Are cases really dropping?

[PrpleRain]

I understand that once you test positive on lateral flow you need to start self isolation and no pcr is required. You should report the result to nhs but how many people will bother doing that? I feel like everyone around me had covid but then I read that the cases are dropping and it’s just hard to believe..

I saw someone yesterday who said their son came back from abroad at xmas/new year and tested positive but they/their partner didn't get it despite him staying with them. He later said they might of had but don't know as they had no lfts!

@Pootle40

Who cares

Loads of people. Important for many reasons. Of course, we know you don't because you pop up with your shite on loads of Covid threads. And yet you seem unable to stay away.

Agree with you op.
I wouldn’t register a positive lft. So that I can get T&T on my case…no thanks! Will just isolate.

That said I can believe cases are falling a bit. Hospitalisations are stable overall and dropping in london.
Where I am everyone had it in December, so I can quite believe less people are catching it as we’ve all just had it

@RosaMoline
You are right. Wednesdays is always the high for reported deaths as few are reported at weekends and then there is a backlog.
That said I am always stunned by the numbers of deaths and how accustomed we are to them
At the very beginning I remembered being absolutely shocked when 50
People a day were dying in Italy.
Nowadays it’s the equipment of a 747 falling out of the sky every day and we’re totally desensitised to it

No it's not if you look at inpatient beds used by COVID patients. My hospital has seen a 4x exponential growth of positive patients in just over 2 weeks.

Cases started falling here before LFT change and MV beds decreasing in London

We’re ahead though so other areas may be later

I personally have several people that I know who are positive, it feels like it’s creeping closer to me. Yet it’s taken until now to get close.

Correct - there's a lag between the actual death and when it is recodrded (and of course that varies further depending on whether it's by cause on death certificate)

Just like there's a lag with the published hospital admissions, where there is a lag of at least 4 days.

I thought those points were well known, and of course they don't prevent analysis of trends

Deaths and hospitalisations relate to cases that were diagnosed a couple of weeks ago. It takes time for someone infected to become unwell enough to need hospital and more time to die (sadly). It’s a bit like if you’ve got an overflowing tap, once you turn it off, it still takes time for the water to drain away. It will take a while for the fall in cases (if it is a true fall) to lead to a fall in hospitalisations and more time to lead to a fall in deaths.

The ONS survey is probably more accurate than the daily cases at this point. I think with the move away from pcr testing, there’s going to be a change in people’s behaviour.

11,000 odd in hospital at 29th Dec. Now 19,000 odd. Normt reducing yet and neither are deaths . Obviously much better thsn previous waves as we have vaccines but not out of woods yet

The point with the high daily death figure is the trend is rising. So week on week we are getting higher deaths each week. There has always been a lag in reporting so whichever way you look at it deaths are rising

@Covidworries

The point with the high daily death figure is the trend is rising. So week on week we are getting higher deaths each week. There has always been a lag in reporting so whichever way you look at it deaths are rising

But that’s from when the cases were rising three or four weeks ago. Not now.

death are rising and will continue to rise that is true but cases can also be dropping.

The relationship between the two has a time lag so at the moment the deaths and hospitalisations are still rising due to the sheer number of mid to late December cases.

@purpledaisies

Yes and cases are still high and due to the lag in testing positive to hospitalisation to death its doing to be 3 or 4 weeks until we know if hospitalisations and deaths stay high, go higher or drop.
Its risky because if cases continue to stay high but this isnt shown due to data not identifying the number of positives this wont be fully known until mid feb by which point the next 4 weeks of hospitalisation and deaths are already locked in as those people have already been exposed.
If the hospital system completely crashes through numbers more people will die who would have recovered and there will be nothing that can be done from such high numbers.

I hope that this is a true drop, i hope the hospitals can continue to funtion effectively with the numbers being admitted, but i dont think anyone can be sure of this from data so far

Deaths, which are recorded as being within 28 days of a positive test, are rising because cases were very high. It does not mean that people are dying of Covid. The number of patients in ventilated beds in the UK is falling, and that is a much better indicator of the actually numbers of related patients very ill from Covid.

Think it's the lack of tests available and people probably not testing, now Christmas is over.
Purely anecdotal, but my Facebook and quite and a fair few friends and family members seem to have it at the moment, either I live in an area of an unusually high infection rate, which surely must be skewing the national average, or there has been a change in how they are reporting the data, or people are not bothering to report as much anymore.

Maybe people are just not out-and-about much just now. January is usually a slow month for hospitality and retail etc isn't it? People are skint and having a bit down time after the Christmas madness. We'll see what happens after pay-day.

Also bear in mind with regards to covid cases 'in hospital' :
My Nan had a bad fall on New Year's Day and has been in hospital since then. On Monday just gone she tested positive for covid, so she's actually caught it in the hospital. Fully vaccinated and boosted, and currently asymptomatic. Yet she still counts in the overall numbers.
There will be many, many cases like this so don't take the numbers as people in hospital BECAUSE of covid, if she hadn't fallen she wouldn't have it at all.

I repeat 1.6 million test recorded isn’t no one tested, it’s Over 2 percent of the country on a single day! (And lots of negative lft will not be recorded meaning the number will be higher). I understand for some people it’s very important to buy a particularly narrative but be good to get a clear idea of how many tests we expect (remember at the beginning when Matt Hancock said that he could get 100,000 tests a day, and it seems impossible now no we say”but no one is testing” when we have 16 times that number! That is a significant change in the narrative!)

Just anecdotally, we now have 25 cases in my hospital over 4 wards. We had none 4 weeks ago. None are in ITU, none are on CPAP. They are all hospital transmission or incidentally found on admission screening. Hardly any are even on oxygen. We have to supply figures of how many are in hospital because of it. The answer is none. We have found the cases because we are looking very hard indeed for them.

Zoe symptom tracker app shows symptomatic cases dropping : this includes any contributor with symptoms whether or not they have a positive test.

More people would have been testing over Christmas, before social events/seeing family etc. There's not as much need to test as a precaution at the moment, so it may look like cases are coming down.

@PartyOnKale

Zoe symptom tracker app shows symptomatic cases dropping : this includes any contributor with symptoms whether or not they have a positive test.

No longer falling in London though but still lower than it was.

[quote Frazzled2207]@RosaMoline
You are right. Wednesdays is always the high for reported deaths as few are reported at weekends and then there is a backlog.
That said I am always stunned by the numbers of deaths and how accustomed we are to them
At the very beginning I remembered being absolutely shocked when 50
People a day were dying in Italy.
Nowadays it’s the equipment of a 747 falling out of the sky every day and we’re totally desensitised to it[/quote]
I think a lot of it is because we're having it shoved in our faces every day.

I always thought the 'death ticker' was a bit crass. But all the media seem to keep doing it.

About half a million people die every year in the UK in a normal (i.e. non-pandemic) year. Which is about 1,400 a day on average.

It's a huge number when you think about it -- two or three jumbo jets to use your analogy. But it's not headline news daily so we don't see it.

@sproutsandparsnips

Just anecdotally, we now have 25 cases in my hospital over 4 wards. We had none 4 weeks ago. None are in ITU, none are on CPAP. They are all hospital transmission or incidentally found on admission screening. Hardly any are even on oxygen. We have to supply figures of how many are in hospital because of it. The answer is none. We have found the cases because we are looking very hard indeed for them.

Which makes your hospital unusual because at the moment, the people in hospital because of Covid make up more than half the number of Covid positive patients.

The current test positivity rate is hideous and there’s an awful lag in the test reporting. I’m not sure it’s possible to give an accurate idea of what’s going on from the daily data. It does look like we aren’t testing enough and the testing system has reached capacity and is struggling.