Some Numbers

 It's been a weekend of wild press speculation. No one actually leaked anything to the Sunday Times and there wasn't very much national news.  Locally, we had the weather and the people that had been fined for taking a trip to the seaside but Nationally there was nothing.  Even the government seem to have settled nicely into their bored but content appreciation of Lockdown 3.  

They had little choice but to run what they had already been told as if it was new and interesting fact.  We know that the government would like to open schools on the 8th of March.  We know they would like to open all schools.  We know that they have to look at the data first.  We know they are under a lot of pressure to get everything going again.  We know that they made mistakes last time (even if they keep insisting that this isn't the time to look at their mistakes).  We know that they won't know the effectiveness of the vaccine for another week and that they have promised to give schools two weeks notice. So anything that the Sunday Times printed as fact was a reworking of what we already know and wild speculations.  They probably talked to ministers who said how much they wanted things to go back to normal and let's face it, who doesn't.

The problem is that the hospitals still aren't going to be able to cope if everyone gets sick at the same time.  It's not just old people that need hospital help and not enough people have already been infected to mean that this risk is over.  Hopefully, the vaccination will help.  Hopefully, the virus won't mutate enough for the vaccine to be ineffective.

I thought for a while that the only numbers that are reliable to look at are number of people in hospital.  It's the only data set that hasn't changed in the way it has been measured and therefore can be compared accurately.  

So, I'm just going to leave some numbers here and let you hope as much as I am.

A week into the first lockdown  (30th of March) there were 11,093 people in hospital with Coronavirus (as we were calling it then)

On the 12th of April there were 21,687, this figure gradually fell and on the 23rd of June the government decided that restrictions could be gradually eased.

On the 23rd of June there were 4,134 people in hospital with Covid-19.  Many of us thought that that was still too many and that there was too much virus around to keep track of it but the numbers continued to fall until it settled at just under 1,000 a day throughout the whole of August and beginning of September.

Once all school children were back the number of people in hospital started to rise again and by the end of October there were 12,302 people in hospital with the illness, which prompted the Prime Minister to announce a 4 week closure of everything but schools.  

These restrictions brought hospital cases down to 16,304 by the 1st of December (not really a fall you say but it had got up to 17,454 - there's always a 2 week lag) and fell for another few days before rising sharply to a peak of 39,241 on the 18th of January.  By this time the children hadn't gone back to school after Christmas and a third, stricter lockdown has been in place since the 5th of Jan (when there were 30,761 people in hospital with Covid-19.

Yesterday, there were 23.341 people in hospital with the disease and the rate of fall hasn't yet started to increase (as you might expect with an effective vaccination programme) but even if it doesn't then the graph predicts that by the 8th of March the hospital cases could have fallen to about 6,000, so that'll be fine, we hope.  

Welcome to the pandemic of hope.