Why severe impacts of covid will now get much much worse

 Let’s just identify some conclusions which seem to be unavoidable

1. Cases are growing exponentially (eg doubling in two weeks)

The ratios of cases to hospitalisation and of hospitalisations to deaths are much lower than in the second wave.

But as soon as we say that there is a ratio, it follows that if cases grow exponentially, the other statistics do too, just from a lower base number.

Don’t be misled by those graphs where the lines of hospitalisations and deaths seem to be growing at a slower rate. Hospitalisations lag cases, and deaths lag hospitalisations. Shift the lower lines to the left to recognise that lag, and their growth rates will look much worse

2. in fact hospitalisations do indeed seem to be doubling. ( “ I work in an NHS Covid ward – and I feel so angry“ Guardian article)

3. The government just hit the accelerator pedal. All the way. Floored it. All the restrictions gone. And one thing about this accelerator pedal is that when you push it to the floor, you can’t relax pressure and have it come back up again. It stays floored for four weeks or more.

4. It takes about two weeks for the first cases that result from relaxations to turn into hospitalisations, and another two weeks for those hospitalisations to turn into deaths, and a further week for us to take note of the statistics

5. By the time four weeks has passed, we can assume numbers will all have quadrupled.

6. But it’s much worse than that. Even if the government took immediate remedial action after four weeks, then the next four weeks’ death numbers would already be established. Those people would not all have died, would not all be in hospital, but the infections that would cause those further deaths over the next 4 weeks would already have occurred. By 4 further weeks the numbers would have quadrupled again, in other words 16 times what we’ve got at the moment.

7. One thing that is irreversible is the effect of opening up. Even if in four weeks time the government reversed all the relaxations, for example, then that would not restore us to today’s position, because by then we would have a much larger infected base of people.

8. There is a very wide range of variations in the modelling of the impact of the relaxations. That is because the modellers do not know how people will behave.

9. That is why these relaxations should have been done gradually, one at a time, with some estimation of the impact.

Patrick Vallance at the podium looked to me like somebody forced to make a hostage video, trying to give subtle clues that all is not well.

We are back in effect to “stay alert”, which was a terribly ineffective slogan the first time round.

Hands. Face mask. Space. That makes more sense.

The end of restrictions does not mean that the pandemic is over. It means that there is room for some of us in intensive care. I don’t think anyone can tell me that intensive care was not rationed last year.

I suspect that we are here because while last year “rationing intensive care“ would have been politically unacceptable if it was proposed as policy, the politicians have now discovered that under duress it can be done in practice .

They can pile pressure on the NHS without any real understanding of what is the worst that could happen.

The double-jab vaccination (and Autumn booster) Is our best protection against this. And the relaxation of rules could have happened a few weeks later, when a much larger proportion of the population was double vaccinated.

EDIT: What I should also have said is that this is limited by the vulnerable population size. In other words we get to a point where almost everybody who could get Covid has got it or has had it.

So 50,000 Cases per day does not necessarily turn into 800,000 cases per day. However, it’s fairly clear that nobody really has a clue as to what that limit is. And, bearing in mind that the deaths in the next four weeks are people who are already infected, then it’s worth bearing in mind the proportion of people who are double vaccinated now, As opposed to what we might hope to achieve in four or eight weeks time.

And finally… The limits by vulnerable population only work if we do not have a new variant that the vaccine does not prevent against