I have been thinking about the additional ‘easing’ of the lockdown regulations as advised by the government and wondered how the variation of Covid-19 infections appeared over the country.
The Office for National Statistics, ONS, publish loads of data, but they are always a week or two behind. Hence the data announced daily is probably more ‘up to the minute’. This is the data from the ONS for total deaths in England and wales up to the wk of 8th May.
This shows the pandemic taking its toll from the end of February and how it has peaked and is now coming down.
But how does he situation vary over the country?
Here is the data for 5 regions, and I have taken London and the SE as two, and those that may be regraded as North as the other 3.
This doesn’t show anything new except the gradients of the curves are slightly different. So how does the number of deaths relate to population.
Here I have taken the same data and considered the proportion of deaths relative what would have normally been expected.
As you can see London got the worst deal, and I suspect that was because of the population density. Everywhere is now reducing, but the proportions are still high. The SE is circa 10% above the expected norm, London, North West, Yorkshire and Humber are circa 23% above the expected norm. But the North East is 40% above the expected norm. So maybe things aren’t that good, yet , in the North East!?
When one considers that deaths are just at the tip of the iceberg, there are loads more infections going on that come to nothing. This is demonstrated in this fictitious data showing the exponential variation between those that are ‘under the weather’ with covid-19, but still infectious and this that unfortunately pass away.
The fear by the government has been not to overwhelm the NHS, and these are the top three categories in my chart. Hence, for the NE at least, things still aren’t looking too good.
I hope the powers that make the rules recognise this and there is a need to have a varying pattern of Lockdown Release over the country as is happening in Scotland, Wales and NI compared with England.