Earlier link behind paywall
A curious swell of panic is emerging in Britain, driven by fears that the country is about to experience
a second wave of coronavirus.
Boris Johnson is said to be
"extremely concerned" about cases "bubbling up", and it is true that the UK's seven-day average rate now stands at around 700, 28 per cent higher than three weeks ago.
But, arguably, Britain is once again suffering from its haphazard testing regime, which is making it virtually impossible to track the pandemic. The roll-out of
test, track and trace means it is highly likely that many mild cases, which would never normally have troubled the testing system, are now being sucked into the figures.
Local outbreaks,
such as that in Leicester, have also triggered widespread surveillance testing which has bumped up the positive cases, and there are far more tests being carried overall than in recent months.
Put simply, if you test more people, you'll see more cases.
On Wednesday, 846 people tested positive for coronavirus, and 165,480 tests were processed (0.5 per cent). Contrast that to April 5, at the height of the pandemic, when 5,902 people tested positive and 16,080 tests were processed (36 per cent).
Professor Karol Sikora, the dean of medicine at the University of Buckingham, said: "We're processing 10 times as many tests a day now. The average ticked up today, and cases certainly aren't falling, but we do need some context."
Take a look at the hospital admissions data, however, and there has been no rise. Admissions are continuing to fall, with around 65 new cases a day – down from 3,099 at the peak. It makes it clear that this new increase is not due to severe Covid-19, and these people are not ending up in hospital.
Data from a symptom tracker app run by King's College London and healthcare company ZOE also shows that levels have plateaued, with no sign of a second wave. Their figures – based on more than 13,000 swab tests – show symptomatic Covid-19 has been stable at around 2,000 cases a day for the past month.
Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College, said: "The data shows that things haven't changed much since the end of June and we are still at the tail end of the first wave, with around 2,000 cases a day. The numbers are holding steady for now. There is no sign of a second wave yet, but we are keeping a close eye of the data to make sure we catch any changes so that we can take all necessary early measures."
The King's College watchlist now shows that all "at risk" areas
are in the north of England, yet even those have seen the surge in numbers stop. "It's not all doom and gloom for the north of England," said Prof Spector. "The data suggest that things are improving."
An increase in localised outbreaks is also entirely expected at the end of a pandemic, and experts say cases are now so low that, if these levels were happening without knowledge of coronavirus, nobody would have spotted the new disease.
Professor Carl Henegehan, director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford University, said: "Across the board, normal life is not resuming because we're still instilling a sense of fear in the community when cases are very low.
"If we didn't have testing now we wouldn't even be considering it a problem, because it's so low. If this was an influenza outbreak, we would have called it finished by now and said we were through this wave, and we would have started to get back to normal.
"We would expect to see sporadic small outbreaks occurring after a major epidemic and, as long as we keep testing, those outbreaks will not get out of control. None of them have led to an overall increase yet."
Prof Heneghan added that people in Britain "are paralysed and fearful of a second wave" amid growing concern about rising case numbers in some other European countries (see the graphic below).
The King's College data estimates that around 29,174 people currently have symptomatic Covid-19 in Britain, which has remained stable since major lockdown restrictions were lifted.
Although being ultra-cautious about the disease may seem prudent, there is mounting evidence that lockdown is causing many excess deaths through lack of adequate healthcare. ONS figures this week show that the number of people dying in hospital is still low, suggesting many people are still not being able to access healthcare.
Sam Williams, of Economic Insight, whose analysis
suggests more than 21,000 people may have died because of the consequence of lockdown, said: "The public's perception of Covid risk has been heavily distorted, and that's probably a key explanation for what we find in our study.
"That's very pertinent to the 'second wave' talk from the Government now. You cannot scare people to death and expect there to be no repercussions."
Before lockdown was eased, experts warned that an ongoing endemic level of disease was a price we may have to pay for getting the economy and health service back on track. The data appears to bear out their forecasts.
Dr Michael Head, senior research fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton, said: "The long-term decline to zero cases of Covid-19 will always see bumps in their graphs within the downward trend.
