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Data obsession in the time of a pandemic can damage your health. The most important information that is needed is: number of daily admissions to hospital related to Covid-19, and number of daily deaths due to covid-19. Anything else, died with rather than of, suicide rates, and so on are not easy to get. Thus for example today’s data shows hospital admissions due to Covid-19 was 5,608 which was up by 1729 from last week. Daily deaths were 150, up from 69 last week. (Source dreaded Guardian website but this bit not behind a registration wall). The other figure that is important is the excess mortality rate which is found here. The overall mortality is raised but looking at the weekly mortality we can see that the main effect for all age groups above 14 years are almost confined to weeks 10-20 of this year. Of course at present we do not know the effect of the second wave on mortality.
Talking of which, there appears to be evidence that the CFR is lower this time round. Even those admitted to intensive care seem to be surviving better. I heard an intensive care Dr today on Sky explaining why this may be happening, the hospitals are better at dealing with patients (I paraphrase), at triage and streamlining, at ensuring adequate and appropriate staffing and at dealing with covid-19 and its complications, She quoted that patients admitted to ITU now have, I think, 80% chance of surviving, compared to figures nearer to 50% in April-May. Some advances include, the use of dexamethasone, the actual procedures adopted in ITU, and the reduced use of ventilation in favour of CPAAP which is less invasive and probably gentler.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel? Yes but that is in about 3-6 months according to one expert from SAGE. There are two promising new lines: treatment with monoclonal antibodies, something which Trump had, with miraculous results, and the other is the possibility of the development of a vaccine.
I do take your point about the App. If it was a genuine NHS App, I would not hesitate to download it but a Dido App! No thanks. Not only do I object to that for obvious reasons but there has been a total failure to show that this has had any effect. Now the UKG is threatening positive people with the police, whereas normally a friendly visit from the local public health official would do the job.