TL:DR – The COVID-19 pandemic is still with us, the January 2023 post summarises some aspects to date.
It has been a while since I added anything to the site about COVID-19. My periodic monitoring of the stats put out by the ZOE app suggests the disease is currently somewhat on the wane in the UK…for now. During the last few months of 2022, the figures for number of people active cases bounced up and down between around 2.5 million and 3.5 million in a couple of waves.
Today, when I check, the estimate is very much lower, 1.6 million. This figure is based on PCR and LFT tests and symptoms reported by the app’s almost 5 million users and is a statistical extrapolation from that data to the whole UK population. It hasn’t been this low since mid-September 2022. It doubled after that, then dipped again in early to mid-December to 2 million or so. It looks like the numbers have been steadily declining since then. There are, however, still almost 100,000 new cases daily in the UK.
The WHO statistics look a bit more complicated. Globally, there were almost 2.8 million new cases and over 13 000 deaths for the week 9th to 15th January 2023, representing a 0.46% mortality rate, which was down 7% on the previous week. But, if we look at 19th December 2022 to 15th January 2023 there were almost 13 million cases and nearly 53 000 deaths, an increase of 20% on the previous four weeks but a lower average mortality rate 0.41%.
The pandemic is in no way over. It is still advisable to wear a face covering in public places and to avoid high-risk areas and to reduce your risk of spreading the disease to vulnerable people. We should be pushing for governments and organisations to install good air filtering and sterilisation systems, not just to protect us from the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, but also to be prepared for the next, inevitable, airborne disease, or even just a new variant that is more virulent than omicron. Maybe we could avoid a pandemic wave or an entirely new pandemic .