Happy Freedom Day!
On June 30th, I wondered what level of mess we’d be in by now, and made a very simple projection based on case and hospitalisation data then.
To keep myself honest, here’s how that panned out. tl;dr? This was entirely predictable.
It continues to amaze me how far ahead of the Government you can be just by doing really simple maths. You don’t need complex models: linear extrapolation (aka using a ruler) could have told you that ‘Freedom Day’ was a terrible idea at least three weeks ago, and arguably before.
Of course, now we’re in unknown territory because restrictions have been relaxed. We could use continued straight-ish lines as the base case, and things look pretty bad given that—100,000 cases per day in less than a fortnight. If we open up quickly, it could be even sooner than that…
The sliver of good news is the continued weakening of the link between cases and hospitalisations. This means fewer seriously ill, and far fewer dying, than pre-jab. (This is the third generation of a graph I made out of curiosity at the end of June—and, if you missed it, the original graph explains how we can see the link between cases and hospitalisations weakening.)
The problem is, we weaken these links linearly, by vaccinating x people per day, but the virus grows exponentially, infecting an extra R people per infected person. When numbers were low, we could get ahead in the race against the virus. Right now…it’s gonna start lapping us.
This has a long way to play out yet. Cases are going through the roof, hospitalisations, deaths, long covid, missed work and school due to isolation requirements and just hundreds of thousands of people having a miserable week in bed feeling awful will follow.
Good luck, everyone. Especially those who haven’t had a chance to be vaccinated yet, or are clinically vulnerable.