Does anyone else wonder how low cases got at the end of the 1st lockdown?

[Cornettoninja]

Just musing really, when I think back to restrictions lifting from the first lockdown we were still being led primarily by the number of deaths, now we’re testing a lot more and have a better idea about how the course of the illness is likely to go i.e there’s on average a few weeks between diagnosis and death I’m wondering how close we actually came to almost zero cases? There were estimates around at the time but nothing like we have now showing so precisely how quickly new infections are coming down.

If track and trace had been functional at that point I wonder whether we could have successfully suppressed infections for longer.

I don’t believe we would/will achieve eradication, certainly not with our appetite for travel, but I do look with envy at other countries going for stretches of days with zero new cases.

The weather mainly

You can look at your own local area/postcode using the detailed data on the Coranavirus ONS dashboard.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

In my local area it was negligible over the Summer and even into Autumn. In the blink of an eye we were never out of the top 4 hotspots. Even now, the local background infection rate has collapsed (it's a quarter of what it was at its height) but it's still > 4x what it was on Dec. 16.

Thanks for the link@EmbarrassingAdmissions,

My thinking is more that widespread testing wasn’t a thing back in spring/summer 2020 and decisions were still largely governed by the number of those who died each day. If we were still working by those parameters I’d guess that we wouldn’t be talking about lifting restrictions the same way we are now.

With hindsight I’m just wondering how close exactly we may have come to almost achieving no community transmission.

I just heard an interview on Radio 4 news where it was said that when pubs/restaurants opened on 4 July, new cases had dropped to 1,000 a day.

Infection rate was < 1000 for a fair amount of July and early August.

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

A 1000 a day is still a lot.

But i do believe that the govt missed a golden opportunity to suppress CV.

Cases dropped because we had a stricter lockdown than we do now.

the economy dropped 12% in the first lockdown, predicted to be 4% in the 3rd lockdown.

We had zero until mid October.

We're still excessively over the average.

More importantly, the level they were in late September when the second set of restrictions were recommended, and how much they had increased by the time there were actually some put in place.

On the 11th June ZOE estimated 5000 cases, we had 1147 confirmed cases and 82 deaths. The UK lifted a lot of restrictions on the 23rd June (all fairly loosely Googled figures so I’m happy to be corrected).

At that point we weren’t testing as widely as now and the gap between ZOE estimates and confirmed cases is much smaller. If we’d had a similar testing set up to the one we have now and track and trace I really think it’s possible that we could have suppressed it successfully and seen how effective local restrictions could be at minimal numbers.

I think it’s interesting to look at what did work and how it could be improved on. Cards on the table, I’m in favour of restrictions and lockdowns so long as they’re used effectively and not a wasted effort. The second lockdown frustrated me and still does, it ignored everything we’d had the opportunity to learn.

• didn’t need ‘we’d’ and ‘had’ there!

It was a very different lockdown compared to now- a lot of construction had stopped, no social bubbles, less click and collect from shops (plus definition of 'non-essential' shop was stricter e.g B&Q closed), keyworker definition for school places more narrow to name but a few.

I'm not convinced the weather has a huge amount to do with it - basically covid spreads best where people are indoors in close proximity and we spend less time indoors during spring/summer. Many countries have been very badly affected during hot weather.

Summer

They dropped dramatically in Sweden too, despite no lockdown

In my area we had very few cases from early May and none from mid June till late August. Covid was brought back into the area by people visiting other places (UK as well as abroad) and then continuing the socialising that they had been doing all summer.

A lot of things opened on 4 July.

On 3 July we reported 205,675 tests and there were 544 reported positives. 137 deaths were reported, but, of course, those would have been from some days earlier.

(That's the numbers reported on the day. I understand that adjustments are made later.)

I agree a lot of infections that exploded in the autumn/winter were seeded particularly at the end of the summer.

I haven’t had many people agree with me but I think schools returning in September and attendance rules exposed a lot of infections that would have otherwise gone undetected. I think it’s quite likely that a lot of people wouldn’t have tested their dc if they didn’t have to for school attendance purposes. It was a massively wasted opportunity to weed out undocumented cases imho because of the fiasco around test shortages (but who could’ve predicted that? /s )