Should we be worried about another Covid spike?

As the chief medical officer professor Chris Whitty suggested this week, the situation with Covid figures can change very sharply, very quickly. One moment infection numbers can be falling, like they were in late November, but the next moment, they can take off again — as they subsequently did in mid-December. That is why all eyes are now on the day-to-day Covid figures published by Public Health England and especially on the apparent deceleration in the decline in new cases over the past week. The numbers published on Wednesday still show a 20 per cent week-on-week fall in the seven day average but that constitutes quite a sharp change. The previous period showed the seven day average of new cases illustrating a 32 per cent week-on-week fall.

Could this be a turning point that results in a return to growth in infection numbers in a few weeks time? There was a similar deceleration in the decline in new infection numbers in mid-February but this was then reversed in the latter half of February.