What I’m struggling to understand right now is why Germany is doing so much worse than the UK – hospitalisation rate around 4.5 times higher than the UK, death rate 4 times higher than the UK, very high testing positivity rate (>20% compared to the UK at 4.3%) yet Germany has a similar vaccination rate to the UK. Perhaps the “quasi-ineffective” AZ vaccination isn’t so ineffective after all?
My impression is that restrictions were much more lax, and later imposed in the UK. Possibly as a result, there are more unrecorded previous infections leading to more natural immunity.
Nothing to back that up….just a guess.
I cannot find the reference now (it was in their ‘live’ news which seems unobtainable after a few hours) but one of the SAGE advisors to the UK government was quoted in The Guardian this morning saying that he estimated over half of Covid infections still went unrecorded.
A very high testing positivity rate tended to indicate not enough testing was being done to give a reliable indication of the infection rate. The data suggests Germany does far less testing than the UK, as do most other European countries, but I seem to recall being corrected by @Malibuflyer previously on that – apparently a quirk of the way Germany records tests means that most LFTs aren’t captured on the data feeds that ourworldindata use. Perhaps the same is true of the results – perhaps a big chunk of negative tests don’t find their way into the dataset and make Germany’s infection rate look much worse than it is?
To get the real number of UK infections you probably need to multiply any official number by something like 2 – 2.5. For other countries doing less testing, that multiplier may be higher.
The UK currently has 15 (fifteen) people in hospital with Omicron.
Also the top secret details of the one (1) man who died have finally leaked out. The KGB obtained the details from a mole in the NHS. It was a 70 year old unvaccinated male.
Completely ridiculous to have this on the news, let alone base public policy on it. There must be more than 15 people in hospital with ingrowing toenails.
The problem is that the opposition is firmly aligned on the "total lockdown of everything, f**k the economy* position (easy for the opposition; like the scientific advisers, they don’t have to pay for anything) and with the govt allegedly having held an illegal xmas party (one year ago!) the govt has zero room for maneuver; they can’t bet on the increasingly obvious: Omicron is about as harmful as the common cold.
It will be interesting what other countries in Europe do, because they have all this information and have had it for days, so they will all know this is not a harmful disease. But perhaps their opposition parties are similarly aligned, to exploit any error – that’s the opposition parties’ job everywhere. It isn’t to help run the country!
And of course any reason to screw the UK is a good one 
Against that you have only the British ski spend, which France doesn’t need (or doesn’t care; there are bigger fish to fry politically) but Italy does, and Italy will be well aware that with Switzerland and Austra already banning Brits, Italy is well placed to cash in. I do hope Italy makes this assessment; I am in Cervinia right now and the crowds are probably 30-50% down.
Perhaps the “quasi-ineffective” AZ vaccination isn’t so ineffective after all?
Or it could be that the UK vacced most relevant people with AZ and since then most relevant people have had a Pfizer booster, and the combination of those two is particularly effective. That is what one would expect, in the vaccination business. The mainland mostly shunned (slagged off, more like) AZ, and as a result didn’t end up with a mixed vaccine programme.
FWIW I never believed AZ was any less good than Pfizer. The data was always mixed, one way or the other. The mainland politicians slagged off AZ because of reasons already well discussed here. What has come out recently is that using Pfizer as a booster after AZ is a lot more effective than using AZ as a booster after AZ.
@Peter I share your skepticism on restrictions and the government’s motivation for making a big deal of this, but I think the jury is still out on Omicron’s severity.
Serious number of Omicron infections are only just getting going and you need at least another two weeks (three or four, preferably) before you see how this translates into hospitalisations.
Well, France has just decided to Ban the Brits. To me this makes no more sense than anything else. Omi is already present in France anyway, regardless of its severity, infectiousness or anything else. I suspect that winding up the brits is a fairly popular pastime at the Elysée these days.
Looking at the case/death graphs, what I find interesting is that while many countries have record peaks of cases right now, deaths are WAY down on previous peaks at the comparable stage. The numbers in France and UK are both right up there with deaths from tea-cosy accidents. And it also looks as though France is peaking right now.
Yes – updated here.
johnh wrote:
I suspect that winding up the brits is a fairly popular pastime at the Elysée these days.
What do ya think? It is entirely transparent, but that’s never been a problem.
The UK can’t really do this to France because France controls the Tunnel and thus the supply of a lot of UK supermarket goods. This principle was fully demonstrated a year ago.
johnh wrote:
Looking at the case/death graphs, what I find interesting is that while many countries have record peaks of cases right now, deaths are WAY down on previous peaks at the comparable stage. The numbers in France and UK are both right up there with deaths from tea-cosy accidents
The difference is, of course and obviously, vaccination.
And it also looks as though France is peaking right now.
Give it another week or so, and Omicron will take care of that
johnh wrote:
Looking at the case/death graphs, what I find interesting is that while many countries have record peaks of cases right now, deaths are WAY down on previous peaks at the comparable stage.
Other than – obviously – vaccination, could it be that Covid has already killed the ‘low-hanging fruit’, i.e. the old and vulnerable? In any case it makes sense for a virus to become less lethal over time, as it otherwise would run out of hosts.
A newspaper piece in Sweden today hypothesised that the resistance towards vaccinations in e.g. Austria is due to traditional acceptance of non-evidence based medicine such as homeopathy in German-speaking countries. E.g. it was claimed that medical insurance in Germany generally will pay for homeopatic treatments.
Any comments from our German/Swiss/Austrian posters?
