Simon Cook is editor of The Spectator's data hub.
The good news picture continues to build for Omicron. Late on New Year’s Eve, the UK Health Security Agency released an update to their estimates for vaccine effectiveness, and for the first time they’ve been able to give a picture of how well vaccines protect against hospitalisation from Omicron. The figure is strong: 88 per
Omicron is sending Covid case numbers surging ( a new high of 189,000 cases reported yesterday) and hospital admissions along with it. But another important piece of data, intensive care admissions, shows a significant fall. This is early data, but worth noting as it may be part of an important trend. And it adds context
Length of hospital stay is a crucial metric, but hard to do with much accuracy unless each patient is certified Omicron or Delta. The closest proxy we have right now is information on patient stay and there are graphs for two cohorts: those admitted from 1 May (third wave) and from 1 December. The graphs were
Man makes Covid predictions and God laughs. Yet with the stakes this high in Britain, every bit of real-world data is useful. That’s why South Africa is so important: it’s a country with a well-digitised healthcare sector that we have to thank for sequencing the Omicron variant, and has been first to experience the impact. That’s
