Sunday 7 August 2022

Covid-19 - four-month waves (part 3)

AS I said in March: "Looking at that, I won't be surprised if there's another peak in June 2022."

It seems that the various variants of the virus are mutating more slowly and/or resistance (from previous infections or jabs) is waning more slowly, because the peak of the current wave wasn't until late July. From Worldometers:
But better roughly right as precisely wrong as they say. The good news is that even at the peak, daily deaths were only a fraction of previous peaks, and barely up from the low in June. Unless 'they' just can't bothered collecting/faking* the numbers any more (* delete according to taste).

And I guess the next wave in four or five months' time will be barely noticeable and we can concentrate on worrying about something else, like World War Three, the cost of living crisis or Ukraine-related mass hunger.

8 comments:

Piotr Wasik said...

I don't believe worldometers anymore, it is too dependant on number of tests performed. Now we test a lot less, so it looks like waves are smaller. The only source I still believe for the UK is ONS https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/datasets/covid19infectionsurveywales because they send out tests to people at random, self selection bias still exists (because you are not obliged to self-test and submit the result), but it is much smaller. And sending at random means that you test a lot of healthy people, so you have a good control group.

I plotted their data (the orange graph, page 2 - https://buboflash.eu/static1/app/demo/2022/08/england_daily_infections_ONS.pdf) a while ago, unfortunately it stops on 15th of June, so I cannot update. We still have a lot of cases, and this year's waves are higher than previous years (no restrictions + more transmittable variants?). I agree that the number of deaths is much lower, case fatality ratio even lower, and it seems that ONS reporting is in line with worldometers here. I am not afraid anymore that it will kill me; I am afraid of various types of long covid and disability possibly from cumulative danage from multiple infections.

As for cumulative cases so far (the green graph, page 3), we exceeded 10,000 cases per 10,000 people on 29th of March 2022, meaning that people are getting covid over and over again.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW< all stat's are questionable. You've got to accept some things as 'reasonable indicators of trends'.

Agreed on Long Covid, it is an absolute bastard, I have a moderately bad version and some have it far worse.

Yes, I know plenty of people had it more than once, like me and most of my family.

Piotr Wasik said...

" all stat's are questionable. You've got to accept some things as 'reasonable indicators of trends'". Yes, worldometers is good enough for trends, I can see when we peak etc, but not for absolute numbers.

Re: long covid, multiple infections in your family. Sad to hear, best wishes for you guys.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW: "Worldometers is good enough for trends, I can see when we peak etc, but not for absolute numbers"

Agreed. Each country measures differently, some deliberately overstate (like UK), some deliberately understate (N Korea). Some do it inadvertently. But chuck them in them in a pot, while the absolute numbers are questionable, it's good enough for trends, as you say.

The same applies to most stat's. What's the true rate of inflation? No idea. Is inflation a lot higher than a year or two ago? Yes of course, and in most countries in the world.

Bayard said...

PW, have you plotted a graph of "deaths from all causes" over time from the ONS statistics?

Piotr Wasik said...

B - nope. All I ever did with ONS data is in this pdf I linked.

Pablo said...

... we can concentrate on worrying about something else, like another nuclear reactor meltdown

Bayard said...

"like another nuclear reactor meltdown"

Ooh, I wonder why that would be a danger. Surely such a decent little democracy like Ukraine wouldn't be shelling a nuclear reactor, would they?