That seems like a good trend now.
Any other countries showing comparable figures?
We seem to be still increasing at a slow rate.
So if you only test 1 in 560 people in the population and only sequence 1.4% of those that gives you a true reflection of what is going on in a population of 350 million people.
I follow news in Australia because alot of Irish are over there and they done so well last year.
Anyways. In the news, there is 222 in hospital, 54 in intensive care with 25 of those on ventilators. And with those in ICU, 7 of them are in their 20s. It just goes to show how serious it can be for younger people as well.
Edit: numbers are for NSW region.
It's hard to know what is actually going on in the UK, the ONS data (which is retrospective) showed cases still rising when the realtime dashboard was showing them dropping. It could be a more gradual rise and fall than previously suggested;
In any case, UK cases are only now down to similar case levels to Ireland, on a proportional basis, after several weeks of being much higher. Cases in Ireland have actually been pretty steady, which seems about the best you can hope for with Delta.
Hospitalisations and deaths are much lower in Ireland and elsewhere than UK. Hopefully the high vaccine takeup in Ireland will see it ride out the Delta wave without too much of a jump in either of those metrics, will be interesting to see how other European countries with lower takeup get on.
Considering they are at potentially the peak of their delta wave those numbers in icu is exceptionally low considering they’ve a population of 25.5 million people. (its the equivalent to 40 icu patients in our icu’s.)
Isn't that 25 million for all of Australia? New South Wales has a population of 8 million with the most of the covid cases around Sydney which has 4 million people.
Edit: I forgot to say that numbers were for NSW.
If the sample is representative. Basic statistics
Represenative to what ?
The samples sequenced being representative of the general population of those infected. For example you would only need 1068 samples from a population of 350,000,000 to have 95% confidence that the true rate of delta in the full population was within 3% of that found in the sample taken. Provided the samples were representative . Eg no bias in those sent for sequence
The USA do not even know what day of the week it is, never mind being 95% certain of the true rate of Delta. It is the number of positive cases divided by the sequencing. Nothing to do in any way with population, because the only way to determine what Delta is in the population is by Genome Sequencing.
US 100K cases 1.4% sequenced = 1400
UK 35K cases 30% sequenced = 10,500
Germany 3K cases 8% sequenced = 2400
France 20K cases 2% sequenced = 400
Germany 3K cases 8% sequenced = 240
So 1400 samples exceeds the sample size requirements to have 95% confidence on the true rate within a 3% margin of error.Again it’s basic stats, and 1400 samples at 1.4% in the US gives far higher accuracy in their estimates of the prevalence than 8% in Germany for example
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/08/the-u-k-s-delta-surge-is-collapsing-will-ours.html
Is it possible that the Delta variant may do us a favour by spreading quickly through the remainder of those un-vaccinated and burning out? I only say this because most people here are, or soon will be, vaccinated . Those that aren't may be conferred with immunity after recovery and most are not in vulnerable groups.
Interesting data in America, looks like Delta Plus is around
It looks like Delta variant has not led to the rise that people expected. It quickly achieves dominance over other strains but once dominant, at least in Ireland, does not lead to too much of an increase to worry about. Cases have increased but appear to have levelled off and deaths, probably due to vaccinations, remain low.
The annoyance that people had with the whole NPHET projections is that they did not seem to adequately account for vaccination rates in their models. The age groups now most affected are also a factor, excluding at risk, and we have very high vaccination levels in all groups above the youngest cohort.
I see that Sky News are reporting that the vaccines do not prevent transmission of Delta, with levels of virus similar in both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups. Zero Covid is no longer a possibility it seems. The virus will be with us forever.
If it's not making people sick in large numbers it's like other viruses that are circulating.
Yes. But we are looking at a future of regular booster shots for the entire world. How will this play out?
I don’t really understand why. Once most people are vaccinated or have contracted the virus at least once it is no longer “novel”. Why wouldn’t boosters just be like the annual flu shot after that? Take them if you want to, don’t if you don’t, and highly recommended for the elderly/at-risk.
I guess it would be like the flu shots, but on a much larger scale and possibly more frequent than once a year. And for a very long time, if not indefinitely. That's a big deal to me.
Less vaccinated people contract and emit the virus and while viral load can be the same (this is still being disputed), vaccinated people clear it faster than unvaccinated so less time to infect others.
I’d like to say it’s unlikely to be multiple times a year and that it won’t be made mandatory to get boosters to live our lives as normal but I’m not going to pretend to have any idea. If you read the news one week there are reports that immunity is long-lasting and there’s probably no need for boosters for most people. The next week we’re hearing reports of Israel rolling out boosters and planning a lockdown in a couple of weeks. I’d like to think things will calm down once everyone gets used to this being just another background respiratory illness and we start seeing lots of people getting flu/cold-like symptoms and almost no one going to hospital but who knows.
Nobody knows but as our understanding of SARS-COV-2 improves we will get a clearer picture. This winter they may be a priority in some cases but long term likely to be more like the flu' vaccine.
If endemic covid ends up being equivalent to the flu in terms of outcomes but much more transmissible, then it's going to be real pain in the tits.
Hopefully, like that theory about the Russian flu, it becomes more akin to a common cold.
Yep. Hopefully the high vaccination numbers combined with the very infectious Delta (when it burns out) will provide a strong herd immunity for us in the future.
It is advantageous to an vaccinated individuals long term immunity to be exposed to the virus
I take it you mean un-vaccinated? May be if they are not vulnerable or develop long Covid. I don't advise catching it but it seems to be going that way.
No I mean vaccinated. You are protected from severe disease and the immune system gets exposed to the newer variant promoting and extending immunity if in wanes in time
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