Oxford and Warwick

[ivykaty44]

Oxford has moved from tier 1 to tier 2 as the rate has moved to 134 - 10000

so why is Warwick still in tier 1 when there rate is 205 - 10000

areas are not moving to the correct tiers and leading people to a false sense of security or am I being unreasonable and missing something?

My understanding is that it’s not just down to the infection rate, but a combination of things including how much space is in hospitals etc.

And also whether it's in a contained part of the population or more widespread.

I also think they don’t want to publicly explain what moves areas up or down tiers because then they’d be bound to it.

My area has been in Tier 2 for over 2 weeks and hasn’t made any difference to the numbers yet, annoying as I can’t see this all getting sorted before Christmas!

The scoring methods to establish tiers should be transparent, and how your area is scored should be too Imo.

I think the infection rate is only one factor in the overall decision. It would a very crude measure really- and would unfairly penalise more rural areas. So if a large proportion of the infections are from one or two settings- I know one area where most common place to be infected at the moment is in hospital- but otherwise transmission rates are low then it is not sensible to raise a regions tier.

I think being more transparent would help, but equally it’s not really a straightforward, simple x rate = tier 1, y rate = tier 2.

Both universities in Oxford have been doing their own testing at their own testing centres but for some reason the university numbers had been ignored from the published figures that seem only to include community testing. Oxford’s true number is likely to be far higher per 100k than the current official figures.

It’s more to do with what’s happening in the area’s hospitals. Warwick has a far larger capacity of beds, and proportionally less of them are currently filled with Covid patients.

Up to last week, Warwick were not cancelling/postponing non-Covid treatments, unlike Oxfordshire, but I don’t have this week’s data - happy to be corrected by someone who has.

You're missing the fact that the infection rate is only one of the determining factors for moving tiers

You didnt really think that the whole of the government had somehow not noticed and you were the only one to spot it did you

I think the infection rate in Warwick is probably largely driven by the universities in and outside Coventry so the rest of the country may have low rates of infection and not actually be causing hospital admissions to rise by very much.

I suspect it's the same in Oxford to be fair, but in Oxford you have all the colleges close together and in the city centre (plus all the students at Oxford Brookes) and it probably means transmission between students and locals is less easy to stop compared with Warwick which is a campus university (I don't know anything about Coventry uni).

I would agree that it is easier to separate the students at Uni of Warwick (which is a campus on the edge of Coventry) and there is a high number of hospitals in the area. Oxford, unless they do something severe' cannot prevent students mixing with the town centre and locals as the university is too close. Also, the majority of Oxford is affiliated with the university in some way (in terms of degrees of separation) so allowing the rule of six, the virus would spread to the majority of the population.

You need to multiply the infection rate per 100,000 by the population. Far more people live in Oxford than Warwick.

Oxford Population is 687,000 = 920 people
Warwick Population is 31,000 = 64 people.

Its all about hospital capacity.

It’s to do with hospital beds not infections. Which is why Liverpool was in tier 3 before Nottingham and the Wirral was added to tier 3 with low numbers

@Seapoint2002 Warwick district is actually covering a population of 140k not 31, I understand the population is fewer in Warwick but obviously the rate could still be higher

I get the point that there are other factors at play and little transparency on what those factors actually are - thank