July 30, 2021

expert reaction to latest COVID-19 daily dashboard case numbers

A comment from Professor Paul Hunter on the latest figures on the DHSC COVID-19 Dashboard.

Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, The Norwich School of Medicine, University of East Anglia, said:

“The DHSC data for today show 29,622 new cases reported in the UK suggesting that recent decline in cases numbers is continuing.  The most recent 7 day rolling mean for new COVID reports is 28,272/day, also a fall from 29,238 yesterday.  Further support that this decline is real comes from the latest data on hospital admissions which show that new admission in England on Wednesday were 728, a 7% fall on 783 on the previous Wednesday.  Taken together these support the view that cases really are falling and that daily admissions to hospital may also have peaked at least for the time being.

“Today was the first day that we would have expected to see any impact of Freedom Monday on cases numbers and the fact that there was no strong upward signal today gives some hope that we may not see a further surge.  But we will need to wait till after the weekend to be confident.

“The decline in case numbers as reported by the DHSC today do not conflict with the report from ONS from earlier in the day as one would not expect to see any impact of the recent decline in the ONS figures till next Friday.  The ONS survey is a prevalence survey and gives an estimate of the proportion of people testing positive during the study period.  Those people who are positive could have caught their infection at any time in the previous two weeks and that is why it takes about two weeks before any change in case numbers is shown in the ONS survey reports.

“For those people following the Zoe app, this has also not really detected the fall in cases.  But this may not be surprising.  The Zoe app is an example of what is known as syndromic surveillance.  Syndromic surveillance is based on people reporting symptoms that are indicative of the infection you are trying to monitor.  The big problem with most syndromic surveillance systems is low specificity.  The Zoe app has made a really important contribution to our monitoring of the COVID epidemic and has amongst other things shown the changing symptom profile seen now many people with the infection have some degree of immunity.  But if COVID is now presenting symptoms more like other respiratory viruses then it becomes increasingly difficult for syndromic surveillance to distinguish COVID from these other infections.  So, if other respiratory infections are rising it will be increasingly difficult for a syndromic surveillance scheme like Zoe to spot changes in COVID against the background of general respiratory infections.”

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

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

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.