I'd pitch it at 75 - 80% chance we won't. 20 - 25% we will at this moment in time.
At most it will be a November style lite lockdown with kids in school I suspect. Its not going to be full closures of everything.
Lets see how the next 2 or 3 weeks progresses before we make more concrete predictions on that though tbh.
Generally speaking the last data hasn't been as bad as feared although case rates and deaths continue to creep up. Its slow and steady growth, which makes it easier to make intervention with less aggressive methods rather than the scary exponential growth of last September. Which is good.
This is an interesting blog on the subject:
unherd.com/2021/09/are-we-heading-for-another-winter-lockdown/?=frlh
Also, the shape of the curve is very different this time around. We’re at 120 deaths a day, but the growth rate is about 7% a week. There’s this neat trick for working out compound growth: if you divide 70 by the percentage weekly growth, you get the (rough) doubling time. So it will take about 10 weeks for deaths to double. By comparison, deaths were going up 50% a week for periods in autumn and winter, doubling about every 10 days.
Maybe that doesn’t matter and we don’t need to stop them. “The optimistic reading is that we now have so much immunity that it’ll peak on its own,” says Oliver Johnson. And there are hints that case numbers have begun to come down. But if it doesn’t, if it carries on as it is, then we’ll have 250 or so deaths a day by the middle of November, and the NHS under severe pressure.
And
Crucially, too, at that rate of growth we could end up at 2,000 hospitalisations a day — about half the January 2021 peak. If that were to happen, we probably won’t see hospitals running out of oxygen, like we did during the first two waves. But we might see it getting harder to access routine care. I spoke to one ophthalmologist earlier this year, and he said that quite a few patients suffered avoidable, but irreversible, sight loss because the sheer weight of Covid cases meant their treatment had to be delayed. That’s a microcosm of the health service in general: for comparison, 2017/18, the worst winter for excess deaths in the last half-century, saw a peak of about 1,000 hospitalisations and about 50 deaths a day, and that led to tens of thousands of hospital appointments being cancelled.
Oliver Johnson @bristoliver is a good (sane and moderate) follow if you are interested.
The government will want to avoid lockdowns for economic reasons and because that discourages people from seeking medical help when they first need it, instead leading to further problems down the line.
The reality this time around is the majority of pressure is likely to come from non-covid cases but covid will add a layer of complication, slow everything down and then covid cases will be the cherry on top of shortage of beds / service.
And I think its other health care issues which are going to face more problems rather than it being about covid patients.
I believe that any lockdown we have will be less to do with covid and more to do with inability to provide medical, police and fire cover over the winter imho. Which I think is a scary prospect in its own right.
(Manchester Airport closed for a couple of hours this week because there was a medical emergency at the airport which the ambulance took ages to get to. As a result the man was cared for by firefighters who are also trained to deal with medical emergencies but that meant there was no firecover available for the airport whilst they did that. This case should give you some idea of why there might be problems and why certainly some large events which require medical staff in attendance would be one of the first things likely to be potted - and why I think event passports are not as likely as some suggest. From a security point of view you are also going to want to avoid potential major incidents on top of hospitals being stretched).
I also don't rule out (and very much expect it) for the army to be drafted in to help with ambulance service problems at some point. Or similar.
Of course this would mean that events will end up cancelled, not due to covid restrictions, but the indirect problems caused by covid (which raises questions about government support / insurance).
I'm expecting things to start getting tricky in November and be pretty dreadful until end January.
Which may give people thought to reconsider at least some Christmas plans in order to facilitate Christmas Day itself. Some people will go crazy partying but others will very much remain cautious to ensure Christmas doesn't get cancelled again.