First sign of green shoots it the death stats w/e 12 Feb.
As I said in a different post on the Scotland hospitalisation studies there was nothing showing in the death stats at that time. Amongst the stats I have set up doing automatic downloads and minor analysis on (mostly graphing, grouping and computing percentages) there is now an inkling of a relative decline in death numbers amongst the older groups.
What I am looking at is the percentage of weekly deaths in a series of age groupings. Those percentages have remained pretty much static throughout the epidemic. Because of the delays between vaccination and build up of immunity and the maybe 3 or 4 weeks between infection and a death being recorded in the weekly ONS stats I expected it to be maybe a little later before anything showed.
First vaccinated were care home and NHS staff. By 11 Jan when the first NHS England vaccination stats started appearing regularly there were enough given that those groups were done. So next up would be the over 80s the first of who should be gaining some immunity by late January. Roll forward to mid February and if the vaccines were working the numbers should start showing in the death stats. Well it's small but they do.
Click for bigger
The change is small but bigger than anything I've seen by way of change across the period of our epidemic. Differences in the age grouping provided by NHS England and ONS make direct comparison across the whole pandemic tricky when you get the rather small changes seen here. Number wise the change is small but the graph shows a decline in percentage deaths over the last week for both the 90+ and 80-89 groupings with that drop being made up for mostly by the increase in the 60-69 group. Of course as we are in a period where the virus is in retreat overall all deaths have declined.
A link to the actual graphs which link back to all the others. The percentage one I've posted about is the bottom one.
.co.uk/ONSdeaths_by_age.php]https://covid.[censored].co.uk/ONSdeaths_by_age.php You'll need a laptop or computer for this to show much as tablets don't seem able to handle the javascript produced by the graphing software I chose to use and show no "hover" data. Phones are way too small anyway.