How effective is one dose of the vaccine?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello and welcome to a brand new series of More or Less, where your weekly shot of statistical salvation that leaves you 90% less likely to be caught out by dubious data. And I'm Tim Harford. This week, did anything happen while we were off air? Oh, fiddlesticks. Fine, we'll have a quick statistical catch-up. The new vaccine regime is to delay the booster shot for up to three months, but is the first shot 52% effective or 90% effective? We might have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for that pesky new virus variant. It's 70% more transmissible apparently, but what does that mean? And one of our youngest loyal listeners has a question about her class register. But first, you don't need to look at the numbers to know things are bad.
The kids are all off school, Joe Wicks is live streaming burpees, and most terrifyingly of all, my producer Kate Lamble is back on more or less.
Hello.
Kate, you made more or less throughout the first wave of the pandemic and now you're back and we're in national lockdown once again. And I have to say, it seems like rather too much of a coincidence. But look, how does the situation now compare to the situation back then?
Yeah, so for more than 10 months now, we've had this constant stream of the numbers of COVID cases and deaths in the headlines. And sometimes it can be quite hard to step back and realise what's been changing over time. So to boil it down, I thought we could cover the current situation in five headline numbers.
Good idea. Let's start with what last Saturday the BBC put out as a headline.
UK sees highest daily toll of 1,325 deaths.
So this article said 1,325 people had died in the UK, the biggest figure reported in a single day since the pandemic began. But the key word here is reported. There's often a delay between when a death occurs and when it's reported, especially when staff are overloaded. If we look at the date these deaths actually occurred, the highest figure so far during this second wave was on the 6th of January, when 799 people died, within 28 days of receiving a positive Covid test.
Is that higher than the spring?
Well, the peak in the spring was the 8th of April when there were 1,072 deaths. Thankfully, we haven't got there quite yet.
Not yet. OK, that's deaths. Headline figure number two then. After the most recent lockdown announcement, the government released a statement saying that one of the reasons for the new restrictions was... The April 2020 hospital admissions peak has now been surpassed by 40%. Is that true?
No, the government has muddled up the definitions there. Hospital cases are 40% higher. They were over 30,000 when Boris Johnson gave his speech on 4 January and only around 21,500 in the April peak. Daily hospital admissions are up just 4% if we compare the two weeks up to 5 January with the worst two weeks of the first wave.
Headline number three then. We often hear in the news that around this time of year, hospital beds are full because of a rise in infections such as flu. But an intensive care doctor told BBC Breakfast this week. To compare this to a normal winter flu epidemic is out of all proportion. It's orders of magnitude larger.
This definitely isn't the same as a normal flu season. Data from Public Health England shows that in the worst recent year for winter flu, which was 2017-2018, just under 10,000 patients were hospitalised over a 28-week period. That many Covid hospitalisations were recently registered in England in just three days.
Wow. What about intensive care or high dependency units?
There's a dramatic difference there too. In 2017-18, just under 3,500 flu patients needed to be cared for in an intensive care or high dependency unit over that 28-week period. But in a mere three weeks over the recent New Year period, just over 4,000 Covid patients were admitted to an ICU.
So that's a bit more than 100 a week for flu and more than 1,000 a week for Covid. Let's move on to headline number four then. During Boris Johnson's most recent lockdown announcement, he said... On the 29th of December, more than 80,000 people tested positive for Covid across the UK.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:27
2
How bad is the current second wave compared to the spring peak by headline death numbers?
8:27–13:34
3
Are current hospital admissions higher than April 2020 and how are definitions being mixed up?
13:34–16:41
4
How do Covid hospital and ICU admissions compare with a severe flu season (2017–18)?
16:41–23:28
5
Was the 29 December testing spike the peak of infections or a bank-holiday artifact?
23:28–27:39