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Comment by tremon | Hacker News Reader

and we are past the potential 2-week delay from cases to deaths

Not everywhere. See here, for example: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/netherland...

The Netherlands went from 550 cases/day at the end of June to 10,000 cases/day now. The Delta variant took less than two weeks to spread as much as the EU variant did in two months (Sep 1st - Nov 1st). Of course, it was helped a lot by the government deciding to open up bars, dancings and nights clubs on June 26th so it's not a fair comparison :/

Point is, we'll have to wait two weeks to see what effect this will have on the death rate. I expect the death rate to be a lot lower than in November, partly because of vaccinations but also because the age group that flocked to the bars and night clubs is a lot younger than the earlier wave victims.

Still, I don't expect our death rate to remain in the single digits as it has been since the beginning of June.

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Still, the UK is quite a bit into the delta wave and the number of deaths have barely budged: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/uk/

That is not surprising. UK targeted very high vaccination rates for those most likely to die from the disease.

> As of 4th July, 2,118,096 (93.8%) of the clinically extremely vulnerable (CEV) population have been vaccinated with at least one dose. This includes all CEV individuals, even if they were vaccinated as part of a higher priority cohort. Of those, more than 9 in 10 (2,046,244, 96.6%) have received a 2nd dose (90.7% of all CEV individuals).

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/wp-content/uploads/sit...

It is a bigger issue in countries like the US where vulnerable populations are refusing the vaccine.

Barely budged? It's gone up by a factor of 5x since the beginning of April!

Are you looking at cases instead of deaths?

No, I'm not. At the end of May, there were about 6 deaths daily. Now it's about 34, and rising exponentially. In two weeks it'll be 100 daily deaths.

I see. Let’s hope for the sake of the UK that there is some noise in that data. We expect greatly improved care with such small numbers compared to the prior waves.

I'm intrigued to know where this 2 week delay comes from. That's comparable to the time from first infection to full symptomatic state, but (based on US data) I see a much longer envelope of at least 2-8 weeks. Maybe this start measured from symptomatic or even test results date, but with test times <24hrs that's unlikely shift the center more than a week.

I'd expect something closer to a 4-6 week delay in the statistics.

https://github.com/ctesta01/animated_covid_rates/blob/master...

4-6 week delay is what I observed earlier in the pandemic. Once people go onto ventilators they usually take a while to either get off them or die.

IIRC during the first months of the pandemic most deaths showed a pattern where, from onset of symptoms, the disease would be unpleasant for ~7 days then the patient would seem to recover, and then suddenly worsen around day 10-14. New cases were typically detected around onset of symptoms, so I'd guess that's where we get the general assumption that deaths will trail new cases by 2 weeks.

I'd be curious whether we're detecting noticeably earlier than symptoms now, in countries like Australia with very proactive testing and contact tracing.

If you take the numbers from the UK (here https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/) and filter to just the 2nd and 3rd waves (testing was poor in 1st wave; lots of people are vaccinated in the 4th) and compute the autocorrelation function between positive tests and deaths, you see a peak around 14 days.

Yes most people who get it bad die after about 14-28 days. I don't know the detailed stats, but the average might well be 3 or 4 weeks or so, but the first of them start dying after 14 days. This means when you see an increase in infections the death rate starts to rise after about 14 days, as the leading edge of the rise in deaths starts entering the statistics.

Isn't it also the case that the Netherlands has vaccinated few of the younger groups, which are the same group that has had an explosion of cases. I can't find the reference right now, but the country rationally focused on older groups. If that's the case, cases may be high with very few deaths.

True, the planning is here (in Dutch, but luckily we use Arabic numerals): https://www.rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/coronavirus-vaccina...

The first table is for non-medical personnel without high-risk indication. People under 30 have only been able to book their first shot since a month (but they were able to choose the J&J vaccine, which only needs one shot).

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