🧵A Covid thread - but a good news one! I’m barely writing about Covid anymore because there is barely any Covid to write about. I thought it was worth celebrating this in this thread. 1/7
The best measure available of the prevalence of Covid in the community is wastewater measurement. It doesn't depend on people getting tested, or even feeling sick. Scotland has been measuring it since June 2020. Only one big wave since end 2024, and now recording lowest levels since 2020 2/7
The UK Health Security Agency has been collecting data on hospital admissions with Covid since 2020 but testing was reduced in Apr 2023. But plotting Covid admissions in England since Apr 2023 also shows just one wave since end 2024 and now record low levels of admissions. 3/7
ONS Death registry data is the gold standard source for determining the number of Covid deaths. I’ve plotted the weekly number of deaths where Covid contributed as a cause since the beginning of the pandemic. Last year there were 4,000 deaths & in most recent week of data, there were just 8. 4/7
This is a combo of far fewer people getting Covid, and then far fewer people infected with Covid getting very sick. Overall over 225K people have died from Covid - this is horrific. I believe far too many mistakes were made in our Covid response. 5/7 christinapagel.substack.com
christinapagel.substack.com
There is a lot about the current state of the world that is deeply depressing. But Covid is now not one of those things - and with any luck won’t be again (at least not SARS-CoV-2) - and I choose to celebrate that. 6/7 You can read more in this substack post and I do have some caveats in the screen shot - basically around who gets access to the vaccine. christinapagel.substack.com 7/7