Covid Infection Rates Are Falling. So Why Is There ‘A Very Long Way’ To Go?
The number of people testing positive for Covid-19 in the UK is decreasing, though figures remain higher than the first wave of the pandemic.
Confirmed cases reached an all-time high on December 29 with 81,522, spiking again on January 4 to 76,090, according to official government figures.
The most recent complete set of data available lists 39,179 cases on January 19. It’s a significant fall – around 50% down since the late December peak – and the indictors suggest the trend has continued in the subsequent days.
But it was December 14 when the last time the seven-day average was below 30,000 cases a day – suggesting that while the UK’s case rate is heading in the right direction, it remains stubbornly high.
And with the the daily Covid-19 death toll still regularly topping 1,000, how hopeful can people be that there is light at the end of the tunnel?
Professor Oliver Johnson, director of the institute of statistical science at the University of Bristol, told HuffPost UK it may take the cases trend a little more time to be reflected in deaths and hospitalisations.
He said: “Due to the lag effect, it’s probably the case that people dying today were infected sometime around New Year.
“I think it might be reasonable to think that if they haven’t already, deaths might peak around this week.”
Johnson lays the blame for the rise in figures at the door of the new variant of coronavirus, said to be more deadly and transmissible.
During the second lockdown, figures for infection rates began rising again towards the end of November.
Johnson said: “In retrospect, knowing what we know now, that was probably a sort of smoking gun that something strange was happening, because numbers shouldn’t have been going up during lockdown.
“There were a lot of people, and I was one of them, who were feeling: ‘Are we going to be able to get this thing under control at all?’ Whereas now, a few weeks into the year and cases have come down, to be honest it has been...
