After nearly an hour waiting for the current figures on coronavirus, the data has still not been updated and I’m starting to see “distract” type aticles from the press with very little detail. These seem to have been written to “fill a hole” that was left for a real article about the stats and they are not being allowed to do that.
Have the press been gagged? Very worrying!
Possibilities:
- A death or deaths
- A very large increase
- Someone particularly prominent has it
- They have realised there is not a chance in hell of the NHS coping.
Addendum
Some 2 hours after they were supposed to be released, the department of health have said there are now 115 cases. (of which 6 are in Scotland). I say “claim”, because this kind of delay is usually for a reason. I was predicting around 107-112 cases today so 115 is not massively different, so that doesn’t explain the delay.
Current prediction (assuming we’ve had real data)
11th march (6 days = Wed) I expect to see our first death by then (but it could be a lot earlier)
16-17/march (10 days) we reach the 3000 cases level at which S.Korea’s health service stopped coping.
30th March (3 weeks 4 days) there will be as many cases as there were NHS beds before any emergency increase.
New Addendum
It is regretable that my earlier comments about 3pm now appear to be correct. Today the UK experienced our first UK based death from CV this is obviously appalling news for those invovled. Worse for everyone else, it appears to be UK based person-to-person transmission which means I was right that those being discovered were the tip of the ice-berg of unknown cases.
Based on the sequence of events, I believe news of the death came to those with the figures shortly before 2pm. There then followed a couple of hours when they deliberated as to whether to give out the news, but decided instead to issue the up-to-date number of cases instead at 4pm. The death was then announced just after the 6pm news started, presumably to minimise the amount of time journalists had to investigate.
Exactly 7 days ago I predicted a death in the UK “in the next 7 days”. Sadly I was right. I expect around 9 more in the next ~7days which means by the 12th March it is likely there will be one in Scotland.
