#16,148
Six weeks ago there were government projections suggesting that daily cases - which were rapidly approaching 50K a day - could double once the UK lifted their COVID restrictions on July 19th.
To just about everyone's surprise, the opposite happened, with the peak of 54 thousand cases occurring on July 17th, followed by a slow decline to 21K over the next 2 weeks (see UK chart above).
While some were declaring the UK's summer wave broken by early August, since then we've seen a slow, but steady, increase in cases. Yesterday made the 9th consecutive day with over 30 thousand cases, and the highest one-day total since July 22nd (n=38,281).
Although well below the worst case scenarios proffered in early July, today the UK is seeing roughly the volume of cases they were seeing in mid-January of this year. And to put it into another context, yesterday's cases were more than 35-fold higher than they were a year ago on that date (n=1048).
COVID deaths in the UK - which tend to lag 3 to 4 weeks behind confirmed cases - have risen markedly over the past 30 days (see chart below). Due to constant backfilling of data as it comes in, trends are tough to quantify, but the UK is reporting a 9-fold increase between June 1st and August 1st.
As I've said before, I consider predictions a mug's game, and so I leave that for the experts to get wrong.
That we are seeing such high (and rising) numbers in the UK, the EU, and the United States in August is concerning, of course. The juggernaut that is Delta continues to surge, and there are legitimate concerns of what might come after.
To that we can add the potential burden of influenza's return this winter, along with a panoply of other respiratory viruses. As weary as we all all of this pandemic, we may have a very challenging winter ahead, and some healthcare delivery systems may find themselves overwhelmed.
It's been more than 600 days since we first learned of 27 cases of atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China - and while we've made remarkable progress with vaccines and research into this virus - I still don't know if we are closer to the beginning of this pandemic, or to the end.
