The epidemic progress post-lockdown continues to disappoint. I believe that the lockdown has not been conducted very efficiently in Britain. While many European countries are easing restrictions, it looks like it will be a long time yet before this is contemplated here. The government will not be drawn on communicating details of its plans to ease the lockdown, which I think is to the detriment of public cooperation more than anything, but sources close to the government indicate that the daily infection rate must be down in the hundreds per day before any measures are relaxed.
The key daily statistic in the available data in my current thinking is the 'Pillar 1 - Positive', essentially the daily count of new hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
This is down to 2,685 today, although keep in mind that today is a Sunday, and the effect of the weekend on the reporting is very real, as can be observed in the statistics of many countries, including Britain. Pillar 2 testing is included in the daily announced total which features most prominently in the press, but this has been increasing, which makes the total of this series less consistent than Pillar 1 on its own, and also makes the situation appear even bleaker than it is. Until not so long ago, the announced total of daily new cases was almost entirely 'Pillar 1'.
It is also encouraging that the yield of positive cases per the number of tests carried out seems to be reducing also. The historical average for Pillar 1 is about one-third of all people, now it is less than one-fifth. In Pillar 2, historically it is around one quarter and in the most recent data less than one-sixth.
But here we are, nearly five weeks into full lockdown, and six weeks into the period when the government brought in its strenuous social-distancing guidelines on the 16th of March, and there are still thousands of people newly testing positive for the virus every day. I do hope that there is some investigation undertaken to find out where these infections are coming from. For healthcare workers and care home residents it is fairly obvious, but do these two groups sum to a number close to the whole?
I have always been concerned about the situation in supermarkets, and have wondered if they are responsible for a large fraction of post-lockdown infections. One wonders whether healthcare and care home workers are also transmitting the disease to the community when they leave their workplaces, thus sustaining the epidemic. Estimates for care home deaths now range up to more than the total number who have died in hospital, with more than 40,000 succumbing to the virus in total in Britain.
UK coronavirus deaths more than double official figure, according to FT study | Free to read