Stuart McDonald
speaker
22 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2021
last heard Jan 2021
Stuart McDonald’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, we had to make a few assumptions first.
We assumed that the vaccine would be 70% effective at preventing any illness, but fully effective at preventing death or illness serious enough to require hospitalisation.
We also had to make an assumption about take-up, and we assumed very good take-up amongst the priority groups.
And with the vaccine programme going well, we assumed that the government target for vaccines will be hit.
Those are the assumptions.
Where do they take us?
The vaccines ought to lead to around a 60% reduction in hospital admissions by mid-March.
Okay.
Importantly, though, intensive care admissions see a much smaller benefit.
As the age distribution in intensive care is much younger, it surprises people often.
Only a quarter of ICU admissions are age 70 plus, and a similar number are age 52 or younger.
To some extent, that's about the way ICU is triaged to ensure that it's only the individuals most likely to benefit that are admitted.
So we only expect to see intensive care admissions reduced by about a third by mid-March.
Yes, I absolutely agree.
Intensive care admissions are one of the key pinch points, as I understand it, in the system.
So the fact that those are the last to fall is a reason that we'll likely need to leave restrictions in place for some time after the deaths start to fall.
We did also extend the results out to look at the next priority groups, so people aged 65 to 70 or below age 65 with underlying health conditions.
As we're moving down those vaccine priority groups, we're obviously less confident in assuming a very high take-up rate.
But if we did have full vaccine take-up, we'd now be preventing around three quarters of hospital admissions and over half of intensive care admissions.
Based on the modelling that I've done, I have some considerable concern about that.
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