April 5, 2020

expert reaction to latest figures on COVID-19 cases and deaths

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have announced the latest figures for cases (47,806) of and deaths (4,934) from COVID-19 in the UK.

Prof Sheila Bird, Formerly Programme Leader, MRC Biostatistics Unit, University of Cambridge, said:

“Forty percent of 9,406 COVID-19 tests reported on 4^th April were test-positive (95% CI: 39% to 41%).  On 5^th April, 48% of 12,334 COVID-19 tests reported were positive.  These positive-rate for consecutive report-days are both precise – and dramatically different.  UK government must start to receive, and to report, COVID-19 test results by sample-date (not report-date).  Reporting should be differentiated by test-route: hospitalized patients; index cases in healthcare-worker households; others.  And by age-group for the persons tested.

“The fleet of “small-boats” test-laboratories can perhaps begin by setting their reporting-sail in a statistically ship-shape manner: test-route, sample-date, birth-year of person tested, gender, test-result.”

Prof Simon Clarke, Associate Professor in Cellular Microbiology, University of Reading, said:

“The news of a smaller day-on-day increase in COVID19 deaths is welcome, but it remains far too early to view this as evidence of a slowdown in the rate of fatalities.  Furthermore, it should always be remembered that these numbers do not include deaths in the community, so are a partial picture of the situation nationally.  For similar reasons, we cannot know whether today’s jump in number of newly diagnosed infections is significant.  We will only know that we’ve reached the next phase, where the daily increase in numbers is expected to be plateau, after several days of consistent data.”

Prof Peter Openshaw, Professor of Experimental Medicine, Imperial College London, said:

“There is inevitably a delay in seeing the effects of social distancing measures on deaths because deaths typically occur almost 3 weeks after the onset of disease, which is usually about 5 days after exposure to the virus.  Reduction in deaths would not be expected until about a month after measures are put in place.

“The present measures aim to confine disease to within households and secondary cases within households are bound to take time to feed through into the statistics.  Given this inevitable delay, there are some early signs that the measures already taken are having some effect.

“It is possible that even more severe restrictions may have to be introduced but for now it would seem that the main problem is that some are not fully observant of the measures already in place.  It is not clear that bringing in more severe restrictions will correct this problem.”

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public

https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/

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

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.