March 6, 2020

expert reaction to biggest single day increase in COVID-19 case numbers in UK

The number of recorded cases of COVID-19 in the UK had the largest single-day increase from Thursday 5th March to Friday 6th March.

Dr Bharat Pankhania, Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Exeter, said:

“It is not at all surprising to hear of the 48 new cases of coronavirus, COVID-19, identified in the UK.

“We are now entering a phase of community transmission of infection and it is important for everyone to become aware that the coronavirus is in the phase of freer community transmission.

“Therefore, it is imperative that members of the public immediately start to exercise good infection prevention practice. As this virus is droplet spread, the gold standard infection prevention strategy still is the avoidance of introducing the infection from the hand to the mouth and/or nose or eyes.

“It is important that people become more aware of their unconscious habits of touching their mouth, nose and eyes. The same applies for the automatic unconscious act of sneezing and/or coughing.

“As habits of a lifetime are difficult to change immediately, it is important that people introduce a new armamentum to infection prevention which, with regard to the hands, is frequent and systematic hand washing as well as hand-drying afterwards. Plus, always wash your hands before eating any food. With regard to the sneezing and coughing, it is important to make it a conscious habit to catch the cough and/or sneeze in a tissue paper, then to safely dispose of the tissue and to immediately wash hands with soap and warm water.”

Prof John Edmunds, Professor in the Centre for the Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said:

“Ongoing transmission has probably been established now. Hence, it is likely that we will see increasing numbers of daily counts. Indeed, as epidemics usually increase exponentially, we can expect these increases to get bigger and bigger over the coming days and weeks.”

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

The SMC also produced a Factsheet on COVID-19 which is available here:

https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/smc-novel-coronavirus-factsheet/

Declared interests

None received.