What is your obsession with hospitalisation? Only a minority end up in hospital. The faster we let it pass through society without overloading the hospitals the better. All the doom and gloom from April didn’t transpire - virtually no Nightingale usage.
The current "elimination strategy, without admitting it's an elimination strategy" approach is pointless and doomed to failure.
Because a minority of a large number of people comes to a large number, and in the winter the NHS has barely any spare capacity anyway (though we might have less flu due to shielding/social distancing).
I'd point out that my "obsession" seems to be shared by people with far more knowledge of the matter than me, and who are advising the government.
The UK government is pretty clearly not pushing an elimination strategy - if they were they would be opening up much more cautiously like Wales and Scotland.
When you're on a few hundreds per day any shift is going to make an appreciable difference to R rate, when you're in the thousands the same shift has a much smaller impact. Like I said it's a random event and these need largish numbers to be considered reliable.
Yes I understand. But can you give me a reason to change my view that when the
Office of National Statistics say that we have enough infections to get a reliable range of values for R, I should disbelieve them?
We are, of course, currently at the stage of thousands of new infections per day.
I'm not sure what point you're making.
While we are on R, here's that report I was mentioning earlier:
The government has restricted movements on millions of people in England: COVID is apparently on the rise. But what happens when you start digging into the data.
www.cebm.net
Amazing how if you search for more things you find more things
Very odd. They seem to be suggesting that the government is making the mistake of basing policy on raw test numbers. Or have I missed something?
And implying that the government is saying that cases are on the rise, which I don't think they are.
(Although we are now at the point where a rise in cases is consistent with somewhat more sophisticated analyses than the one referred to here).