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Smear tests on more than 105,000 people showed that Covid-19 infections are declining in England, according to an interim report from the Real-Time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT) program.
The report includes results of coronavirus home tests taken between November 13 and 24, and shows that “an estimated 0.96% of the population in England has the virus, or about 1 in 100 people.”
“This is roughly a 30% drop in the number of infections compared to previous findings, where more than 1 in 80 or 1.3% of people had the virus as of November 2,” according to the Imperial researchers. College London and Ipsos MORI.
England’s four-week nationwide lockdown, in which nonessential businesses were closed and residents told not to mix with other households, began on November 5 and will end on Wednesday.
It came after the UK experienced a second wave of infection, particularly affecting the northern regions of England. The government introduced a localized system for the country, under which regions where infections were high were subjected to stricter restrictions than other areas. England will return to a tiered system on Wednesday.
“We are seeing a drop in infections nationwide and particularly in regions that were previously hit the hardest. These trends suggest that the tiered approach helped curb infections in these areas and that the lockdown has added to this. effect, “said Paul. Elliott, program director at Imperial.
Cases were down in most of England, most dramatically in the country’s former hotspots in the north, where they fell by more than 50%, the researchers found. There was very little change in London and the East Midlands, but the rapid growth of the epidemic seen in the capital and the south in mid-to-late October was no longer evident.
The West Midlands now has the highest number of infections at 1.55% of the population, according to the report.
The research showed that the R number (or reproduction number, which indicates how many more people each infected person transmits the virus to) has fallen below 1 to an estimated 0.88, “which means that the country’s epidemic is currently it is shrinking instead of growing. ” according to the researchers.
London had the highest R number in the country at 0.95, while the lowest were found in the North West and North East of England, at 0.76 and 0.78, respectively.
The researchers also drew attention to the fact that “the virus is having an uneven impact” on people, and healthcare workers, people living in large households and people from ethnic minorities are at increased risk of infection. .
There was also a link with deprivation, according to the report, with people in the poorest areas having the highest number of infections. The researchers said this suggested that social inequalities could be contributing to the virus spreading more in certain communities.
Other scientists have raised questions about how asymptomatic Covid-19 cases can affect the virus case count.
“In the most recent [REACT] survey about 40% of those who tested positive had no symptoms at the time the sample was taken, “Mark Woolhouse, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh, told the UK’s Science Media Center.
He noted that this was about 1 in 200 people, which would equal more than 250,000 cases in England.
Woolhouse said the results support the UK government’s goal “to make mass testing as widely available as possible to find large numbers of people who may be unknowingly infectious.”
