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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:
“Today’s figures show a continuing decline in the number of new cases of COVID being reported on the DHSC dashboard. Today’s figures are important as they represent the first day that any impact of the opening of society on the 19th July would have been obvious in the statistics. Today’s figures are 21,952 which are down 12% on last Monday’s report. So as expected, we are not seeing the rapid fall in case numbers that we were seeing last Monday. Whether we see a continuing decline over coming weeks or see cases plateau is not clear but I doubt we will see further rapid falls or indeed increases over the next month.
“In addition we can now see that in England new admissions to hospital have peaked. Data for the UK as a whole is only available up to 27th July because some devolved nations take somewhat longer to report their admission data. Today’s figure for England of 593 admissions (for Saturday 31st July) is 19% down on the previous Saturday’s number. As yet the number of people in hospital with covid has not peaked, though it is clearly plateauing, and we can expect to start seeing this fall in the next few days. It will take another week or so before we see any impact on reported deaths.
“The fact that hospital admissions are now falling provides further evidence that the decline in cases in the last couple of weeks was real and not due to an artefact from changing testing or people deleting the NHS Covid app as some have suggested.”
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
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