Hunting For Vaccine Benefit (part 5)

Using UK GOV Coronavirus Dashboard & NHS England Hospital Activity Data And Keeping It Plain And Simple

In Hunting For Vaccine Benefit parts 1 - 4 I’ve used cross-correlation analysis to investigate the relationship between the rise and fall in COVID cases and the rise and fall in vaccination dosing over time. In the next few newsletters I am going to use the same methodology to study COVID admissions to hospital, COVID inpatients, COVID general bed use and COVID mechanical ventilation bed use (MV bed) across NHS England, source files and definitions for which may be obtained here.

Anybody understanding the basic principles of correlation should find the CCF plots relatively easy to understand since they’re simply a series of repeated correlations made at different time lags. Lag zero means the time series for daily dose count is correlated with the time series for COVID admission/bed use with no delay (i.e. we’re looking at an instant effect). Positive-going correlations at positive lags (big red bars sticking up to the right of lag zero) mean COVID admissions/bed use was rising after d…