April 10, 2020

expert reaction to today’s COVID-19 figures on cases and reported deaths

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have announced the latest reported figures for cases (73,758) of and deaths (8,958) from COVID-19 in the UK.

Prof James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute and Professor of Structural Biology, University of Oxford, said:

“With an additional 980 deaths reported, today represents an extremely sad day for the country. The volatility in the daily numbers due to the nature of the reporting makes confidently identifying a hopeful trend in the daily total of announced deaths very hard. The daily total of deaths will be the last number to peak and the loss of life announced today will be of people who were infected before the tight lockdown. There are now encouraging signs in the trends of hospital admissions that social distancing is working as expected.

“The numbers today are once again inconsistent with the more pessimistic scenarios outlined by IHME. The IHME predicted a very wide range of scenarios and it was unhelpful that the range and uncertainty in these predictions was not given as much emphasis in discussion as they should have been.

“Finally, over 90 % of people infected with the virus do not become seriously ill, those who do rely on our health care system who we clapped on Thursday. There is a very long list of essential workers who we owe thanks. Our continuing social distancing has and will save thousands of lives. Whilst no one is safe from the virus, young people are at much lower risk of serious disease. Young people, too easily derided, have willingly put their social, family, love and working lives on pause to save the lives of older generations. Life is for living and our young people’s willingness to give up, for others, that which makes us human, is something we must not forget.”

www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public#number-of-cases-and-deaths

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

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