Falling R rate puts PM under pressure to curb lockdown
App shows plateau in cases suggesting tier system is working and virus is ‘running out of steam’
THE coronavirus R rate in England and Scotland has dropped to 1, leading to hopes that a national lockdown may not be necessary. New data from King’s
College London’s Zoe app, which has been tracking symptoms and test results since the first wave, showed a slight fall in new cases in England and the UK as a whole.
On Friday, the team reported 43,569 daily new symptomatic cases of Covid19 in the UK, but that has since fallen to 42,276. Likewise in England, last week there were 34,268 daily infections but that has now dropped to 33,636.
The R rate, which measures how fast the virus is spreading, is now 1 for
England, Scotland and the UK, according to the app. This suggests cases have plateaued overall and appear to be shrinking substantially in some areas. Wales is currently at 1.1.
Prof Tim Spector, who shared the figures on Twitter, said: “More good news as the Zoe CSS app survey continues to show a plateauing and slight fall in new cases in England, Wales and Scotland with an R of 1.0.”
The figures are more evidence that the tier system is working and will put
‘The data in Liverpool are showing cases have come down by about half and admissions have stabilised’
greater pressure on Boris Johnson to pause his planned English lockdown tomorrow. Yesterday, the Prime Minister told the Cabinet there was “light ahead” in the battle against coronavirus. He said the R number was “only just above one” and the lockdown would bring it back below that threshold.
Government scientists have already been criticised for showing out-of-date and alarmist graphs at a press conference on Saturday when the national measures were announced. Sir Patrick
Vallance and Prof Chris Whitty showed projections for an R rate of between 1.3 and 1.5, even though they believed the rate was now 1.1 to 1.3, and were aware that the tier system was having an impact.
According to the King’s app, cases in northern England and the Midlands stopped rising four days ago and cases in Liverpool have shown steep falls since the city was placed into Tier 3.
Prof Spector has already questioned why the Government is locking the country down when the disease appears to be “running out of steam” in the worst-affected areas. However, he said there was still a slow rise among the over-60s, “so we can’t relax”.
Other experts said they could not understand why further restrictions were being imposed just as cases were beginning to fall.
Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine at the University of Oxford, said the R value in Liverpool was “well below one at this moment in time”.
He agreed there was a “problem” in the city, but added that “the data in Liverpool are showing cases have come down by about half, admissions have now stabilised.” He told BBC Radio 4’s
Today programme: “You’ve got ... these pockets around the country where trusts like Liverpool have got into trouble with over half the patients being Covid patients”, but “actually, [the seven-day rolling average of cases in Liverpool] has dropped from about 490 a day down to 260 – a significant drop”.
Latest data from Public Health England show that the vast majority of outbreaks are in schools, workplaces and care homes and the hospitality industry is a very low risk.