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Four times yesterday we were told that the Covid numbers were going in the wrong direction.
Cases soared, hospital admissions and deaths, the grim news conference reported to the nation.
Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, warned: “This is going in the wrong direction. There is no reason for complacency here.
Professor Chris Whitty, medical director, agreed. “This is definitely going the wrong way.” Some 71 Covid deaths were recorded across the UK yesterday.
Just over six months ago, on March 21, two days before the nation plunged into the blockade, exactly the same number of deaths were reported.
The government is desperate to prevent the virus from suddenly spiraling out of control. If cases increase, it could overwhelm the NHS. But all the signs suggest that this is not in the cards. Yes, the cases are worryingly high. Yes, hospital admissions have doubled in a week. And yes, 71 deaths are a tragedy
The symmetry is chilling and the message from Boris Johnson and his advisers was clear: follow the rules, follow the line, or we will have no choice but to block the country once more. Warning that the nation is at a “critical moment”, the prime minister said: “We will not hesitate to take further measures which, I fear, would be more costly than what we have put in place now.”
But while cases and deaths are indeed on the rise, Britain is in a much better position than it was in the spring. On March 21, when 71 people died of Covid, we were at the beginning of an upward curve that was about to skyrocket.
A few days later, the daily death toll had reached 1,000. Cases were doubling every three or four days, Professor Whitty reminded us yesterday. The last time he and Sir Patrick appeared in Downing Street together, about ten days ago, they predicted that cases would double every seven days.
Even that now seems like a pessimistic forecast. In reality, the data suggests that cases are increasing much more slowly, perhaps doubling as slowly as every 21 days.
After all, this may seem like a bummer, if cases are on the rise, so will hospital admissions and deaths inevitably.
Sir Patrick and Professor Whitty often look to France and Spain, which are said to be two to three weeks ahead of the UK on their trajectories. Although both countries have much higher cases than Great Britain, they have seen nothing like the peak seen in the spring.
But the speed of the rise, the gradient of the graph, is crucial when the cost of action to flatten the curve would be so high.
The government is desperate to prevent the virus from suddenly spiraling out of control. If cases increase, it could overwhelm the NHS.
But all the signs suggest that this is not in the cards. Yes, the cases are worryingly high. Yes, hospital admissions have doubled in a week. And yes, 71 deaths are a tragedy.
But all these numbers have been increasing very gradually over several weeks.
And a major study from Imperial College London, based on tens of thousands of tests, suggested last night that the growth rate might even be slowing. He estimated that the crucial R rate has fallen to 1.1, from a high of about 1.5 the previous week, suggesting that the recent restrictions are working. Exponential growth doesn’t seem imminent.
Sir Patrick and Professor Whitty often look to France and Spain, which are said to be two to three weeks ahead of the UK on their trajectories.
Although both countries have much higher cases than Great Britain, they have seen nothing like the peak seen in the spring.
Daily cases in both countries are around 12,000, if the seven-day moving average is considered, which evens out the peaks and valleys of the daily reports.
This figure has remained roughly the same level in France over the past week, and in Spain it has fallen slightly. Deaths in both countries are also high: France has about twice the daily deaths of Britain and Spain almost triple.
But again, both have been fairly stable over the past fortnight.
Neither country has seen the virus spiral out of control, as it did in the spring. Much has been made of the 7,000 new coronavirus cases reported in Britain yesterday and the day before. Although these are the highest figures on record, last spring the country was doing only a fraction of the tests, so only a small proportion of cases were detected. .
If we had been running the same number of tests then, as we do now, we would likely have seen 80,000 to 100,000 infections per day.
To that extent, what we are currently experiencing is more of a wave than a second wave. The prime minister is well aware of the costs of further restrictions. After a series of hard-hitting headlines about missed cancer screenings during the latest shutdown, he was quick to stress last night that the NHS is still open.
Its officials predict 74,000 people will die as an indirect result of the spring shutdown, many because they stayed away from hospitals.
Mr. Johnson must ensure, before ordering a repeat, that the cure is no worse than the disease.
