With COVID occupancy increasing, last week I compared the regional position against the last April's peak. We're still well below, but rising quickly in the North. In the NW the growth was more than twice the previous week. How quickly could the situation there become critical?

Any projection is dependent on many assumptions, the key one here being how quickly admissions increase (or don't). I've taken 2 examples, increasing the current 7DMA by 50% and 20%. (It rose by 75% in the last week.) The lower growth delays by 3 weeks hitting the April peak.

A 3rd example starts at a higher level, the 208 seen earlier this week, but is flat. You can see the occupancy soon levels off as discharges match admissions. So it's continued growth that causes the problem, not the current rate. Any time when R>1 we will see continued growth.

This is all very mathematical, and as the CSO has found out, example projections can be open to criticism. But the message is that in the North we are not that far off from April's peak, unless we can rapidly bring R down to 1 and keep it there.

Finally, even at April's levels, we would expect deaths to be much lower (maybe by two thirds), as treatments have improved. But over-peak capacity in hospitals will start to give secondary issues, which themselves will have a negative influence on outcomes. ENDS