March 29, 2024

News Cymru

Two sides to every headline

COVID19 2nd Wave Daily Death Patterns

Summary – We see the 2nd wave (deaths) up swing lasting around 2 months before plateauing. How long the plateau will last is unknown at this time.

In Europe, the two most advanced countries in the 2nd wave (that we could find) are Spain and Greece. Both countries are experience a plateau in the rate of increase in daily deaths. Arguably Greece has been on the plateau for around a week and Spain for around a month.

Spain looks like it has the potential to see a slow uptick again and the country is also bringing in some sort of lockdown measures at the end of October which could trigger this increase.

When looking at France we see there was an uptick in the daily deaths around the time new lockdown measures were introduced, 11-13th of October.

The Netherlands have also introduced some lockdown measures around the 13th of October and this was followed by an increase in the rate of increase in daily deaths.

The sample size is small but we were not able to find a case where a country had introduced lockdown measures which were then followed by a decrease in the rate of increase of daily deaths. Very counter intuitive although we have seen studies where contagion in ones own home was the most likely place to contract COVID19 under lockdown conditions.

It is a shame that Spain has decided to implement lockdown measures now, the country appears to be the most advanced through the cycle, it could have given other countries an idea of when they could expect daily deaths to start declining.

Likewise with Greece, as the number of daily deaths looks to be starting to decrease the government have decided to bring in restrictions on bars and restaurants with masks being mandatory everywhere. Travel will not be restricted and non essential businesses will still open so there is still some hope that Greece will give the rest of Europe an idea of what they can expect from this “second wave”.

The UK entered the second wave around the 10th of September, assuming the uptick in daily deaths last around 2 months, the 10th of November could have seen the plateau in the numbers. Unfortunately the UK has decided to go into a full lockdown until the 2nd of December. If the results in France and Holland are indicative then we would not be surprised to see the rate of increase in daily deaths to start increasing over the coming weeks rather than reducing.

Italy also seems to be having a lighter touch, lighter than even Greece so Italy could give us some good information over the coming weeks. If we say Italy entered their second wave on the 7th of September the days around 8th of December should make interesting reading if the government can resist taking unproven measures. We would be looking at a plateauing of numbers around the 8th of December.

The big unknown in all of this is the counting of deaths. It has been suggested that influenza cases may be seen to be dropping much lower than normal because flu deaths will start to be attributed to COVID19, if this starts to happen then all predictions are off.

Influenza season tends to hit in December and January which would mean supposed COVID deaths increasing for a long time, hopefully the data of flu deaths will be as easily accessible as COVID deaths so the comparison can be made!

If you want to see more sources of information relating to COVID19, check this article, especially the links at the bottom

Get the latest updates in your inbox

I