, your second dose and when was the PCR? Does it feel like upper respiratory rather than further down the body? There are some guesses I can make about PCR positivity off this.