I’ve been looking at figures today and it now looks as if Scotland, having had two peaks this autumn, is now starting to climb up again to a third. I believe this is a pattern of repeated epidemics and as such I can project this pattern forward.

This has not happened in Wales, England nor N.Ireland where the pattern of infection is much more complex and hard to understand. In Scotland we had (positive test per day):

• (1st) July peak topped at about 3400
• (1st) Aug trough at 1100
• (2nd) September peak at about 6400
• (4th) October trough at 2400

It clearly looks as if the scale of the epidemic is doubling with each peak with about two months between peaks. This suggests that the next peak will be around the 4th of November with 13000 positives a day.

In terms of deaths, there was a peak in Scotland around the 19th September with 23 per day. There is no clear peak before this, but it maxed at 8 per day beginning of July. As such we might see a peak in deaths in Scotland around the 20th November, which if it doubles, means we would be seeing ~40 deaths a day. That is similar to the Autumn peak of 2020.

Because the numbers and method of projection is so speculative, I’m going to say that even a very uncertain projection is a peak of 20-80 deaths/day.

UK

Trying to project this to the UK is very problematic. One approach is to say “if it’s the same as the autumn peak in Scotland, it will be the same as the Autumn peak in the UK”. The other is to assume that the death rate peaked recently and then double it for the next peak. The UK peak of deaths in Autumn of 2020 was 470/day. Based on a similar sized peak to this, one projection is that around the 20th November we will see another similar sized peak for UK. Another is that the last peak of 150/day will double to 300/day.

Again, I’m going to add a lot of leeway to this. Generally the trend is up, so I think a lower limit of half of 300 or 150/day is reasonable. But they are not going up as fast as it appears in Scotland. So I’m going to put a range on the maximum of between 300 to 1000 deaths/day in UK around 20th November. That’s really a COP out, as the figures suggest a maximum of 1000, but that seems to high for me as the general trend doesn’t show such a growth.

Xmas

One optimistic point … the figures would suggest a drop toward Xmas.