Cases

Has the current wave peaked?

Yesterday, the news was dominated by Imperial College’s React study which suggested – in contrast to the fall in recorded new infections – that the prevalence of Covid-19 in the general population was either static during the first ten days of lockdown (between 6 and 15 January), or could even have risen slightly. This morning, however, we have a second opinion in the form of the ONS infection survey, which like React is based on testing a randomised sample of the population. It suggests that the prevalence of Covid-19 did indeed fall in the first half of January – but not by all that much. Between 9 and 16 January,

The reason coronavirus cases ‘tripled’ this weekend

The dramatic jump in UK coronavirus cases from 7,000 reported on Friday, to just under 13,000 on Saturday, to a fraction below 23,000 on Sunday is not a dire as it seems – though it is not good news. What has inflated the numbers for Sunday and Saturday are a staggering 15,841 cases where the specimens were taken between 25 September and 2 October. In other words, there was a serious lag between a swab being taken and the result appearing in the government’s official figures. The reason for the confidence-destroying lag was a glitch in two of Public Health England’s ‘legacy’ computer systems, which meant that data was not