fransknorge

I spend more time on this paper and this is really poor. First note this was not peer-reviewed, and probably might never be as it is a working paper, meaning an opinion. The studies included do not make sense. They have a weird criteria to exclude several studies (all studies using counterfactuals, which is the method the most used in epidemiological research, meaning most papers on the subject of this meta review are excluded, no reason given why), they use a criteria of including studies using diff-on-diff method, only to choose some papers that do not use diff-on-diff either, and those studies have the highest rating in the meta-review (??!!!).
The papers chosen are all using the Oxford Stringency Index, but the paper that introduce this index is absent. Why ? So they take 7 papers all using the same database but manipulate it in a different way and extract a mean from that ?
The entire weighting is based on one review that found benefits from the lockdown. The author of that review went public saying the meta-review from those 3 economists is junk and they distort the conclusions of their paper. The maths are opaque so the numbers non interpretable.
So basically a useless paper which seemed to be biased (note there is no real discussion of the bias introduced).

DaveS

Daily data:

Cases 60,578 (72,727 last Saturday)
Deaths 259 (296)
vaccinated up to and including 4 February 2022:
First dose: 52,413,781
Second dose: 48,549,079
Booster: 37,493,486

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now down 4.2% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is down 5.4%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 243.6 today.

Misco60

Only 35,469 boosters were given on Friday, and the 7-day average is now below 40,000 for the first time since the booster rollout began: in late December the average was over 850,000 per day. This despite the fact that fewer than two-thirds of eligible people have received a booster.

DaveS

I think getting to two thirds of the over 12 population for boosters is a remarkable achievement when you consider what has been going on in the UK in the last couple of months. Hopefully that is skewed towards those that need it most. I am sure we all now know plenty of people that have had COVID in the last month or so, but in my case I cannot think of anyone that had anything worse than a runny nose. I think it is understandable that people are just giving up and accepting what will be will be. When I try to justify boosters to people I know, the push back is often that I had a booster and still caught covid. In the end the strongest way I can justify it is that it makes travel easier. Of course people are still losing their lives to omicron, but hopefully the number will continue to fall as it has been for some time now.

Today's data will be delayed as I have been booted onto Lufthansa and I am not sure if they have anything modern like wifi on board! I'll settle for electric lighting, with anything else being a bonus

corporate-wage-slave

It's about 85% eligible have had a booster, the 65% includes young people between 12 and 15. Very few children under 16 can have a booster, and a big chunk of those 16 to 25 are still not in the time frame for getting their boosters, which is 3 months. Add into that all those who have had a COVID infection in the last 28 days - or even 91 days for younger people - then the actual uptake is pretty good in the circumstances, and I would expect it to drift upwards if major travel locations continue to require boosters. The UK has a relatively large child population which makes some of the national stats in this area difficult to make out. So while the national figure is that 91.1% have had at least the first dose, if you look at voters it's over 94%.

Misco60

The fact that the eligible population is smaller than that of some other countries makes the UK's figures look better than they actually are.

At the moment, 73% of the UK population is fully vaccinated, placing us about 40th in the world. Portugal is at 90% and even Australia and New Zealand, whose own vaccination programmes started disastrously, have achieved 80%.

We're doing better with boosters, currently in 8th place with 56% - but Iceland has given a booster to 67% of its population and Denmark 62%, and other European nations are catching us up very quickly.

Even a brief glance at the graphs available on Our World in Data and other websites shows that after a genuinely world-beating start the UK is now starting to trail very badly in the vaccination race, and it's not helpful to simply keep repeating, as the government does, that the UK is the best and fastest and that it's all going incredibly well. Giving 35,000 boosters a day is simply not going to get us to where we need to be.

DaveS

I was a bit unkind about LH earlier. There is wifi, albeit paid for J passengers. So here is the daily data:

Cases 54,095 (62,399 last Sunday)
Deaths 75 (85)
vaccinated up to and including 6 February 2022:
First dose: 52,427,710
Second dose: 48,576,227
Booster: 37,529,824

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now down 5.2% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is down 7.1%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 242.1 today. The cases and deaths figures are now showing sustained improvement just as the healthcare figures have been. I had expected the addition of re-infections to have more impact.

corporate-wage-slave

England median age is 7 years younger than Portugal, which is an enormous difference. There is no physical way England can get to 90% of the population vaccinated since there are too many children who under UK rules cannot be vaccinated. The maxima possible is around 81%. The effective minimum age for vaccines in England is 12 years old, in Portugal it's 5 years old and there are a lot less of them compared to England. Now I work hard trying to get people vaccinated, going around mosques and synagogues, billiard clubs and drug dens to encourage as many people to get it as possible, so I'm absolutely with you that we need to get more boosters sorted out. The 3 people in ICU at the RVI are all unvaccinated people in their 20s and 30s. But it's unrealistic to get to 90% unless we allow very young children to be vaccinated. There are nearly a million 8 year olds in the UK alone, I predict the UK will be an amazingly vibrant place to be in 10-15 years time, but with very rare exceptions they can't be jabbed. The demography of the UK is astonishing and I really don't think people have taken on board where we are heading as a nation.

Personally I would prefer the statistics to show how many adults over 18 years of age are unvaccinated, in England that's around 4 million people.

DaveS

Daily data:

Cases 57,623 (92,368 last Monday)
Deaths 45 (51)
Patients admitted 1,699 (1,851 on the 25th)
Patients in hospital 14,207 (15,982 on the 28th)
Patients in ventilation beds 474 (535 on the 28th)
Vaccinated up to and including 6 February 2022:
First dose: 52,437,297
Second dose: 48,594,494
Booster: 37,553,416

The rolling seven day daily average for cases is now down 10.4% on the previous week and the same measure for deaths is down 7.1%. The rolling 7 day daily average for deaths is 241.3 today.

corporate-wage-slave

The figures today are a bit more encouraging than of late, with a good reduction in case numbers in the worst hit areas, for 2 reasons. One is fairly obvious, we are now 1 week into England and Northern Ireland including reinfections, so there was a 10% step upwards with infections, hidden by something like an 11% underlying fall in cases. Wales was already including reinfections. The other one is that the re-infection rate is fairly static or falling, when you would actually expect it to rise upwards as more people have a COVID positive history, albeit with a 90 day lag. That's bound to happen eventually, but it's interesting that people with confirmed cases now are generally first infections rather than repeat infections. This is of course more about England rather than Scotland and Wales which both have half the rate of infection as England.

SherlockMiles

Tim Spector said in his most recent youtube update that the numbers are rising according to the ZOE app, and largely the reason for the divergence (compared to the official figures) is that people aren't taking as many PCRs.

corporate-wage-slave

Indeed he did say this, on 4 February relating to data up to and including 3 February. I'm not entirely convinced, since plenty of Laterals are being done, a lot by people who are quite expert at doing them, and a big chunk would be ongoing screening by NHS staff, those in education and so on. And we really aren't seeing any rises outside a few places (Cambridge is one, as an example). I think the trajectory from pandemic to endemic to epidemic is fairly robust now, in the absence of anything worse than BA.1 / BA.2. There are a whole range of other pieces of data that support a continuing reduction - fewer NHS and teacher absences, fewer transport staff off work, reductions in cases at hospitals (which has systematic PCR of arriving patients). But ZOE is an important resource so I wouldn't want to disregard their evidence.

VickiSoCal

St Andrews had a huge jump last week, biggest case numbers ever by a long ways, but most students are testing daily and they had very little in person instruction up to 2 weeks ago so I think it was inevitable. As the lat flow tests are being reported, they should get counted.

DaveS

The schools send out warning letters to parents when another child in a class is reported as positive. In the week before Christmas and the first two weeks of last month I was getting them at least every other day. There has not been one for near enough two weeks now. If this is the same picture elsewhere then it backs up the fall in cases that are seen in the official figures.

Internaut

I think LFD is one of the most valuable tools we have right now. Though clearly far from perfect, I get the sense enough of these tests are being done in education/work settings, by individuals before socialising and so on to make a meaningful difference.