The official Covid-19 dashboard has turned green and cases appear to have peaked, at least for now. You hear a lot of people say ‘cases don’t matter’, but they are a leading indicator of hospitalisations and deaths — and so a peak in cases (if confirmed by the ONS survey) should lead to a peak in hospitalisations in future weeks.
So, is that it? Are we done? It would be unwise to estimate the R numbers for a few days. Not because I’m disappointed that numbers are falling, but because you can’t do linear regression on non-linear data. And there is still a lot of uncertainty.
However, for the first time in 18 months, there’s been a fall in cases that can’t be easily explained by a national lockdown. That’s great news.
However, where it gets murkier is when you try to work out why this fall is happening, and try to figure out what it means.
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