The Pandemic-What's Happening in the UK in January 2021

The Anti-Lockdown brigade have known about this for months and it provides the foundation for their argument about lockdowns not working. We shouldn’t be surprised that the government, the government scientists and the majority of the media decide not to acknowledge the inconvenient fact that, in terms of deaths, the pandemic ended in May 2020. The graph of daily deaths below confirms this. The black line shows the actual (total) number of (age-standardised) daily deaths, whilst the blue line shows the same data but averaged over 5 years.   So, the blue line is the reference to which the black line should be compared with.   Unfortunately the red line diverts attention away from the important story in this graph; so for now ignore the red line because it’s unlikely to be accurate (but it forms the centre-piece of the government’s story). The pandemic deaths are clear in the spring of 2020, but there’s no significant increase in deaths in the winter so, what is going on? First a

As of late December, early January, it’s hard to tell what’s going on in the UK’s pandemic; has something changed? We know that the rate of hospitalisations has increased, which is the cause of the third national lockdown. We know that the NHS has around 7000 fewer beds compared with this time last year so bed capacity is much lower than in the ideal world. We know that a more infectious variant of Covid is spreading rapidly and that NHS front-line staff are stretched again. So why are there large numbers of people presenting at hospital with Covid?   Who are these (by definition) vulnerable people? Have the vulnerable failed to appreciate they need to shield until effectively vaccinated and relaxed their guard too much? Well, we also know that December, January & February are the peak months for respiratory infections and that since the autumn people have relaxed their guards, plus schools and colleges restarted.   All of which leads to increasing transmission, heading