Are people tiring of lockdown?

Is the decline in new Covid infections slowing down? That is the picture painted by the government’s figures for confirmed infections, arrived at via the NHS Test and Trace system. The most recent figures show that the 71,320 cases recorded in the seven days to Wednesday are 15 per cent down on the previous seven days — a substantial fall, yet over the previous few weeks numbers had been declining at around 25 per cent every week. The fall in deaths, on the other hand, appears to be accelerating. The figure for the past seven days — at 2,684 — is 30 per cent down on the previous seven days. Hospitalisations are declining at a rate that falls between the two — down 20 per cent over the past week.

The divergence between the curves of infections and deaths is not unexpected. Over the past two months the vast majority of the over-70s — by far the group most vulnerable to dying of Covid 19 — have been vaccinated.