Feeling disheartened as lockdown drags on? Don’t. Perhaps you’ve got out of the habit of looking at the numbers on the government’s website. They are now moving rapidly in the right direction. It’s getting better. Reopening is coming.
New cases of the virus are continuing to fall across the UK, as lockdown and the rapid vaccination rollout push down infections in the vast majority of local areas. According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), around 248,100 people tested positive for coronavirus in the community in England during the week ending 27 February – the equivalent of one in 220 people.
This is a reduction from the rate of one in 145 the previous week and is the lowest infection rate since the week to 1 October, when it was one in 240. Weekly case numbers are now over five times smaller than the figures seen at the peak of the second wave in January.
The current R number suggests that this decline in cases is likely to continue. The R number in the UK is now 0.7-0.9, up slightly from 0.6-0.9 last week, but still below the crucial level of 1 – which indicates the epidemic is continuing to shrink.
Significantly, this steady drop in cases is already starting to have a knock-on effect on the number of hospitalisations. This week, the number of patients with Covid in hospitals in England dropped to below 10,000 for the first time since the start of the second lockdown in November. At the peak of the second wave, Covid hospitalisations reached 34,336.
In another encouraging sign, the UK lowered its Covid-19 alert status from the highest possible level last week for the first time since early January. Level 5 means that there is a “material risk” of the NHS being overwhelmed, while level 4 means the epidemic “is in general circulation” and “transmission is high or rising exponentially”.
The number of deaths is also falling. Yesterday, the UK recorded 242 Covid-related deaths – a reduction of around 35 per cent from last week, when 323 deaths were recorded on 25 February.
In part, this good news can be attributed to the UK’s speedy rollout of the vaccines. More than 20 million people in the UK have now received their first dose, the equivalent of 31.4 per cent of the total UK population and 39.8 per cent of people aged 18 and over, with 963,862 people having received a second dose.
Despite some recent dips in supplies, an average of 2.5 million people a week are receiving their first doses of the vaccine. This puts the UK on course to offer jabs to everyone over 50 in the week starting 15 March, almost a month before the government target.
While all of these numbers are moving in the right direction, it is worth noting that the infection rate in England – one in 220 – is still high when compared to last summer; in the week to 25 August, around one in 2,000 people had coronavirus.
But as the vaccine kicks in and more people become immune, the number of deaths will continue to drop, SAGE expert Professor Andrew Hayward told Times Radio this morning.
He said: “Of course, we have the technology to update the vaccines and I think that’s where we’re going really… the numbers of deaths will be much more like flu – the approach to surveillance of new strains and development of new vaccines and regular annual vaccinations will be like that.” He told listeners that he believed we’ve been through the worst and, most reassuringly, that “we will get back to normal”.
