April 7, 2020

expert reaction to today’s COVID-19 figures for number of cases and deaths in the UK

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) have announced the latest figures for cases (55,242) of and deaths (6,159) from COVID-19 in the UK.

Prof James Naismith FRS FMedSci, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute & Professor of Structural Biology at Oxford University, said:

“The current methods of reporting mean this daily death toll has value in transparency but it has become unhelpful and distracting in evaluating the progress of the pandemic. The swings in numbers that we are seeing are emotionally draining; hope one day and despair the next. The swings arise for good reasons, the NHS trusts are not focussed on reporting data but on saving lives. Whilst never forgetting the tragedy that these numbers represent,  I have put my focus on the trends in the data and hospital admissions as a more helpful guide to our progress than daily totals of announced deaths.”

Prof Keith Neal, Emeritus Professor of the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases, University of Nottingham, said:

 “The number of new cases is the lowest figure so far this month.  This is encouraging but too early to tell for sure how well the control measures have performed.  It is possible that the new cases also include health care workers who have been tested and if so the figures are even more encouraging. (The Govt should report on this fact in the name of transparency).  If the decline continues ,the timescale is consistent with the lockdown and the week before that of isolating people with fever or cough.  Deaths are likely to continue to rise for a while given the time from infection to death, so deaths reflect what was happening earlier in the epidemic than the number of new cases.  ”

Dr Joshua Moon, a Research Fellow in Sustainability Research Methods in the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex Business School, said:

“No single day is going to be indicative of a trend. We need a much more long-term view of all of this.

“Backlogs in reporting and testing, the number of mild or asymptomatic cases that aren’t being tested, and the uncertain quality of the data will highly affect the ability to make decisions on all of this.

“What’s important for reducing lockdown is both a clear downward trend, but also enough capacity for testing and epidemiological contact tracing/isolation for cases. Without these, any lockdown reductions will ultimately lead to cycles of spiking cases leading to strict lockdown, and falling cases leading to loosened lockdown, followed by more spiking cases and so on.”

Prof Istvan Kiss, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Sussex, said:

“The message is clear, one needs to wait to clear any backlog in reporting and in infected people still out there. We will need to see a clear downward trend before contemplating any loosening on the current restrictions.

“Data needs to be also of a reasonable quality until this can be seen with sufficient confidence.”

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

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

Declared interests

None received.