April 21, 2020

expert reaction to today’s reported COVID cases and deaths in the UK

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have announced the latest reported figures for cases (129,044) of and deaths (17,337) from COVID-19 in the UK.

Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine at the University of East Anglia, said:

“Today’s report of new cases show an continuing and sustained decline over the past week. Part of the problem with monitoring cases on a daily basis is that there can be random day to day variation that makes it difficult to see trends. Monitoring trends have been made more difficult by the welcome inclusion of the results of increasing numbers of pillar 2 tests in total numbers.

“Nevertheless, when the results are separated into pillar 1 and pillar 2 it is easier to see the trend in pillar 1 (results from the most ill patients).  We have used a seven day rolling mean for new reports and it case be seen that there has been a consistent decline over the past week, from a peak of 8447 on the 8^th April to 18^th April (the last day possible to calculate the rolling mean). There does appear to be an upward trend in pillar 2 reports, but this is likely to represent the ramping up of testing in this group.  There now also appears to be a clear downward trend in daily reports of hospital deaths in the UK.

“I find the trends in both pillar 1 cases and hospital deaths to be reassuring that the current UK control efforts are now having a real and observable impact on the epidemic.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

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