(17-07-2021, 11:14 PM)Sam Cariss Wrote: In an attempt to put this into some sort of perspective, does anyone know what the highest number of cases previously reported on Fuerteventura is and if this latest outbreak a 'cause for concern' or more a cause for 'out and out panic'???
For comparison, the
January peak was under 180. Shortly after, there were 14 people in hospital. Now there are 4 people in hospital.
If the ratio of cases to hospitalisations stays what it is now, we don't need to worry too much. It's gone from from 1 hospitalisation per 12 infections to 1 hospitalisation for every 92 infections. That's amazing. Hopefully that means the vaccines are doing their job. Clearly people are clearly still getting
COVID, but it looks like they're not getting as sick from it. That will take the pressure off the health service, and allow for life to continue a little bit.
However, we still need to be cautious— if everyone on the island got
COVID at once, even a 1 in 92 hospitalisation rate would mean 1350 people needing to be hospitalised. Obviously the hospital couldn't cope with that. If even 20% of the island had
COVID at once, that would still mean 270 people needing to be in hospital at the one time, which is still way too much. 5% population infected with
COVID? 67 people in hospital. We don't have capacity for that. This is why it's important we try to keep the infection numbers under control.
There's also a small concern in that hospitalisations always lag behind cases. First you get the reports of infections, and then those people have to seek treatment 5-14 days later. Hopefully, we will not see a big uptick in hospitalisations in a week or two— looking back at the numbers from the beginning of the month, it doesn't seem terribly likely. It will go up, but hopefully not by too much.
In terms of the figures I've used here, I'm using daily hospitalisations to daily cases, but perhaps a more optimistic measure would be older cases to daily hospitalisations. If so, the ratio would be even better than 1 in 92. More like 1 in 168 (14 days previous) or 1 in 220 (7 days previous). If that's the case, we can expect hospitalisations to remain fairly low, even for the high amount of cases we have now. It's just important to not let the levels of infection go totally crazy, or we will be in trouble again.
TL;DR: don't panic, we are not where we were back in
January, with the chances of ending up in hospital very high and hearing reports of multiple deaths per week. I don't anticipate full March 2020-style lockdown to return, either. The vaccine seems to be doing its job. However, please do be cautious and remember that every spread case of the virus increases the chances that someone will end up getting very sick, risking lives and the health service. Follow the rules the government are imposing to try to reduce the level of
COVID in the community. Regardless of the ratio, the lower the level of infection on the island, the lower the level of hospitalisations.
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