A step toward understanding (part 2)

Using factor analysis to get a handle on the pandemic

In A step toward understanding (part 1) I kicked off by boiling down 38 pandemically-flavoured independent variables into a mélange of just 5 orthogonal factors I called nationwide testing, COVID cases + clinical tests, COVID deaths, prevalence + CFR, and in-hospital test rate. These five beauties explained 93.4% of the variation available in the 38-dimension dataset and glistened like edible jewels in the sun.

This morning I am going to repeat the exercise for variables garnered from NHS England COVID-19 Hospital Activity pages, which may be found here. As before, the raw variables on official offer have been corrected and embellished by my good self, and here are all 27 of them for the period 1st Mar - 7th Dec ‘21 (i.e. pre-vaccine):

There are delights to be had in considering just this table of descriptive statistics alone; for example, a personal favourite is a daily mean of 550 COVID inpatients (inpatients already in hospital for other reasons that happened to test positive during…