UK Daily COVID Number & Omicron Overview (Dec 29th)

#16,468

The UK, like many other countries, is having difficulty collecting, collating, and publishing COVID data in the face of rapidly rising Omicron cases.  Today, their daily update - published 2 hours late - sets a new record (n=183,037), but it includes 5 days worth of previously missing data from Northern Ireland. 

29 December 2021
Log category: DATA ISSUE Reported figures for Northern Ireland cover 5-day period

Newly reported figures from Northern Ireland for testing, cases and deaths reflect the difference in totals reported on 29 December and those last published by Northern Ireland on 24 December 2021.

Figures for cases and deaths are available by specimen date and date of death respectively. Retrospective report date figures for each day from 25 to 28 December are not available.

The UK's Health Security Agency also announced that on Friday, publication of their detailed Omicron Overview report - which began less than 2 weeks ago - will be ended.

While the UK Dashboard provides a decent overview of COVID in the UK, having less data is never preferable to having more, particularly during a crisis. And some data on the Dashboard lags a week or more behind, such as today's update on Hospitalizations (up 13.2% in a week), which is only current through Dec 21st. 

Today's (soon to be discontinued) 7-page Omicron Overview adds nearly 33K confirmed Omicron cases, increases Omicron related hospitalizations to 766 (+98) and deaths to 53 (+4). 

 

Reporting on COVID, particularly over the holidays, has become increasingly chaotic and unreliable.  And not just in the UK.  A lot is due to logistical constraints - including a lack of testing capacity - both of which ought to be in much better shape two years into this pandemic. 

But too many people and governments assumed that vaccines would defeat SARS-CoV-2 by the end of the year, and declared victory prematurely (see last September's NPR Is The Worst Over? Modelers Predict A Steady Decline In COVID Cases Through March).  

While there were reasons to question these projections, and warnings that new variants might emerge that could evade vaccines (see UK SAGE: Can We Predict the Limits of SARS-CoV-2 Variants and their Phenotypic Consequences?), most were ignored in favor of a more optimistic scenario. 

So we find ourselves going into a 3rd year of the pandemic faced with a massive new wave of infection, too little testing capacity, increasing pressure on hospitals, and very few options to deal with Omicron's impact other than to reduce isolation and quarantine times, and hope this wave burns out quickly and ends the pandemic.  

While that could happen, it is based more on hope than on science.  And it ignores the possibility that the next global health crisis won't emerge while we are still dealing with COVID. 

As bad as COVID has been, we got very lucky in that its fatality rate wasn't higher - and that the really transmissible strain waited nearly two years to emerge - giving us time to develop a vaccine and get it into the arms of billions of people.  

The next emerging virus may not be nearly as accommodating. 

And if we approach the next crisis as fragmented, flat-footed, and oblivious to the threat as we've approached this one, we could end up looking back at 2020-2021 and calling it the `good old days'.