Health Secretary Matt Hancock revealed some statistics in the Commons yesterday about the Delta (Indian) variant: out of 12,383 Delta variant positive tests in the U.K. up to June 3rd, 464 went to emergency care and 126 were admitted to hospital. Of those admitted to hospital, 83 were unvaccinated, 28 had had one jab and three had had both doses.
Keen-eyed readers will spot that 83+28+3 is not 126 – there are 12 hospital admissions unaccounted for. A Department of Health source told the Financial Times‘s Sebastian Payne that nine of these “don’t match to a vaccine status at present” while three were within 21 days of their first dose so didn’t count in any category.
Can we use these figures to make some crude calculations of the severity of the Delta variant?
126 hospital admissions out of 12,383 positive tests gives a 1% hospitalisation rate, or 99% not needing hospital. How does this compare to the Alpha (British) variant?
Last week Public Health England (PHE) released a study claiming the Delta variant had around double the risk of serious disease or hospitalisation compared with the Alpha variant. However, according to the ONS, during the winter peak when the Alpha variant was dominant, around 2% of the population of England was infected with COVID-19 and around 0.04% of the population was being admitted to hospital with the virus each week, giving around 2% of British variant infections leading to hospital admission. This is double the rate for the Indian variant on Hancock’s figures – and furthermore, Hancock’s figures use positive cases, not an ONS population infection estimate, which would reduce the hospitalisation rate for the Indian variant further.
However, what we don’t know, because these are just statistics delivered verbally in Parliament not a proper report (more science-by-press-release), is how many of the 12,383 positive cases are too recent to have led yet to hospital admission. We also don’t know how elderly or vulnerable those in the sample of 12,383 are, or what impact the vaccines are making on the hospitalisation rate.
The figures are of limited use as well in estimating the effectiveness of the vaccines against hospital admission with the Delta variant. That’s because we don’t know what proportion of the 12,383 infected were vaccinated, so we can’t control for that key factor. Having said that, the three versus 83 hospital admissions for fully vaccinated versus unvaccinated seems encouraging.
Overall, this data is very limited. Nonetheless, the fact that the hospitalisation rate even among positive cases is so much lower with the Delta variant now than with the Alpha variant in winter is further evidence that the latest scariant is nothing to fear.
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I confess, I am equally frustrated that everyone carries around with them a way of accessing the entirety of human knowledge, and so few bother doing anything more than watching kitty video’s or asking their friends what they are doing.
Puppy videos are better.
Thanks to Joanna Gray for exposing this shocking truth. All these years I had just assumed that young people were even more adept than us old folks at using the internet as the vast, wondrous library it is, so it comes as a real shock to me that most young ones have no interest at all in that.
One small English quibble: it’s “reams”, not “reems”.
Really nteresting article. I think you are on to something here. Most people will default to ‘lazy’, given the chance and lack of stimuli.
I will be looking at my teenage children’s usage with this in mind.
One more reason to be glad that I’ll be dead soon.
When I wrote my PhD, I could only use hardcopy sources and I went through a LOT of books and journals to do it. The internet existed, but it was nothing like the resource it is now. When I quit teaching, half my students were using the internet to write their essays for them (and being caught out because the results didn’t sound like them. Thus I would type in what they’d written et voila! Source found and student got a b@ll@cking). To find they’re not even doing that much is depressing. I am reading academic papers, doing research, watching documentaries, listening to interviews… It’s all there for them. Why aren’t they seizing on it? What has changed in education that they no longer have the urge to learn even when it’s easy?
Stupid is as stupid does (or does not); the answer my be that the younger generation has become more and more stupid.
Ah yes.
But that’s just with Bliar’s genius stroke of increasing university attendance to 50% of yoof.
(In other words ensuring a cohort of students of below 50% IQ, as many kids can’t or don’twant to do that. And the appointment of “University Professors” who would be lucky to have been laboratory assistants back when I was at University.).
Now, we learn that our Uniparty (Labia,branch) chums look to ensure 70% of kiddies go to University. The outcome should be exciting.
Maybe forcibly jabbing children with 72 needles has something to do with it…
What do they eat in Scotland? Fascinating question.
Technology is great and we should ofcourse use it. —–But today Technology is using the people.———– In a very short period of time we have gone from no phones to where I now see young people waiting for the school bus or walking along the road all glued to their phones. I see young mums pushing their buggies with one hand on the phone and paying no attention at all to their baby. —————I think we have to class this now as some kind of phycological disorder.
It is tied up with changes to the family structure and lone parents and grandparents needing to provide 365 day support to their children and grandchildren in order to keep them dependant and home for as long as possible so they will never be lonely.
Jordan Peterson does a good analysis on this subject.
Yes, plus pots of extra benefit money for life, if they can get their sproggies declared “mentally disabled” under one or more of the hundreds of categories.
Going to a hospital appointment the other day I was carrying my current read, D Day, by Antony Beevor. “Good book? What’s it about?” Asks the nurse. “Er, D day”‘ I reply. “What’s that then?” She said.
It’s hopeless, isn’t it?