The UK’s covid situation gets worse and worse. Today there were 1564 deaths from covid. Since Christmas there have now been 15,000, nearly 20% of all deaths since last January. Thats in just 20 days. Its possible that new cases have topped out, though tomorrow’s number will be interesting, but its still more than double what it was in mid December. The graph is quite horrible. Lockdown looks set to continue to mid Feb at the earliest.
And hospitals are now critically overloaded. Many have had to send patients elsewhere, many are rationing care. People are dying because care isn’t available. It is really bad.
Vaccination is under way but slowly. Since the start of Jan about 2.6 million people have been vaccinated once and 430,000 twice. In the last two days, about 390,000 people were vaccinated Thats short of the two million a week needed to get all the vulnerable folk done by mid Feb, but its promising. The problem is simply the numbers. At the current vaccination rate, they will get to Group 5 by the start of March, and Group 7 by the start of May.
| Group | Number in Group | Cumulative |
| Care home residents Care home workers | 400,000 700,000 | 1.1m |
| People aged over 80 Frontline Health Workers | 3,400,000 1,600,000 | 6.1m |
| People aged 75-79 | 2,300,000 | 8.4m |
| People aged 70-74 Clinically Extremely Vulnerable | 3,300,000 2,200,000 | 13.9m |
| People 65-69 | 3,400,000 | 17.3m |
| People 16-64 with underlying health conditions | 8,500,000 | 25.8m |
| People aged 60-64 | 3,800,000 | 29.6m |
| People aged 55-59 | 4,400,000 | 34.0m |
| People aged 50-44 | 4,700,000 | 38.7m |
