Mystic (COVID) Jelltex

On March 9th 2020, I wrote my first COVID blog, in which I guestimated how bad things would be.

I said that for the UK there would be:

Infections: 1,330,000

Hospitalisations: 133,000

Actual results, up to yesterday 15th February 2021:

Infections: 4,047,843

Hospitalisations: 423,269

So, nearly three times as bad as feared based on the initial data from Italy.

My guestimate for the US was:

Infections: 6,540,000

Hospitalisations: 654,000

And the actual:

Infections: 28,320,708

Hospitalisations: 1,690,996 So about the same, between three and four times as high. Though my guestiate was for the whole pandemic, we are not over it yet, of course. I was shocked when I made these calculations, but imagine how it is to have underestimated by 400%?

THis is eyewatering, and then you look at countries, easpecially those in the far east and Austalia and New Zealand, where supression of new infections has worked and life has returned pretty much to normal. There is no reason why the UK, which is an isalnd, could not have had the same outcome. As I wrote several times, the UK did worse that doing nothing would have done, and now talk is of unlocking, and doing so on a large scale and as soon as possible.

This runs the risk of a wave of vaccine resistant COVID developing, and that being another gift for the world to go along with the Kent variant. It means that the pain of this last lockdown, some ten weeks so far, stretching back to November 3rd, would be in vain, and another round of mass deaths would be inevitable.