Arizona11 wrote:
Any reassurance that can be given to us would be very much appreciated.
It was mentioned earlier in the thread that you might start to improve your personal confidence over the coming weeks and months if you could clearly see local and national infection-rates coming back down, but one aspect that I now realise hasn't been covered is just how you might be able to do that if it's not something that you've sought access to previously.
So here's some links for you to have a look at, which might cut through some of the more sensationalist headlines that we sometimes see in the mainstream media -
- Interactive UK COVID Map - this map can be viewed at county, town, and suburb level using your mouse scroll wheel, and then by left-clicking on an area-element at each viewing level, and it shows total cases in a 7-day period, along with a 'case-rate per 100,000 people' figure as well, and in many areas of the UK both of those figures can currently be seen coming down at a fairly impressive rate. A user-entered postcode can also be used via the box in the top-left area of the map -
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map/cases
- Daily Update - this contains a quick-look UK summary of vaccinations, people testing COVID-positive, deaths within 28-days of a positive test, COVID patients admitted to hospital, and COVID tests conducted, along with recent snapshot-graphs to enable visual trends to be seen easily and clearly -
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
- COVID cases in the UK - this page shows longer term charts, including the scale and length of previous COVID waves experienced since the start of the UK pandemic, for cases by specimen date, cases by date reported, and 7-day rolling averages of both recent 7-day case rates, and also of the percentage change on those rolling 7-day case rates -
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases
- COVID-related healthcare in the UK - this shows long term charts for COVID patients admitted to hospital, COVID patients in hospital, and patients in mechanical ventilation beds, from the start of the UK pandemic and showing the scale and height of previous COVID infection waves -
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/healthcare
It should be noted that the final two links, for cases and healthcare, will open by default at 'UK' level, but can be configured using a link at the top of each page to also show nation-level data (England, Scotland, etc..), regional-level data (South-East, South-West, etc...), and local-authority level data based on major local towns.
Hopefully taking a look at the above links at both national and local level might start to give you some confidence that even if infection-rates are still higher than you're currently comfortable with at the moment, they might be heading in the right direction and can be judged at a more granular level than perhaps simply taking confidence-cues from broader media sources, some of which tend to be of a more sensationalist nature by default...
At the very least, you should be able to clearly see using the above links how things like local infection-rates are hopefully coming down at a good pace, and that even though the charts will show that
case-rates have been quite high for this most recent wave, the links above also
do clearly show that UK hospitalisation rates and deaths
have remained at a very low level compared to earlier waves, which clearly show the vaccines doing
exactly what they're designed to do, which is to protect the most vulnerable of us from the worst outcomes,
even if we do become infected, and for those of us that have been double-jabbed
and don't carry any other major underlying health issues, it's turned the virus into something that can be largely tolerated without major issues now, for the most part, and hopefully the healthcare links above can start to shine a light on that key factor for you, and help you gain some confidence in how much our current situation has improved when compared to earlier, non-vaccinated waves...
Best wishes,
Itsallaguess