scotia wrote:The strongest I would put my own observations is that I suggest that there could be - and if the effect I am seeing is due to an increased death rate of the variant, it looks like its in agreement with the government's tentative figure of a 30% increase .
It is, of course, possible that the health service have increased the threshold at which someone goes to hospital.
However, taking the deaths by date of death for England:
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details ... me=England
They are running around the 900-1000 mark.
Hospital admissions are running around the 3600-4000 mark.
Your figure of 26.5% is just over a quarter.
So fatalities as a proportion of hospital admissions appears about the same.
It may be that the circumstances are such that increase the viral load and number of people infected, but I don't see the calculation for a 30% increase as a proportion of hospital admissions.
(which would be 1270-1300 deaths per day)
The government don't really know how many people get infected. You could take the ONS proportion of people infected and compare that to hospital admissions and/or deaths. I am not sure what happened with the ONS figures. Initially they were testing the same people every week so they could pick up when they were infected, but I think that stopped which means there is then a month's uncertainty about infection date.