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NHS England have published the latest figure for reported deaths in hospitals in England from COVID-19 – an additional 209 deaths since yesterday, bringing the total to 23,358.
Prof James Naismith FRS FRSE FMedSci, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and University of Oxford, said:
“That 209 deaths announced today in hospitals is seen in some way as positive news, should serve to remind us of what a tragedy covid19 represents. Today’s figures also report just under 4000 positive tests for the virus. This is further evidence that the UK has had a very large number of infections in the first wave and has been one of the worst affected countries in the world.
“It is worth stressing that focussing a narrative on any single number is misleading. The focus on reported deaths in hospitals may have meant the spotlight fell too late on care homes. The current obsession with the effective R value of covid19 could be similarly unhelpful. The effective R (Re) value is not the same as the R0 (basis reproductive number). The R0 for covid19 is estimated to be around 4, however, there remains considerable uncertainty. Re is a guide to how useful a measure is – push Re below 1 for a prolonged period and this will eliminate the virus (it is most commonly used to judge vaccination campaigns).
“R0 and Re are not measured in real time, they are derived from models into which are fed numbers of infection – they are population averages, they have uncertainties and the trend is more useful than a snapshot. Allowing a narrative to take hold that an Re of 1.1 on a given day is disaster whilst an Re of 0.9 on the next is safety would be singularly unhelpful. We cannot measure with this level of precision. Even if we could, an Re of 1.1 means the virus will continue to grow, but it will do so extremely slowly allowing science the time to develop medicines and vaccines. I would be dismayed to see a daily scorecard of Re.
“Hard lockdown has been an effective emergency measure everywhere it has been implemented. Every country faces the same problem: what next?
“The three legged stool – test, trace and isolate – has proven a useful means of control in other countries. It is a very demanding system to implement and needs focus for a prolonged period. If we are to follow it, then we need to know what is the maximum daily number of infections that we can effectively operate such a system in the UK; hopefully we are working to increase capacity across all three legs so that this maximum is increasing all the time. At the same time social distancing measures have meant that the number of new daily infections is dropping (slowly). It would be helpful for the government to share where it thinks the rise in capacity will cross with the decrease in new cases and what can be done to speed up this cross over. I certainly think measuring progress to this cross over is more useful than a daily Re value.”
Prof Carl Heneghan and Dr Jason Oke, Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine and Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, said:
“Today’s reported figure is 209 deaths in hospitals in England. These deaths are distributed back to the 18th of March: 175 (84%) of the deaths were in the last week, and 34 (16%) occurred more than 7 days ago.
“For comparison: the reported deaths in hospitals in England on the same day of the week were:
“Today, 12 of the 209 (5.7%) deaths are reported with no positive COVID-19 test result.”
https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/covid-19-daily-deaths/
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www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
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