September 16, 2021

expert reaction to latest reported COVID-19 case numbers for England, as published on the government daily dashboard

The government have published the latest figures for cases of COVID-19 in England.

Prof Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine, UEA, said:

“Today was the first day that we would have expected to see any clear impact of schools opening on daily reports of COVD case numbers in England.  The UK wide figure for today does not include Scotland’s statistics so we cannot rely on the UK total today.  Today in England there were 22,949 infections reported, 15% down on last Thursday’s figure of 27,049.  This means that over the last 7 days we saw 22% fewer cases than the previous week.  We started seeing case reports below the same day in the previous week on the Thursday 9th September, about 8 days after most pupils went back to school at the point when any impact may have been seen.  Some would argue that this decline could be because of reduced use of LFD in schools but the decline is more steep in reports where only a PCR test was performed (more likely to be driven by clinical need) than in cases where the initial test was a LFD, so that argument could not explain this decline.  Also changes in use of LFD in schools would not have impacted on case numbers in older age groups anywhere nearly as strong to have affected the numbers as we have seen.

“Whilst this pattern would be consistent with an hypothesis that the infection spreads less rapidly when children are in school it would be a mistake to assume that is the case.  In an endemic infection, like COVID has now become, infections reach an equilibrium point where the proportion of the population becoming susceptible balances the likelihood of transmission and of course a lot of people have developed some degree of immunity in recent months as a result of either immunisation or infection.  Also although case numbers seem to have started falling in all age groups, age specific data is always reported somewhat later and it will be later next week before we can know for certain what the trend in each age group really is.  Nevertheless it does look like those strongly expressed views that we would see a surge in infections after schools went back has not turned out to be the case.

“Also of note today is that hospital admissions in England may have already peaked as today’s reported admissions (relating to Tuesday) were down 12% on the previous Tuesday representing a 6% fall in admissions in the most recent 7 day period compared to the previous 7 day period.  Daily reported deaths seem to have levelled off over recent days, but it is still too early to be confident that this will continue to be the case for the next week or so, but if the past is anything to go on, we should see deaths falling in about a couple of weeks.

“How long and low this decline in cases and hospital admissions will go is not clear.  I suspect case numbers will level off at some point and there is still the possibility that cases could increase again as we move through autumn, though I doubt anywhere near as high as we have seen in the past or as has been predicted by some.”

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

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