Slowdown in cases suggests modellers’ dire predictions were wrong again

IT WAS just last weekend that Prof Neil Ferguson told the BBC that it was “almost inevitable” that Britain would soon see 100,000 Covid cases per day, and possibly even 200,000 daily infections.

For months, modellers have been warning of a devastating summer spike, which could exceed the highs of previous waves, with even Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, asking the country to brace for six-figure daily infection numbers.

Yet there are early signs that Britain has already peaked, and it has done so at a far lower point than anyone expected. On July 15, the country recorded 60,676 cases and infections have largely been falling ever since.

Although daily case numbers can be erratic, the seven-day rolling average is telling the same story.

The slowdown began on July 19 when there was just a 1.7 per cent increase compared with 5.5 per cent the day before. The increase was smaller again the following day, at just 0.5 per cent, before falling by 2.6 per cent on July 22.

Yesterday, 36,389 cases were reported, a fall of 3,517 from Thursday and a 42 per cent drop from the previous Friday when 51,870 infections were announced.

“We started to see a weak signal a few days ago and we’re now seeing a considerable dip from when cases hit 56,000 last week in England,” said Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine at the University of Oxford.

“This seems to be how viruses work, you see this exponential rise and then they seem to drop at a rapid pace.”

It is inevitable that admissions and deaths will continue to rise for several weeks before they catch up with the fall in infections, but it does suggest the end of the third wave may be on the horizon.

It is already clear that Scotland has peaked, with a high of 3,930 recorded on June 28. Curiously, that was just six days after the country was knocked out of the European Championships, and could signal that the recent surge was partially caused by increased social contact sparked by the tournament.

It may explain why England, whose team went on to the final at Wembley on July 11, peaked later, at 56,196 infections on July 15.

Paul Hunter, professor in medicine, at the University of East Anglia, found there had been a “significant acceleration” in cases about eight to 10 days after the first England game in the Euros and then after the quarter finals.

“In Scotland case numbers started to fall after they left the Championships and case numbers have continued to fall since,” he said. “If such a perturbation as the Euros caused only a temporary acceleration in the increase in case numbers despite games continuing, this may bode well for the impact of July 19.”

Prof Heneghan added: “We know significant events can act as a promoter of infection and it’s interesting to note that Scotland peaked earlier.

“The fall in numbers is reassuring because we’ve had quite a lot of opening-up already, as well as the football, and I can’t see that a great deal has changed in behaviour since then.

“It’s now time to overhaul the data and publish cycle threshold information so we have a better understanding of how infectious people are, and find out how many people are being admitted to hospital with Covid rather than being tested when they go in with something else.

“That would really help us understand what is really going on.”

Overall, the country has done far better coming out of restrictions than any of the models predicted.

Scenarios suggested that daily hospital admissions would be around 1,300 a day by now. Instead Britain recorded 870 yesterday. Modellers also forecast hospital occupancy of between 8,000 and 12,600 now and 200 deaths a day, yet there are currently 4,861 people in hospital, and 64 deaths were reported yesterday.

All this must be taken with a healthy dose of caution because the unlocking on July 19 may still lead to a further upward trend which is not being seen in the figures yet.

Latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show infection rates are continuing to rise, with 1 in 75 people now carrying the virus.

However the ONS data only go up to the week ending July 17, so will not have captured the recent falls.

This week’s ONS data also show a rise of 28 per cent between the week ending July 10 and July 17, compared with a 73 per cent rise between the weeks ending July 3 and 10.

It might be argued that the fall is due to reduced testing. The number of tests carried out recently has also been sporadic, ranging from 1.2 million on July 14 to just 784,000 on July 17.

But fewer tests may be indicative of fewer symptomatic people and there is no sign of a delay in processing tests which could cause a backlog of data.

So it may be that there are finally enough people vaccinated to keep the disease under control.

Put simply the virus may be running out of unvaccinated people to infect.