THE POSITIVE PROFESSOR

SOCIAL media’s voice of calm Karol Sikora has been signed up by the Daily Express. Readers can now enjoy his soothing advice in these troubled times that have won him hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter. If you need reassuring everything’s going to be all right read Professor Positivity.

AS we all know by now, good news often gets overlooked.

So let’s take a look at some of the recent numbers, remembering that schools have been back for weeks now.

Great reports coming out of the US state that vaccination can halt not just a severe disease, but also transmission.

This means cases should be coming down to extremely low levels and that is indeed happening.

Testing in schools has inflated the number somewhat in Britain.

However, even with that the five day average is around 5,000 and after a little mini-plateau seems to be dropping again.

Vaccines will break the link between cases and hospital admissions, so hopefully even if there is a small uptick in cases it won’t translate to hospital activity. Daily admissions are now well below 400, down from a peak of 4,000.

This statistic is far more important than the case numbers now.

Antibodies

The seven-day average for fatalities stands at approximately 50, down from around 1,250 earlier in the year. After everything, that is the number that we needed to force down.

Israel is further ahead of us, not by a massive amount, in their vaccination programme and cases there have plummeted. Mobility is way up and infection numbers continue to tumble. Hopefully we will follow.

The Office of National Statistics estimate that in the UK over half of people now have Covid antibodies, with that number increasing to 90 per cent in the over-65s.

That is an enormous amount of immunity in the population.

All the numbers are pointing in the right direction, if we’re all sensible we should be hopeful that will continue.