Continuing the discussion from Current covid hospitalisation sitrep in the UK:
10 days ago, I took a look at how the hospitalisations in the UK were increasing, and noticed that they were on a pure exponential trajectory. I decided to take another look today and see what the current situation is, as of end of last week. The data below are up to Oct 22/23.
I used the exponential model from the last post, to see how the reality has followed the predicted fit. Results below
hospitalisations
The blue bars are the actual data. The red circles are the data used to fit the model, and the red line is the prediction from the model.
Up until just before last weekend, we can see that the number of patients admitted into hospital continued to follow the perfect exponential fit from more than 10 days ago. Some possible good news is that it seems to be tailing off in the last couple of days. Not sure if that is some kind of problem in data recording or whether it is real. Something that some folk here might find interesting is that this effect seems too early for it to be a result of the Tier 3 lockdowns. I would expect the effect of the lockdown to show up (if at all) later this week, not last week. Either it’s dodgy data, or the people themselves were responsible for the drop in hospitalisations either through social distancing, or because we are hitting levels of immunity in the population.
In any case, we are hitting about 40% of the hospitalisations that we saw at the height of the bad times, in April. And there are still large parts of the country that I believe have not experienced the virus yet.
ventilated patients
Again, blue bars are actual data, red circles are data used to fit the model and red line is the model prediction.
Due to some lag between patients being admitted to hospital, and being put onto a ventilator, we are still seeing pure exponential growth of ventilated patients.
The good news is that the rate at which people are being put onto ventilators seems much slower than the first time round. Either because doctors have other treatments now and are just not putting people onto ventilators if they can possible help it, or because people are not getting as sick this time.
If the trajectory continues for another 10 days or so, though, we will still end up with about 40% of the total of ventilator patients as we saw at the worst of the April peak.
thoughts
Clearly there has been another epidemic outbreak of this virus in the north of England. There are some early signs that it might be tailing off now. If that’s true, then the explanation for that is unlikely to be lockdows, as those have only just been put in place, and haven’t had time to filter through. That means that either people were getting scared and social distancing before the lockdowns came into force, or the virus has reached the limit of its reach in those areas, which would give some support to innate immunity amongst the pop. If either of those explanations are true, then it would seem we didn’t need the lockdown. I know many of you will be shocked to hear that 
If we have almost reached the peak of new hospitalisations (and it doesn’t spike up again this week), then this also suggests that, going forward, we are likely to see regional outbreaks of smaller scale than the london outbreak we saw in April. But there are still plenty of regions waiting to be hit…
This will be an interesting week to see what happens next in the data.
cheers
True, Gates and other creatures of that oligo-plankton have made a killing, yetmorebillions-wise. But when a time of reckoning finally arrives that can still be taken away from them; as much of it as will survive the big shake-out when the super ‘rich’ realise that so much of their hallucinated ‘wealth’ has turned out to be just so much worthless paper/computer-entries: