@borntobequiet
Many schools had very low attendance throughout July - hundreds of thousands of pupils were isolating. Some schools broke up over two weeks ago. Others closed bubbles, whole year groups or shut entirely due to illness. Many parents chose to keep children off school in the last week to avoid compromising holidays. Others will have avoided testing.
It’s really no surprise that rates are falling, given infection rates and unavoidable mixing in schools, and I’m sure *@noblegiraffe* won’t be perplexed by it.
My council area. Schools open til Friday. Less bubbles closed for the council area for the last week. Cases now dropping.
If anything I would put the weather as being more significant than schools that week.
Also in terms of people not being able to get a pcr. Well that doesn't make sense either as if that were happening, you would expect the positivity rate to increase. It hasn't. Its dropped.
England is following the same pattern as Scotland still. And today they are saying hospitalisations and deaths are dropping there now. So in Scotland we know a drop in cases isn't due to drops in testing. Its due to case drop.
It could be the sheer number of people isolating, but the 'hit rate' of prevented transmissions gets lower and lower as vaccinations rise because there are less vectors it can spread to anyway - hence why the plan is for vaccinated adults to no longer isolate from 16th August.
Again, we have a population where over 90% now has antibodies. This means there is an ever decreasing pool of people the virus can spread to. The whole point of the vaccine is to achieve as close to herd immunity as possible to limit the spread and severity of the problem and burden on the NHS.
The Euros had the effect of things spiking much steeper and quickly than most had predicted and it really made the scientists nervous that it would carry on. But this spike has been in younger people who have not been double vaccinated - which in itself is good news and although its travelled up the age groups to a degree the vaccines do seem to have done their stuff.
I do worry about the autumn / winter but the numbers are consistent and see to really back up each other in saying that this is a real drop in cases thats hard to explain away as not having been significantly influenced by immunity levels reaching a critical point.
Its now looking like data is suggesting that the R was just below 1 before 19th July. Which is really good news.
It doesn't mean we are out of the woods. But things do look promising.
We have a numbers game here. I hate to keep saying this, but if we know that the vaccine reduces your rates of infection in the double jabbed and we know that reinfection rates are still low and it reduces the severity of covid in the double jabbed and we have had a very high rate of cases in a very short period of time something will eventually happen. And thats we would expect to see a peak and then numbers drop off because there is no where for the virus to go. Unless we have a new variant which changes this - and even then there seems to be rising confidence that we would need a significant mutation for vaccines to not have at least some protective effect at this point (this may of course be misplaced).