A deeper dive into COVID numbers

So we are all familiar,I am sure, with the government briefings where we are presented with a collection of slides to tell us what the current situation is with infections, deaths, and vaccinations. With the government lauding the great success of the vaccine roll-out whilst showing us how the number of deaths have fallen when compared to the number of  infections, I thought this needed another look and very few people die the day that they test positive for COVID. If everybody did then there wouldn’t have been a cull of the numbers by setting an arbitary cut-off of within four weeks.

1. First Step download the data that is available from the PHE COVID Dashboard
2. import the data into an Excel file
3. Work with it (guded by a couple of logical rules

• i f the government counts deaths up to four weeks, then we should be counting hospital admissions in four-weekly blocks too, as it is doubtful that anybody goes into hospital on test day.
• consider the data that they dont present us with on TV anymore.

I had some suspicions as people have compared the current infection rates to those from October, but that simple analogy doesn’t take into account the very low rates that we had over the summer despite the school holidays, “Eat Out to Help Out” and pubs having opened. When kids went back to school in September we saw a spike, almost 150,000 cases in September. The last four weeks have seen over 820,000 the virus was is more widespread.

As for Hospital admissions 8,008 people were admitted to hospital in Septmber, but in the last four weeks that number is 11,487.

Where we do start t osee real improvement is in deaths, on October the 1st the number of deaths was 7.5% of the months hospital adminssions, whereas yesterday it was 3.75% (half of that figure.)

The vaccine is doing a good job of decreasing the severity of the disease and it appears that the more seriously ill are the only ones being hospitalised, with proportion that survive having increased.

I have attached my excel file, for you to see my calculations, though the PHE data files did not all havethe same date ranges due to delays in reporting.