Why aren’t the numbers going back up?

[Mohiqo]

I went into lockdown a week before we were told to. We are the only household on our street who has rigorously stuck to all the lockdown rules. I say this to explain that I’ve been taking lockdown seriously!

But recently I’m starting to think that perhaps we can just start to live our lives normally again, like lots of other people are doing. Reason being that I don’t understand why the numbers aren’t going back up again. First it was VE Day, then the impact of Domgate, then more people slowly going back to work and the roads getting busier.

So why aren’t the diagnosed cases climbing back up again?

see a new peak after the VE Day celebrations. I am very happy to be wrong.

I’m glad you’re wrong too but most people did socially distance on VE Day. Any celebrations were outside. While some people did get drunk/break social distancing (our A+E was very busy), most people didn’t.

Having sequenced the virus in the U.K., the researchers think it come in via international travel from Europe and that we probably stopped non-essential travel a week late. So it was well embedded in the population by mid-March. They don’t think ‘most’ people have had it at all.

I think it's a mixture of things:

1. Community transmission in most areas of the country is very low now after 11 weeks of lockdown
2. Social distancing is being widely practiced
3. Shielders are still shielding
4. Many people are still working from home
5. Most school children are still at home (only 7% back nationwide)
6. Many people are still largely staying at home. I am. My DH is WFH, my kids are home schooling, I'm going to the supermarket once a week, exercising outside most days, but shops aren't open until Monday and quite honestly I don't need to rush out and buy clothes, books, electricals, stationery or anything else 'non-essential'. My behaviour hasn't really changed much since the height of lockdown and I think that's true for many. We've met a couple of friends outside, but that's it.

Track and trace is working well here but because it’s the Tories implementing it, Mumsnet will never admit this and will lie about it and find any fault. It’s the left wing way

The R rate is always 3 weeks behind. They stress that in the figures.

Chris Whitty et al has also said the numbers are still too high, on a daily basis, ( something like 3500 this week, wasn' t it?) which is why they want to keep the 2 mt distance and reduce lockdown very slowly.

So don't get too complacent.

We are not seeing increases because our lives are no where near what they were like a few months back. Take the VE parties... Most were properly distanced street affairs. Those that weren’t were still outdoors (very low risk) and people still tended to keep some distance rather bunched up like sardines.

Covid tends to spread widely in crammed indoor spaces (tubes, pubs, buses etc) and we haven’t been able to do that since March even if we had wanted to. Before lockdown, millions of us crammed together with strangers every week without giving it a second thought.

So we can start doing a lot of stuff now numbers are low and we understand Covid transmission better... but there are things we can’t do as a society unless we want numbers to spike again in a couple of months just before schools are due to return in. September!

Tracing study on R4 now very interesting. Most likely in enclosed spaces - houses, public transport, churches, restaurants (unsurprising). High spreading if you go out to crowded indoor space when most contagious. One person spread to eg twenty, others none based on that timing of event.

As for most of us having had it... Antibody tests show something like 7% has had it. Some people say that many of us are naturally immune and don’t need to produce antibodies.... That may be true for some of us, or where people have contracted low doses, but take Bergamo, the heart of the epicentre in Italy that seeded Europe’s outbreak.... 57% have tested positive for antibodies there (with a death rate that is consistent with Prof Ferguson’s 250-500,000 potential death toll for the UK) so the “most of us have had it” and that we’re largely now immune is a very dangerous myth.

Sunshine true you would must likely know them atm.

Has anyone supplied their number to tracing (for initial contact). Do you do it when you do the test?

Theonlyway,

If track and trace is working well, there should be around 12,000 people being contacted daily, based on 1,200 new infections with 10 contacts each.

Some of those 12,000 must be on here. Has anyone reading this been contacted?

Track and trace isn’t ‘working’ because people are social distancing so they don’t have any contacts in many cases. It’s a total chicken and egg situation. Bit like testing vaccines.

The truth is OP no one actually knows. It could be that covid isn’t quite as infectious as originally thought and is being suppressed enough by behaviour. It could be it’s more infectious but only 30% of people are susceptible anyway so we have quite a bit of immunity in the population with the levels of infection (no one knows how many people have had it because we don’t know everyone gets this neat antibody response). I could be that the virus is dying out.

We are all desperate to know the answer and being labelled ‘armchair epidemiologists’ but the reality is that science doesn’t have the answers which is why we are in limbo. It isn’t being hidden from us, no one knows. Not an ignoramus like me on MN, a politician or a scientist with a PHD. It’s all a big experiment.

We don’t even know how many people have actually died of it, how many died because family stopped visiting, how many died because they didn’t call an ambulance for a heart attack/ stroke etc.

The answers from science will come too late to be any help to us unfortunately. It is all one big experiment.

I think they said last night that over the week 30,000 had been contacted by trace & track, do not quite 2 people per tracer . In a week.

It's too early yet OP. We will see in a couple of weeks.

"based on 1,200 new infections with 10 contacts each."

I think most people don't have 10 contacts. I have 2, the others in my household and I have had only 2 contacts since lockdown began. Ds has more because he has the others in his bubble at school but most adults and all the children not in school won't have that many.

For all the concern about VE Day, I think most celebrations were far more muted than a few media photos would have us believe.

Socially distanced parties outside - even if the 2 metre rule wasn’t completely adhered to - with families who had mostly been isolating, wasn’t going to have anything like the impact that several evenings huddled in a busy pub after spending the day at Cheltenham races had.

Spikey,

But, statistically, those who get Covid will have the most contacts! And some people in school and medical settings (and factories) will have far more than 10.

I don't like the government we currently have but don't believe it's a scam. They've dished out so much in financial packages and the country is heading towards a severe recession.

And some people in school and medical settings (and factories) will have far more than 10.

If a child gets it and their bubble has to isolate T & T is somewhat redundant.

The same as above would be true in a factory. Plus if the factory are practising social distancing at work then the colleagues wouldn’t be close contacts anyway.

The transmission rate in the community is low - lots of people don't have it. Finally care homes have PPE and have good practice at last and so even if they have a case of Covid-19 they are now less likely to spread it to others in the home than previously. My friend is a nurse manager and said lots of the early cases were due to poor virus control and lack of PPE - government should be held to account - they now all have PPE.
Our local hospital cheered as one chap left surviving the virus after spending over 70 days in hospital. He was in his early 80's. Lots of the deaths reported now are from people who got it over a month ago and have been in ICU on life support but their bodies have finally given up.
The virus appears to follow a curve everywhere - we passed the spike of infection rate as we entered lock down - it was on the way down.

People are practising social distancing and it works. People are aware if they have symptoms to isolate now. In the early days March - there were people out and about coughing on others. Coughing is now seen as a red flag people avoid 'coughers' and 'coughers' stay away.

The chances of getting it from shopping, children, etc have all been showed to be lower than expected originally so despite schools being open for what one would assume to be the most likely children to spread KW's children - that didn't produce mass outbreaks in schools.

@larrygrylls

Theonlyway,

If track and trace is working well, there should be around 12,000 people being contacted daily, based on 1,200 new infections with 10 contacts each.

Some of those 12,000 must be on here. Has anyone reading this been contacted?

Why 10 contacts?

Are you still saying that no one is being phoned up? I do the job. I’m not lying.

The thing is that after being locked down for a few weeks before the beaches fiasco, VE day and the riots, very few people participating would be infectious (if any) so high levels of new cases is unlikely anyway. It's very dangerous to assume we're safe going forward. It was probably the safest time to do those things whilst most people had been following the rules in the weeks before.

Doing the same in a month once people have been circulating again, going shopping more, socialising more, would probably be a very different outcome.

It’s don’t believe it’s a scam either. I do think people are worryingly easy to control though in the name of ‘science’ when they don’t have the evidence that science required to draw conclusions.

Many of those contacts will overlap so it won't be 10 different contacts for all of them.

Because community transmission is very low

This. There were 6 new cases in my area where 110k people live last week. Half in care homes. The chances of me coming into contact with one of those people is tiny.

Plus we've also learned that just walking past someone in the street won't give you Covid. Neither will passing someone in hte supermarket unless they make a specific aim of coughing all over you.

It's very dangerous to assume we're safe going forward. It was probably the safest time to do those things whilst most people had been following the rules in the weeks before.

It’s also dangerous to assume that we aren’t safe. That will cause deaths and poor health in other ways.

My brother works in a factory and no outbreaks there - despite several hundred mainly men working there. They have worked throughout. No deaths in the factory at all.

Our local deaths have been nursing homes and thankfully a very small numbers of deaths.