Here's your answer:
https://youtu.be/5r0AA41dgLU

All of Dr John Campbell's videos (like the one linked above by cyclopathic) are worth viewing.

As the infection rates spiral it’s going to get much harder trying to make sense of the figures with journalists blithely repeating press release numbers—not understanding the underlying facts, or not asking pertinent questions. Here's something I wrote for my extended family about the UK situation.

1. INFECTIONS: Scientific and medical experts from South Africa were quick to reassure the UK that although the Omicron variant was spreading more rapidly, symptoms, hospitalisations and deaths were much reduced from those of Delta. The UK Health Security Agency felt this was optimistic and in order to impress the urgency of the situation, it issued a statement on 13 December through Health Secretary Sayid Javid saying that current infection levels (people catching the virus THAT day) in the UK were 200,000 per day and doubling every 1.9 days. If this were true then by now the figure would be over 1.1 million infections today. And looking ahead only two weeks, would reach 100 million per day by 31 December—which is 1.5 times the entire population of the UK being infected each day!!



"What are they smoking?” was the general reaction and the UKHSA has now admitted it was wrong to assume the growth rate, and has declined to give an up-to-date estimate of infections.

2. CERTIFIED DAILY CASES: Although the UK is processing a million PCR tests per day the high level of positives (~10%) indicates it needs to do more testing as true figures are not being revealed. The WHO suggests that when positives are over 5%, testing should be ramped up. But in reality, infections and testing numbers are irrelevant as we can't do anything with that knowledge. Does it matter much if daily reported PCR positive cases are 100,000 or 150,000? Anyway, the real case numbers when you add in those who haven't reported are probably two or three times higher. About one in five of UK PCR tests are genome sequenced and the UKHSA has announced that detected Omicron and SGTR (S gene dropout) cases are now at an accumulated total of 101,000. SGTR is only an indication that it *might* be Omicron. London and Scotland have the highest percentage of Omicron cases. London is also the least vaccinated region of the UK thanks to vaccine hesitancy, so a double whammy.

3. HOSPITAL STATISTICS: The important figures to look out for are (a) daily hospital admissions, (b) beds occupied, (c) mechanically ventilated patients, and (d) daily deaths. At the January 2021 peak—before widespread vaccination—these were 4,580 daily admissions, 39,240 beds, 4,077 ventilated, and 1,250 daily deaths (7 day average).

4. CURRENT FIGURES: are not showing any sign of recent increase—daily admissions of 930 are lower than Oct, beds of 7,600 are lower than Nov, ventilation of 875 is lower than Nov, daily deaths of 112 (rolling average) are at the lowest for three months. As Surfy comments, we don't have the fine data from hospitals—many cases of Omicron are likely to be picked up when the patient is admitted for another reason, but will nevertheless be counted as an Omicron admission. Healthcare staff estimate 75% of (Delta) hospital admissions are unvaccinated patients. UK Health Security Agency reports just 65 hospital admissions of Omicron + SGTR (suspected Omicron) cases and seven Omicron deaths.

5. LOW DEATH RATES: South Africa's previous peak infection was in July 2021 and the current Omicron outbreak has already overtaken this in numbers of cases. But the current death rate is ~10% that of July 2021.

6. NEXT WEEK: will bring the first real indications of what is to come in the UK hospital statistics. Even though Omicron might be less serious, the fact it is highly infectious will give huge problems for the care and health sectors who will have to manage with vastly depleted personnel whilst key staff isolate. Some London hospitals are already complaining of additional staff shortages. So we can't assume the headroom stretches all the way to the Jan 2021 extremes.

7. LOCKDOWN: I am on the fence as to whether a lockdown is necessary, I believe there's a good chance the hospital figures will only show mild increases. Crossing fingers and toes. We have our own plans for Christmas including four days of isolation beforehand and lateral flow tests on the morning, so we plan to go ahead with our family celebration whatever the government says.

So best wishes to all on the forum, stay safe and have a great festive season (if circumstances permit).

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Certainly worth hoping that hospital admissions, ICU usage, long-term symptoms, and death rates stay (relatively) low. But given this is a very recent development, and considering the historical lag time between cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, the fact that the later is currently lagging doesn't inspire much confidence.

All in all, there are so many variables--some known, some unknown or unaddressed--that it's largely guesswork at this point. If determined, any of us can find lots of evidence to support whatever position we wish to support, e.g., "...we plan to go ahead...whatever the government says." That may be a reasonable way to plan a Christmas dinner, but it's probably not a good way to make predictions about the future course of the pandemic. And we should all probably bear in mind that many of the folks we're relying on to provide solid information are in hot pursuit of their own private agendas, too.

The same holds true when evaluating retrospectively; if 99% of COVID cases do *not* end in fatalities (and the majority of the fatalities do not involve people previously fit, healthy and/or young), we might conclude that Christmas dinners were fine all the way around last year, too. I mean, except for the dead, the suffering, and those who care for the sickly, who're having a resoundingly difficult time.

Note that I'm not taking a stand for or against social occasions, personal precautions, lockdowns, or any of the rest. I'm just pontificating about the way we evaluate information to suit our pre-existing interests.

Mark

Are you really accusing me of slanting what I've written in the post to support the fact that we hope to be able to go ahead with Christmas with our extended family? That's laughable. As a journalist for more than a decade I have too much integrity to pick and choose snippets for my own purposes. Please point out where I have used dubious facts to support 'my position'.

As for Christmas, you may not be aware on your side of the pond, but there's currently a lot of anger in the UK about the way the government held multiple Christmas parties last year when the general populace were forbidden to visit dying relatives in care homes. Many people are so annoyed they are likely to ignore anything Boris says, even if it's intended for the best.

__________________
"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

My friend's son lives in Denmark and has sent over some notes from today's Danish government press conference (not word for word)...

Omicron) ...it’s too late. The rate is too high and there’s no way we can stop it. It’s run away.

It will take an extreme amount of effort for each person to avoid getting infected over the winter and it’s almost inevitable.

Social distancing and hand sanitiser will not be enough.

All we can do is get vaccinated to reduce the likelihood of infection and of severe illness and protect those who are most vulnerable.

Getting vaccinated no longer means you’re unlikely to get covid. Omicron seems to be much more contagious and that vaccinated people will still get it. But the symptoms are generally much milder in vaccinated people.

____________________________________________

On the other hand Netherlands has a different strategy and is locking down from tomorrow. Both these countries are ten to fifteen days behind the UK in the Omicron trajectory. Morocco did well by suspending ALL foreign flights on 29 November.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Danmark actual:

Since todays morning theathers, cinemas, zoos, amusement park and sports facilities in Danmark are fully closed. Restaurants can stay open up to 23:00 when individually regulated by goverment.

These rules are valid up to middle of January 2022.

Since friday Danmark(6 Mio residents) has 12.000 inections per day and 20% of them are omicron ones.

If you travel from Danmark to Germany you have to stay in a 5 day quarantime if you are vaccinated - if not you have to stay 10 days. After 5 days it´s possible short quarantime through a negative pcr test.

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re. post #56
@Tim Cullis. Thanks for this reasoned, intelligent post.

So any info on people coming into Denmark (from the UK specifically). My son and his wife live in Malmo, so fly in and out of Copenhagen airport. They're here with us at the moment but heading back in a few days. They have to get into Denmark and then cross the bridge into Sweden.

I apologize if it seems I'm "accusing you" of anything at all, Tim. I believe that we all fall prey to confirmation bias, and therefore attend preferentially to information which supports our desires and worldview. I'm not "accusing:" I'm merely stating one of my own biases, which is that we're all susceptible and that this sometimes interferes with our ability to see things clearly and make wise decisions.

Of course I was responding in part to your statement that your family intended to go ahead with existing plans regardless of what you heard from the government. You may have meant something different, but what I heard was "We intend to ignore any information contrary to what we've already decided." In your post quoted above, you say instead that you "*hope* to be able to go ahead" [emphasis added], which seems to me quite different. Again, I'm just stating how I interpreted your words; I'm not trying to tell you what you meant, felt or believed when you wrote them.

I was also responding to the conclusions I thought you were drawing from some--not all--of the statistics you quoted. For example, statements that a case rate is doubling every couple of days can't be disproven by projecting that rate into the indefinite future. Both can be true: case rates are currently doubling, and they can't continue to do so without exceeding our population.

This is, in fact, the norm: in the beginning of an epidemic there might be one, five, or ten known cases, but in a couple of days there might be ten times as many.--that is, five, fifty or a hundred. Obviously, that doesn't mean the case rate will continue to expand by a factor of ten; that would be absurd. Anyone--politician, health "expert," or reporter who thinks that numbers works this way is suffering from a failure of critical thinking.

I've already pointed to the lag times between increases in infections, hospitalization, ICU admissions, and death rates. You said that "CURRENT FIGURES: are not showing any sign of recent increase..." but this has been true during all surges of this pandemic; first infections increase, then after a bit so do hospitalizations, eventually ICU admissions, and finally death rates. Whether this will be true during the current phase remains an open question. If we're lucky, predictions that this variant is less virulent will prove out. At the moment, the people I trust more rather than less are offering very mixed predictions; one stated this morning that he expects record death rates in the US this winter. I hope he's wrong.

Yes, I'm aware of those controversies (and we've had our share of similar events). I'm also aware of a range of irritated responses, including a distinct deterioration in trust. As one who never particularly believed anything your prime minister said in the first place--and who felt the same except even more so about my previous president--that seems to me a reasonable response.

But the fact that a bunch of politicians held Christmas parties last year doesn't mean much when it comes to my own decisions; why should it? I don't trust them, their ability to make wise decisions, their propensity for telling the truth or ability to predict the future. A prominent politician from my neck of the woods--a Trump campaign organizer and COVID denier--just died of COVID after traveling to El Salvador under bogus pretenses during an intense outbreak there. Am I going to model my own life after his?

I don't know whether this clarifies my earlier post, but I hope it does at least to some extent. Meanwhile, here's to a happy, stress-free holiday for you and your family!

Mark

I prefer to be objective and rely on reported data. You are reading far too much into what I have written which was after all a simple relating of facts, as follows...

People wouldn't remember the statistics from the January 2021 peak so I related those click on data on each heading then scroll for Jan 21. Then I gave the current figures (same link, click on data for each heading) prefixing these with the factual comment that no recent increases had been recorded. The important bit you seem to have missed is that I then wrote that next week will bring the first real indications of what is to come in the UK hospital statistics.

I don't profess to know the relative infection/serious illness rates of Omicron vs Delta in the UK and have no idea how next week will play out. The whole point of my post was to highlight that at the moment we just don't know whether the SA experience of moderate illness relates to the UK, but next week will be our best guide.

No bias. No need for confirmation.

I also have no opinion as to whether there will be a lockdown in the UK. I appreciate the arguments for no lockdown in terms of protecting the economy and mental health, conversely I appreciate the arguments for preventing dramatic spikes that the NHS can't handle. Glad I don't have to make the decision.
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In the meantime it has been reported that SAGE (emergency committee) has been discussing some extremely worrying models that predict dangerous outcomes. However when the minutes of the meeting were leaked to the media, what wasn't admitted was that the government had asked the modellers to assume Omicron was no different from Delta in terms of serious cases and deaths.

It took JP Morgan (merchant bank) to discover this. So these SAGE models were about as far from an independent viewpoint as it's possible to get. I'm not saying the SAGE predictions will turn out to be incorrect, but the fact that the government had set strict parameters should have been declared.

Link to Spectator article: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/...ling-committee

I don't know what tomorrow's papers will make of this—Boris and his team have suffered one credibility setback after another just recently. (And that's an objective view, not confirmation bias).

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

They can continue and exceed our population by double or tripple infecting a person which are actually proven cases in South Africa. Omicron is an Escape-Mutation which means it is infecting people who were e.g. infected and recovered from the Delta variant.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/2326...ity-from-past/

A pandemic situation is marked through its dynamic behavior. A pandemic rule says: Never say never. This you can observe by omicron and its much higher potential to infect compared to Delta variant.

It`s imaginable that a case rate can continue to expand by a factor of ten as well as it is imaginable that it can continue to expand by a factor of 100.

Omicron is in 77 countries with a spreading rate (exponentially growth) no other corona variant showed up to now. Even if it will be evidentially true that omicron infects people with mostly mild symptoms the sheer number of cases could overcome health systems of these 77 countries.

Check this graph and compare the share and growth of omicron variant in all analyzed sequences in South Africa/Botswana starting at Nov 1, 2021 to other countries starting at Nov29, 2021.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/c...SA~ZAF~BWA~AUS

The fear of a exponentially case growth like this accelerated through omicron is actual the reason why Austria tighted their rules and why The Netherlands went into lookdown and why many other countries will follow with different measures in the next weeks.

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Chin up, we're doomed!

Sorry, but this is not the way mathematics work. Start with a hundred cases. Sustained expansion by a factor of ten exceeds the population of the entire world in 8 days. In 9 days it exceeds the population of the world by a factor of ten. No matter how many repeated or "multiple" infections you imagine, this is not possible. If you doubt this, just keep going: ten days, or eleven.

Theoretical expansion of this sort works in a very limited way--the first couple of days, the first week. After a certain point it become impossible to sustain, no matter what sort of system you're describing. This includes pandemics, multi-level marketing schemes, gifting circles, you name it.

The same applies when you apply lesser expansions--say, a daily doubling of cases--but more slowly. I'm too lazy to figure it out precisely, but if you start with, say, 64 cases it only takes a bit more than a month before you've again exceeded the population of the world. Keep going and...well, you get the picture.

Mark

From three weeks ago... The UK Office for Statistics Regulation has warned the UKHSA that Sajid Javid's claim of 200,000 infections per day by mid-December caused confusion after officials failed to justify the figures.

In the meantime South African scientists seem to have taken umbrage with the way the UK totally dismissed their 'on the ground' advice regarding Omicron, see news report.

From two weeks ago... London is thought to be a week or more ahead of the rest of the country with the Omicron wave and is also the region of the UK with the lowest vaccination records. So looking at London gives some indication of where the rest of the UK will follow.

Daily infection rates in London (based on the more accurate date of test rather than date of report) did indeed peak just before Christmas with a rolling seven-day average high of just over 26,200. Since then the daily average has fallen back by 13% to just under 23,000. There has been no sign of a surge due to Christmas gatherings. There is a backlog on tests and it will be another four days to judge whether there has been a surge due to New Year celebrations. Other statistics such as hospital admissions, ventilation cases and deaths will lag infection rates and likely continue to rise even when infections are dropping.

Hospital admissions were running around 150 per day in early December, they increased in middle December to 400, then 450 and peaked at 511 on 29 December, but have now fallen back to under 320 per day.

The number of patients in hospital with Covid peaked at just over 4,000 on 5 January, though one-third of these (NHS stats) are patients who presented for other ailments and were identified positive post admission. There has been a small but continuing drop off in the last four days but it's too early to call this a trend.

Numbers in ventilation beds have risen from around 195 before the Omicron surge to currently 224. Most Covid patients in intensive care are unvaccinated.

Daily deaths have risen from 12 per day on 9 December to now 24 per day, with 90% of these being patients over 60 years of age. Some will likely be Delta patients who were already in intensive care, but there's no statistics on vaccination/booster status.

Staff pressures through sickness and isolation absences are immense, especially in the ambulance service and A&E (emergency department) with some hospital trusts advising heart attack cases to take a taxi to hospital rather than gamble on an ambulance.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)

Watch out - the Deltakron mutation has arrived….

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/08/cypr...and-delta.html

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In the end everything will be fine. If its not fine its not the end....