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

  Conclusions By allowing the virus to become endemic in January-February 2020 and, even today, failing to have a working policy to reduce imported infections a whole year after the pandemic started. By focusing too narrowly on protecting the NHS whilst failing to protect the vulnerable from getting infected and still following this strategy today.    The data available in February 2020 clearly demonstrated the link between fatality and age (see: Review of IC's Infamous Report-9 ); however, this wasn’t acted on.   This was a major failing by both the advising scientists and policymakers. By failing to re-purpose the NHS during the summer of 2020 so as to have enhanced capacity to treat people in the winter (rather than the smaller capacity, now). It is clear that the poor are probably the second worst casualty, through a combination of living conditions, diet and general health.   Are we surprised?   Couldn’t this have been predicted and acted on? In the beginning of 2020 the UK

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