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Comment by JetSetWilly | Hacker News Reader

Probably schools and universities being closed.

I'd support this by noting that the numbers in Scotland surged earlier then started declining earlier (where universities and schools go on summer holidays weeks before England). When English schools later broke up for summer, numbers there started declining too.

So no doubt numbers will start going up again when school returns, and will do so first in Scotland - as the virus burns through the young, unvaccinated population.

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The staggered school return times you mention could be one factor (as could better weather resulting in outdoor socialising instead of indoor). The effect when schools return (~2 weeks from now in Scotland) might be muted however as hundreds of thousands more vaccinations will have been done in the parent-age population. In Scotland, for example, over 90% of adults have received the first dose, and 72% the second (implying that ~18% are in the waiting period for the 2nd). Perhaps we should expect to see a spike in cases in children, but not so much among their parents.

Did we not see the same effect last year (probably for the reasons you mentioned)? Numbers declined in summer, but then massively rose again in Oct-Nov.

I think this Autumn will reveal whether the vaccinations are giving us the protection needed to gradually open up society again.

For my part I really hope it does, as it will also encourage other countries to do the same and give the vaccination campaign a worldwide boost.

Let’s hope the peak just gone is the last big spike. In the final analysis I imagine the British public’s _willingness_ to get the jab will be seen as an enormous success factor, on top of the vaccine itself’s efficacy. This willingness merits study. High social trust of the NHS, historic common understanding of vaccines and everyone knowing someone affected by the virus all play their part. As an aside, I believe this to have been the NHS’ finest hour, and in future “the pandemic” will replace “the war” as the lynchpin reference point in time, as it were.

The UK government definitely seems to consider the British public's willingness to get vaccinated to be one of the key parts of the success story, from what I've seen. I will also say that their handling of issues like the AstraZeneca blood clotting issue has been really good compared to the shitshows elsewhere - careful, measured, with really clear communication about what they know and why it justifies the decisions about whether to vaccinate people with it.

Not sure it's quite this simple; look at the overall case by specimen and age demographics graphs on https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases?areaType=natio... (England only, because the data for rUK isn't available).

Note the peak is around a week _prior_ the end of the school term in England (23 July), and this is true across basically all age groups.

The Euro finals were on 11th July and for a lot of schools the holidays started on the 15th July

Most of England's private schools broke up one week prior to the state schools.

Most children don't go to private schools.

Only 6% of the population attend private school.

But if it rose earlier and fell earlier, the simplest explanation is simply that the course of the disease was... earlier there, isn't it?

It is possible, but there's still large cohorts of the population (ie under 18s) who have not had the virus and are not vaccinated, you would expect that when they go back to large scale mixing in schools together that transmission will increase among them and case numbers will go up.

And this isn't really an issue so long as the overwhelming majority of the old and vulnerable are vaccinated. But there still the potential for scary looking case numbers but not so much death numbers.

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