karlypants wrote:How are hospital admisions now? I think it's still low which makes me think that the virus is potentially weaking itself now?
Then again, we could end up with a mix of strains with a lot of people still hell bent on having a holiday abroad!
To be honest I have a little difficulty following the hospital admissions stats because they don't seem to be updated daily like the rest of the stats are - or maybe I'm not understanding them correctly BUT it does seem from what I can gather that admissions are really LOW.
The stats showing today is that for the whole of the UK (the tables I have put up showing Bolton at the 'top' is just for England) is that there seemed to be just 124 admissions (from 1,940 new cases), that the total of people in hospital is just 743 (we've been having over 1,000 new cases every day for the last 21 days apart from just two occasions) and that just 76 people are on ventilators.
Now if you consider how few deaths there are and that those on the ventilators are going to be in hospital long term, it would seem to my way of thinking that not only are surprisingly few in hospital (compared to the daily numbers of new cases we have) and that roughly 100 admissions are being made daily, then it would seem to me that the average stay in hospital for those admitted must be around a week at most!
IF I'm reading things right then it seems to me that whilst cases are increasing in the community that the vast number of positives are being found in people with few or any symptoms (if the current new cases average was say for argument 1,000 per day and it's clearly above that figure) and say an average of 100 people are admitted each day - then 90% of the new cases don't lead to hospitalisation and those that do on average need it for less than a week.
All good news actually - unless of course you or your loved ones are in the minority who have been really poorly with it.
My thinking fwiw is that there's three types of people out there in the community - a largish number who don't really care and are catching the virus and spreading it around, a good chunk of people who are obeying by the rules, and a small percentage of vulnerable people who have gone into hibernation until all this is over.
The ones catching and spreading it, are the forty's and under, who by and large it is not harming but making 1 in 10 of them needing hospital treatment and that they usually are well enough to be discharged fairly soon thereafter.
Those playing by the rules don't catch it unless they are unlucky and the sick and vulnerable are keeping well out of it.
I further reason that until a vaccine/whatever is found, these three groups will continue to act in the same ways they are, until I guess some form of herd immunity is built up (presuming that can happen?) in the group that don't give a fuck, and when that point is reached new infections will start to go down, the ones playing by the rules will continue to do so - and eventually the virus 'goes away' until something happens to make it flare up again - but this time (and the times after) fewer and fewer people will catch it (assuming those that had previously have some resistance to it) and it slowly fades into the background of our daily lives.
The key factor for me is that as long as hospital admissions don't go silly, then in a sense it doesn't matter how many new cases there are as it isn't equating to people becoming seriously ill and dying from it (unless you are one of the unlucky ones!).
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