‘A bit of a mystery’: why England Covid cases are going down despite easing of restrictions - The Guardian

If people rushed back to work and resumed all the socialising they had put on hold, the number of daily admissions in England could peak at 7,000 within six weeks.

Assuming a more gradual return to normality, the modelling had daily Covid hospitalisations rising slowly and slightly, topping out at nearly 2,000, before falling again in November.

Over the past fortnight, hospitalisations have fallen in England, even as schools and offices reopened.

In this case, what if R (the reproduction number of the epidemic) reaches 1.1?

And what if – as Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England, would say – people “rip the pants off it” and push R to 1.5.

It’s the average number of people on to whom one infected person will pass the virus.

That means each person would pass it on to between two and three people on average, before either recovering or dying, and each of those people would pass it on to a further two to three others, causing the total number of cases to snowball over time.

Sage expected hospitalisations in England to peak somewhere near the lower range, namely 2,000 a day, but no sooner was the modelling complete than hospitalisations began to fall.

Each by itself is perfectly capable of making the number of cases or hospitalisations go up or down, and they are basically fighting each other right now,” said Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Edinburgh University.

On Friday, the Office for National Statistics reported a fall in infection rates in England for the second week running, with one in 90 now estimated to test positive for Covid.