England’s coronavirus outbreak is still shrinking and the number of new cases have more than halved in a week, according to the results of a government surveillance testing scheme.
The Office for National Statistics, which tracks the spread of the virus, estimates 1,700 people are getting infected with Covid-19 each day outside of hospitals and care homes — down from 3,500 last week.
The estimate — based on eight new cases out of 25,000 people who are swabbed regularly — also claimed there are just 14,000 people who are currently infected.
This is the equivalent of 0.03 per cent of the population of the whole country, or one in every 3,900 people. It is down from 0.04 per cent last week and 0.09 per cent a week before.
Separate figures, from King’s College London, suggest the outbreak in England has stopped shrinking — but its estimate is lower than the ONS’s at around 1,200 new cases per day.
Department of Health chiefs have announced an average of just 546 new positive test results per day for the past week — but up to half of infected patients are thought to never show symptoms.
A report by Public Health England and the University of Cambridge predicted on Monday that the true number of daily cases is more like 5,300 but could even be as high as 7,600.
Although the ONS’s data shows a downward trend, the organisation says the decline in cases of coronavirus – which was noticeable in May and June – has levelled off.
Today’s report said: ‘When analysing data for the most recent non-overlapping 14-day periods, these estimates suggest the percentage testing positive has decreased over time since April 27, and this downward trend appears to have now levelled off.
‘Over the last three 14-day periods, the variation in the percentage testing positive is consistent with random variation based on sampling.’
The ONS’s data appears close to hitting the bottom of the range where it can accurately predict the prevalence of Covid-19 in England without doing more tests.
It tested almost 26,000 people for this week’s data but only eight of them tested positive. As the numbers stay smaller the margins of error grow larger.
One statistician at the University of Bristol, Dr Daniel Lawson, said: ‘These national, randomised trials are a critical part of the UK COVID-19 monitoring and represent the least biased data source available.
‘The problem is that when prevalence is low, good information on trends requires very large samples that we don’t have – the last data had only eight households out of 25,662 testing positive.
‘The corresponding estimate of 1,700 infections per day is plausible given the 642 daily positive tests reported (on 9th July).
‘The data show that prevalence is low, and modelling recent weeks data implies that is now stable, though we must remain vigilant against a rise. As testing capacity grows, some of that capacity should be reserved for larger statistical samples, especially if we hope to reduce the prevalence further.’
Separate data, collected by the COVID Symptom tracker app, run by King’s College London and the healthcare tech company ZOE, which suggests the curve of England’s outbreak is flat.
The app, which uses data from people self-reporting their symptoms and test results, predicts that 1,228 people per day are catching Covid-19 in England.
This was a tiny rise from 1,225 it predicted last week. The Midlands makes up the biggest single proportion of cases, it said.
An estimated 363 people per day were catching it in the beleaguered region, which contains Leicester, the only place in England to have a local lockdown so far.
After that there were 252 people catching the virus each day in the North East and Yorkshire, the data suggested, along with 214 in the South West, 203 in London, 153 in the South East, 102 in the North West and 0 in the East of England.
Professor Tim Spector, a King’s College epidemiologist who set up the app project, said: ‘It is disappointing to see that the number of daily new cases are no longer falling like they have been in previous weeks.
‘This could be a temporary blip or due to the easing of lockdown and the amount of social contact slowly increasing.
‘Importantly, our updated analysis of the prevalence is still continuing to show that the Midlands and Wales are key areas in the country where the amount of Covid is remaining relatively high. It is important that we keep a close eye on these areas.
‘With the growing number of people suffering for extended periods of time, we are going to be focusing on these long term sufferers to help us research causes and potential treatments.
‘But in order for this to be possible, we need all our users to continue to log in, even if they have been ill and have got better.’
The latest prevalence figures from the app data estimate that 23,459 people in the UK currently have symptomatic Covid-19.
This was on par with the ONS’s estimate last week, but that has now dropped to just 14,000. This includes people without symptoms, which the app data doesn’t.
The ONS report suggests there are no definite differences in diagnosis rates between different regions of the UK.
While the data suggests there are more people testing positive in London and the East of England, the possible ranges are so wide that all areas overlap – this means there is no statistically significant difference.
The ONS report takes its estimates from the period between June 22 and July 5, when the tests were done.
This takes into account some of the relaxed social distancing measures, such as reopening shops and allowing people to meet up in groups of six outdoors, but not the pubs reopening or indoor meetings from last week.
If the data remains stable this could mean that loosening the lockdown has not dramatically contributed to the spread of the virus, as many feared it would.
Possible ranges written into the ONS data suggest that the number of people currently infected could be as low as 5,000 or as high as 31,000. And the new daily infections is somewhere between 700 and 3,700.
Data not updated this week includes sub-sections of people and their relative risk of catching the coronavirus.
Previous reports found that age and sex did not significantly affect how likely someone was to test positive for Covid-19. The only factor that did affect the likelihood was whether or not someone worked outside the house and whether they were a health or care worker.
People who travelled to work outside the home, and health and care workers, were more likely to test positive than anybody else.
A testing survey by Public Health England, published today, found that the prevalence of coronavirus among home carers is now thought to be the same as it is in the general population.
The programme tested 2,015 carers working for 65 companies around the company found just two of them tested positive – 0.1 per cent.
The two workers were from different regions – one from London and the other from the North East. Worryingly, neither of them had had any symptoms of Covid-19 before they tested positive for the virus.
PHE compared the report to a study during the peak of the country’s crisis in mid-April, which found that infection rates among care home workers – different but similar to at-home carers – were as high as 20.4 per cent.
In June, the report said, infection among domiciliary care workers was significantly lower.
PHE’s report read: ‘Studies among front line healthcare workers in late April 2020 have shown a prevalence of 2.0%.
‘Our findings suggest that, in June 2020, prevalence among domiciliary care workers is similar to that of the general population, at least among those currently working rather than self-isolating at home.’
