zico wrote:
More odd things in today's press conference. 3 graphs were shown -
1st was for new cases, where it was claimed peak new cases have already happened - the graph didn't support that.
2nd was for hospitalisations, where it was claimed the rate of increase was slowing - though not that obvious to the naked eye.
3rd was for critical cases in hospitals, where it was claimed these have now flat-lined.
The problem with the above is that with the progress of the diseases (identification, then hospitalisation, then critical care) you'd expect to see the first flat-line in new cases, followed a few days later by flat-lining hospital admissions, then a few days later by flat-lining critical cases.
But the critical cases seem to have flat-lined first.
I saw the press conference and initially thought the same as you, regarding the 'critical-cases in hospitals' figures looking like flatlining earlier, and then I thought that this would make complete sense if the section of the community that might end up in that particular section of the statistics were self-isolating to a much more stringent degree than those that might still become poorly, but not necessarily then go on to need hospital treatment...
On the flip side of that, you'd perhaps then expect more and more of the actual 'daily new cases' figures to be more strongly represented over time by people who are clearly still catching it, but perhaps then tend to be less and less reliant on hospital treatment, given that they might not be 'taking that extra level of care' simply because they don't consider themselves to be in that 'extra-vulnerable group' that might then end up requiring hospital treatment, or because many of them are perhaps part of the relatively younger section of society that largely forms our current 'critical services' workers, who by default will be exposed to more risk of catching the virus on a daily basis, simply by having to carry out those 'critical services'.
If we were to perhaps compare those two 'less-susceptible-to-needing-hospital-treatment' groups of people with the 'older and much more susceptible group' that are being told to carry out much more stringent self-isolation processes, then we might expect those 'critical-cases in hospitals' figures to start to drop off quite early on, as a higher and higher proportion of the
less-susceptible (to needing hospital treatment..) group continue feed into the 'daily new cases' figures..
In a way, the above scenario is how I would expect any future 'herd immunity' approach to have to play out - where the ultra-susceptible (in terms of potentially requiring hospital treatment...) are told to stay in a different 'situation' than those that are not as likely to need hospital treatment if and when they were to go on to be affected by the virus, and in that scenario we might see exactly what you're scratching your head about here, where 'new cases' continues to rise, but with 'critical hospital cases' continuing to flat-line or even drop-off, so long as that ultra-susceptible (to requiring hospital treatment) cohort were to continue with their very stringent self-isolation routines...
Given that in the absence of any type of reliable vaccine, the above scenario is also likely to be one that might get the economy going again using what we might consider to be the largely more 'economically active' and also large sections of the 'working population', where the younger/fitter/still-working might largely be considered to be that section of society that are much less likely to need hospital treatment, I would expect the above 'two-tiered' approach to be something they might go on to look at when they ever begin to walk-back on the current lock-down arrangements...
Cheers,
Itsallaguess