@rosestar,
No. We have moved on. This was the case before we knew anything else about Covid, and because we had no other indicators by which to measure its impact. Now the focus should be on mitigating the dangers of Covid, which if done correctly, will then mitigate pressure on clinical resources. I repeat my earlier comment - Covid is a public health crisis, not a staffing crisis. The objective is to stop people getting so severely ill that they need hospital treatment in the first place, not to make sure there enough hospital beds for everyone who gets severely ill.
We always had plenty of other indicators to measure its impact, deaths, length of infection, number of people off work etc. When pandemics start, and you have no vaccinations and limited treatments, of course it is all about reducing spread, which is mainly about reducing contact, but also about mask wearing and social distancing.
Clearly, in tandem with all the above, producing a vaccine and improving treatments is also going on. Now we have the vaccine and treatments have improved.
Covid is, for us, both a public health crisis and a staffing crisis. I am not sure that you can easily separate the two, anyway, as they are so interlinked.
But, as I have maintained all along, if the hospital system does become overwhelmed the impact explodes, and overtakes everything else.
We are right now at what appears to be a point of inflexion. Can we now 'manage' COVID as an endemic illness, or will we still need to use our toolkit of pandemic measures going forwards? That remains unclear and will do so until mid autumn.
it doesn’t work like this. R is a population average which gives you a broad indication of how fast the disease is spreading, NOT what the outcomes are going to be. Rates of long Covid, deaths etc vary significantly among different social groups, ages etc. So whilst the R number is a leading indicator of hospitalisation, complications and deaths (ie it tells you what to expect), it is not an absolute predictor / causal indicator of outcomes. You cannot infer the r number between social groups because that’s simply not how the virus spreads at population level. r cannot tell you whether the virus is spreading among at risk groups or otherwise, that has to be inferred from other information we have, specifically case rates among population groups (which are not equivalent to r).
Yes, the more granularity of data you have, the better. However, sometimes one group leads another, so you cannot ignore it. For instance, if we have a massive outbreak amongst school children, this will be a forward indicator of increased cases in adults aged 30-60 (plus some older grandparents).
No. This is my point. At the beginning we had no other choice or information. Now we do, so we manage impact first, hospitals will follow. There is no other illness in existence for which we manage hospital resources as a priority over patient outcomes (although I’m not a medical doctor, so happy to be corrected by someone who is in this case).
Every pandemic plan, and there are lots I can link to (CDC, WHO etc), manage hospital resources as a priority. Of course, if you feel that we have gone beyond this point, then that will change. However, hospitals cannot 'follow' as we cannot magically recruit doctors. They are currently the limiting factor.