This thread probably. To return us the the same weekly average as before Christmas will require reporting more than 450 today.

It's a complex thing this. Deaths should be reported within 5 days, but many registrars were closed from 24 December afternoon until yesterday 29 December morning. Most registrars are working from home, so it's a case of people choosing a slot online and having a phone call. The old system was that people would go to the town hall and wait until the queue ahead of them was done. I would imagine that all slots for 29 December were filled some days ago, and therefore any death on say Boxing Day may not get registered until the New Year in some cases, despite the legal requirement. Furthermore you need some confirmation of death from a doctor, ambulance service, hospital before proceeding, and there can be delays there too. So you won't normally get a a backlog cleared in a day or two at this time of year.

Fortunately, evidence from UK research supports the conclusion that omicron is not so lethal as the delta strain of the virus, and, crucially, less likely to cause illness requiring hospitalisation. So we can retire the South Africa soapbox.

However, omicron is also acknowledged as being significantly more infectious than delta. The rate at which the virus spreads and the severity of the disease it causes are the drivers of hospital admissions, the length of hospital stays, and so the degree to which our medical services become saturated. The result of the interplay of those two forces with our vaccine programme is, as yet, unclear.

All that is surely not a revelation.

December 29 saw over 11,100 covid patients in hospital in England and Scotland. The November peak for those two nations was a little under 8,500. (NHS figures).

For England alone, the latest statistic for covid hospitalisations is 10,462. The November range covered 5,784 - 7,535.

Looks like the number will be between 400 and 450, from internal sources.

Daily data:

Cases 189,213 (119,789 last Thursday)
Deaths 332 (147)
Patients admitted 1,152 (858 on the 17th)
Patients in hospital 11,898 (8,246 on the 22nd)
Patients in ventilation beds 868 (842 on the 22nd)
People vaccinated up to and including 29 December 2021:
First dose: 51,738,013
Second dose: 47,368,074
Booster: 33,527,184

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now up 45.1% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is down 10.6%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 98.6 today. The deaths figure includes the backlog form the 24th onwards. I do not know if all of the backlog is included. Cases include 2 days data from Wales. A small vaccine milestone today, first jabs have reached 90% for what must be the 3rd time.

They'll be arguing about what to do with one of the numbers.

189213 cases and 332 death.

332. Your internal source wasn't Neil Ferguson was it? :)

No, not all the backlog is there. Many registrars had all their slots filled on Wednesday (see my previous post) so any excess requirements to register death will spill over on to later days. So I would expect the death rate reported to be on the high side for today and maybe tomorrow a bit, slow down again and then pick up again from Wednesday next week. From what I'm seeing from internal data, I think the death rate will go back up to about 800 deaths a week, it's 690 at the moment, so there are about 100 deaths not fully reported at the moment. Then if the Omicron reduced severity on death rates is confirmed, so around 10 January, it should start to fall.

fransknorge's "internal sources" suggested 400-450 deaths. c-w-s' "internal data" suggests 100 unreported deaths in addition to the 332 reported.

Without knowing what these various secret internal sources are, I don't really see a significant discrepancy. But I also don't think that we can rely on any figures for another week or so yet, due to the puzzling inability of the UK to report such important data for a period either side of a public holiday.

Paul Charles.

It just goes to show that there is probably only one accurate source of information on this thread…

Maybe the negative nellies that claim to be “in the know” should give it a rest?

It has to be said, however, that hospitalisations have increased to about 1,000 a day from a long-standing average of 7-800.

Does it? It can also be said that the people in mechanical ventilation beds is falling: 7 day average in January 2021 ~4051, December 2021 ~850.

It does.

Hospital admissions: 7-day average for 21/12 is 1,160, was 760 in late November.
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...1d4ad32f1a.png

You are both correct, 13901 is right that hospitalisations are increasing, especially in London, the rest of the country is probably in catch up mode.

​​​​Silver Fox is right that the number of patients needing ventilation is currently on the decrease.

But both of the above do not directly correlate to the real terms impact on the NHS. Previously most COVID patients would be focused on a few wards - respiratory wards, HDU and/or ICU. Now patients with COVID are scattered across the healthcare system and creating considerable operational pressure to create multiple areas of isolation, and coupled with a significant number of frontline essential workers catching COVID and/or needing to Self-isolate these are the real current pressure points. Flip back to posts #8551 and #8578 for more detail.

Hopefully the pressure will be short lived, and that the impact of the new variant continues to be minor, but there is still a significant risk to business as usual for many businesses and services. My broadband at home has been down since before the holidays because of a lack of Openreach engineers to fix the underlying issue, affecting many other local residents, COVID is being cited as a contributing excuse for the extended outage.​​​​​