March 8, 2020

expert reaction to confirmation of 67 new cases in the UK

The Department of Health and Social Care’s (DHSC’s) daily update of UK case numbers of COVID-19 on Sunday 8th March confirmed that 67 new cases had been identified over the previous 24 hours, the largest rise in case numbers to date.

Francois Balloux, Professor of Computational Systems Biology, Director, UCL Genetics Institute, University College London, said:

“The actual number of covid-19 infections cases is doubling roughly every 6-7 days globally. This figure is also likely true for most parts of the world. Spikes in the number of reported cases over and above the weekly doubling time are primarily driven by an increase in testing.

“I agree that containment has failed and we’re entering a phase where the best strategy is to slow down the epidemic in order to avoid healthcare capacity being overrun.”

Martin Hibberd, Professor of Emerging Infectious Disease, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM),said:

 “The numbers on their own are not very informative now. We need to know if these new cases are forming clusters or can be traced to known cases in other ways (such as imports from Italy) to understand if we have moved out of the initial containment stage. If they are clusters, we are sampling contacts of cases sufficiently and understanding the outbreak dynamics. If they are apparently randomly distributed, then we know there are more cases than are being reported and we can expect rapid increases in numbers over the coming days and weeks.”

Prof Tom Solomon, Walton Centre NHS Foundation Trust, and Institute of Infection & Global Health, University of Liverpool, said:

 “It is likely that the number of cases in this country is going to double every few days. So in that regard this increase of 67 is not really such a big increase, or not really unexpected. As the numbers  continue to grow we are moving from a phase of containment, where we hoped we could stop the outbreak completely, to one of delay. This means all our efforts are aimed at slowing the outbreak down.

“Even if we cannot stop the virus, and ultimately cannot reduce the number of people who are going to be infected, the intention is to spread the outbreak out.

“Ultimately perhaps 50 to 80% of the population may get infected with this virus. Currently about 5% of patients are needing hospitalisation.  If all these people become infected in a short time window, eg a few weeks, then we will have a very large number who need to go to hospital all at the same time. And the health services will really struggle. 

“However, If we can spread the outbreak over many months, the health services will be able to cope better with the same number of patients, because not everyone will need to care at the same time.”

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

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