Hospitals reaching crisis point, just as infection rates tail off everywhere but around the border..

It’s striking how Ireland (north and south) now seems to be cooling its infection rates quicker than any single administration in Britain. Now, that’s just as well, because as Gav Reilly points out on Twitter, the situation in the south’s hospital system is close to bursting…

Yesterday’s hospital stats – 193 in ICU, 22 beds left available.

There are 299 people in intensive care, including non-COVID patients, which is higher than the standard national full-time capacity (gone from 255 to 285 in last year, per Stephen Donnelly #OnTheRecordNT yesterday) pic.twitter.com/pMGuKtwfA4

— Gavan Reilly (@gavreilly) January 18, 2021

Overall, the death rates in the Republic though are way down on the UK as a whole:

• The UK’s death rate from the start of the pandemic is about 129 per 100,000 people
• Northern Ireland’s is much lower – about 82 per 100,000
• The Republic’s is lower again – at about 50 per 100,000.

Within each are however there is a fantastic regional variance. Parts of England are as low and lower than each of these figures, and parts of Northern Ireland are showing fantastically high percentages:

According to BBC figures for the week up to 10 January, the Newry, Mourne and Down council area had the highest infection rate in Northern Ireland, with 750 cases per 100,000 people.

Same policy, but clearly even at this late stage in lockdown compliance is still not universal within Northern Ireland. The BBC reports: all indications are that border areas – both north and south – have high infection rates.

According to a paper published by the BMJ, there is a “geo-social gradient associated with predicted disease prevalence suggesting urban areas and areas of higher deprivation are most affected”.

On the upside, the UK Government’s prepurchases of vaccines seems to be paying off for Northern Ireland where as much as 6% of the population (more than 110,000 people) have been vaccinated, compared with just 2% in the south.

It is certain there will be complications that no doubt will grab many headlines when they arise. But for now, out with the need to keep control on the spread, they are likely to be the most effective route out in the short/medium term.

As a short aside, there has been much praise for the countries of south east Asia, and indeed New Zealand and Australia where, informed by earlier experiences of epidemics they were much quicker out of the blocks than Europe.

But it should be noted that whilst China has been supremely effective at stamping out the various they have been much less forthcoming with sharing the kind of health data that has helped to bring these vaccines to market fantastically early.

As I have said here before we are going through a massive, global, and completely bounded experiment as each country (and inside the UK each devolved region) has been given latitude to go its own way.

There will be plenty of time afterwards to figure who got what right, and to share the resulting insights.

“Covid !9 Pandemic Collage” by Joey Z1 is licensed under CC BY