My first one took less than 30 minutes and the second one probably only about 20 minutes total. When I arrived for the first one there was about 7 or 8 people waiting so it took about 15 minutes after I signed in to get the injection. Second time there might have been 2 or 3 so I got my injection in about 5 minutes from signing in.
I've had quite a few moments in the last 2 months where I've felt like the vaccine (or indeed the virus) may have been having an effect on me, but fortunately I am still mostly well.
This was my experience. I showed up early for my appointment, provided my ID and insurance info, went through a general health checklist, waited a minute for the person ahead of me to get stuck and for the chair to get sani-wiped, got my arm wiped, stuck and bandaged, and headed out to the empty-but-for-the-person-before-me holding area before checking in fifteen minutes later to let them know I was good.
Fortunately for us, Scottish schools broke up last week and hence a few more weeks of disruption have been averted up here.
I'm not as optimistic about the hospitalisation data as all that.
It's very difficult/impossible to put a direct number on it, but what has to be avoided at all costs is crippling the NHS.
But therein lies the problem - there must also be a number by which point the situation cannot be considered "normal" any more.
Last time I looked at the ratios of admissions to cases it seemd pretty erratic! So this time round I thought I'd take a look at the rate of change, since the adage is "increasing cases lead to increasing admissions". I've taken 7-day averages, and then traced the increase compared to a week before, for cases and admissions separately. What this ought to do is mostly remove the effect of vaccination, which changes the admissions/case ratio. It gives quite an interesting chart:I'm not as optimistic about the hospitalisation data as all that.
Looking at the data for Scotland only, the hospitalisation rate per case has definitely dropped significantly, and that is great news... but...
If you look at the 7-day average of both cases and hospitalisations (delayed by a week) for the peak of the second wave, you get the 'hospitalisations per case' rate. If you do the same with the current numbers, you get a lower rate - and that is the good news.
The bad news is that the ratio of these two rates is about 3:1. In other words, vaccines and immunity are seemingly cutting hospitalisations by 2/3rds. That's huge... but it is not massive.
At the current rate of increase in cases, Scotland will be looking at 3x more cases per day than the peak of the 2nd wave by the end of next week... and, unlike the 2nd wave peak, there's no plan to lock down again. Indeed, the peak of the 2nd wave happened well after full lockdown was reimposed across the entire country. Not so this time around.
That being the case, and with a week delay between cases and associated hospitalisations, we could well be back to 150-200 hospital admissions per day in around two weeks' time.
The data I'm looking at is here:
COVID-19 Daily Dashboard
public.tableau.com
I'm not a doctor, so take my advice for what it's worth.
Well, we know from the Prime Minister's comments that he's happy for it to be in the thousands so long as they're piled high...
I don't think we can answer that until we get an idea of what the R number is like in a vaccinated society. Taking the worst example given of 27-30,000 deaths per year, that's about 84 people a day. We've now seen that 84 people dying per day with Covid, even under semi-lockdown, leads to 5 times that number within a month and 10 times that within about 3 months. I think we'd tolerate 20,000 Covid deaths per year whilst we go about our (old) normal lives, provided it was a fairly consistent number, and not spikes that lead to full-scale lockdowns. Road KSI figures simply aren't comparable, there is no R number and there's decades of data to forecast from for a given local authority to plan for.
To relate that to my previous post, what you're describing there is an increase of about 50% per week. We aren't seeing anything like that currently in admissions, let alone deaths. Of course, having a 20% increase in admissions each week will still get bad if it goes on for long enough, but it gives us a lot more time.
The expectation seems to be that eventually it becomes another winter wave like flu, and perhaps those extra deaths spread over the winter months would be 'manageable'. I hope not - theoretically I think we have a much better chance through further vaccination of making COVID have far less of an impact than Flu, but I fear that not enough will be done.
I'm not sure I follow you, or which months your referring to. For a while back in August we had low numbers of cases, and obviously low numbers of hospitalisations and deaths. Come September cases increased, followed by admissions, followed by deaths (and the same again from a higher starting point in December). But what I was looking at is rates of change. They used to match up quite closely - say, from end of Sept to end of Feb - and any deviation would get caught up with within a week or so. All I'm pointing out is that no longer appears to be the case, since Scotland has had a month of cases increasing by 40%/week or more yet admissions have increased at a distinctly lower rate, 20%/week or so.
I was able to recreate this graph, but I don't think the interpretation of it is that simple.
theconversation.com
The problem with moving admissions back 10 days is that it doesn't match up to cases any more, with admissions leading cases both when rates were rising and falling - across the whole trace! There is already some lag in to the reporting of cases I guess, whereas admissions are for the day stated.
Well the media are not the brightest, and mostly seem to be talking about where people might be able to holiday to ☹️
This is why I don't want the damn thing.
