April 3, 2020

expert reaction to latest figures on COVID-19 cases and deaths

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have announced the latest figures for cases (38168, up by 4450), and deaths (3605, up by 684) from COVID-19.

Prof James Naismith FRS FMedSci, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute & Professor of Structural Biology at Oxford University, said:

“The rise in deaths reported today, will have brought heartbreak across the country. The awful reality is that we are going to continue to see very large numbers of deaths for some time ahead.

“What we will see first, as social distancing measures work, is a slowdown in the increase in these daily numbers.  Although today’s numbers are higher than yesterday, the increase is not quite as large as it might have been. I stress that the progress of our efforts to curb the virus must not be judged by day-to-day numbers. It takes several weeks for a reduction in infections to show up as a reduction in deaths. Today’s numbers are therefore looking back to before the lockdown of the country. And the daily data used until recently by NHS trusts reported different time periods, which introduces a significant variation in the daily numbers.

“Obviously there is a huge amount of discussion around testing, but this must not distract us from the most important thing that we all have to continue to do, social distancing. This is the only thing that will bring the number of new cases and deaths down in the next few weeks.”

Prof Keith Neal, Emeritus Professor of the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at the University of Nottingham, said:

“These figures are not unexpected, and deaths will continue to rise in the short term as they reflect people infected up to a month ago. 

“On a more positive note there is suggestion that the number of new cases per day might be beginning to head in the right direction.  The next few days including past the weekend will tell us more.”

Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, said:

“The data include cases reported to NHS England over the previous 24 hours. Few of these 684 deaths will have occurred over the previous day, due to the Trusts understandably often taking a few days to report their data to NHS England. Therefore, the information needs to be presented as ‘date of death’ rather than simply presented as ‘deaths now reported’. As things stand, the daily deaths data is typically incorrectly interpreted in indicating an increase or decrease on the previous day.”

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

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