What’s going on with case numbers?

[FishfingerFlinger]

Has anyone seen any good explanation of the trends in case numbers over the last few weeks?

Why did they start tumbling back down so suddenly (when lots of people were suggesting they would keep on going up)?

Why do they seem to have started ticking back up again?

Maybe

1. Schools no longer weekly testing
2. Holidays, lack of social distancing and in office expectations

We are 3 weeks post the lifting of the last set of restrictions. The politicians and scientists have always been very clear that numbers of cases would rise 2-3 weeks later.

Call me a cynic, but possibly people with holidays coming up avoiding actually testing because of the potential fallout if positive.

There was a peak amongst younger men driven by the euros. Figures dropped after that, then the effects of reopening kicked in.

Cases went up because of the euros, then dropped because behaviour changed and huge numbers of younger people were pinged and isolating.

Niw they're rising slightly because the last restrictions have been lifted. This rise was expected, it has just taken longer than expected to happen.

@Sparklfairy

Call me a cynic, but possibly people with holidays coming up avoiding actually testing because of the potential fallout if positive.

Surely less asymptomatic testing would have the opposite effect, if they're asymptomatic or ignoring symptomspositive they're spreading the virus to others on their holidays instead of isolating therefore cases would increase not decrease

The euros effect on men's case numbers

I think its because so many people were (needlessly) isolating due to being "pinged" so they weren't out and about to catch covid. It's like having half the country in lockdown again

Recorded cases would initially decrease (as no testing, they’re not found). Then increase if the reduced SI did cause an upturn in cases, but possibly not that much as only symptomatic cases would be found.

It’s because the school holidays have started. Most cases were in unvaccinated teens and now they’re not all mingling in the same way as regularly.

Neil Ferguson talks about this on podcast = Payne's Politics.

93% (or some other high statistic) of population has had wild infection or vaccination, so some immune system protection is high right now.

In spite of Freedom Day, people are keeping their socialising way down (on average), Ferguson calls this 'contact rates'

There's still a lot of social distancing, care homes & hospitals have kept most their precautions of last 15 months

There's still formal policy to isolate contacts of & known cases

There was a downward trend in case counts since June and much earlier, but a blip upwards due to Euros (esp. evident in higher case rates among young men until England got knocked out of Euros)

Good weather: much more socialising outdoors not indoors in summer, without the crazy high temps that drive people indoors in very hot places like Texas or Florida

Ferguson pointed out that contact rates in July 2021 are much lower than they were in July/Aug 2021; people literally aren't socialising as much now as then.

They were expected to rise through the first half of the summer, in the hope they would be falling by September when schools go back. The polite fiction is that schools are safe enough, when really they aren't, and the concern was that the 'schools open + winter virus season' would be too much for NHS, particularly as flu season is going to be a bit of a toss up this time (very difficult to predict which strains to include in flu jab when flu has been barely in circulation). So more the people immunised, and more people with wild immunity the better - both of which could reasonably be expected to happen over a largely unrestricted summer.

What actually happened was the Euros - and the massive spike that followed a couple of weeks later. That was a kind of front loading of the expected cases over the summer, which fell back ter this'd weeks when it seemed everyone was ill of SI because they'd been near someone who was ill.

Now that both that peak and its consequences are behind us, the disease is back on a more gently rising path. The expectation/hope is that the rise will end at around the middle of this month and we can go into autumn in more or less the right circumstances. It might get bumpy after that, but there's only so far ahead one can look (without crystal balls for new variants and levels of flu)

If the rise continues beyond mid August, then the assumptions for the start of the autumn will also change, but that may not matter that much unless there is also a very unlucky crystal ball factor.

My friend has just told me she's tried to get a PCR test and she's 'not eligible'. She has a very sore throat and feels tired/run down but none of the 'big three' symptoms. She thought it best to be safe and get tested. My understanding of the Delta variant was that it can present differently. The booking site says she can do a LFT if she has 'no symptoms'... she has symptoms of 'something' so the result wouldn't even be reliable, and she still wouldn't be able to get a PCR based on the questions asked in order to book if the LFT was positive!

No testing in schools, many people not testing as they want to have their large gatherings, go on holiday, visit places, football etc.

@IceCreamAndCandyfloss

No testing in schools, many people not testing as they want to have their large gatherings, go on holiday, visit places, football etc.

Surely at those large gatherings if people are untested the virus will still spread anyway and to more people therefore increasing the infection rate. The only way to know if less testing is a factor is if the hospitalisation and death rates don't then follow the drop in cases trend

@Sparklfairy

My friend has just told me she's tried to get a PCR test and she's 'not eligible'. She has a very sore throat and feels tired/run down but none of the 'big three' symptoms. She thought it best to be safe and get tested. My understanding of the Delta variant was that it can present differently. The booking site says she can do a LFT if she has 'no symptoms'... she has symptoms of 'something' so the result wouldn't even be reliable, and she still wouldn't be able to get a PCR based on the questions asked in order to book if the LFT was positive!

She can do the LFT anyway, it's just that she shouldn't rely on a negative result meaning she definitely doesn't have covid. If she has a positive LFT she can then get the confirmatory PCR.

If she had the zoe app she would be told to test with those symptoms, and IMO she should just go for a PCR test anyway - she may well have had a mild temperature that she hasn't taken her temperature often enough to notice.

So the proportion of people getting PCR tests who turn out to them be positive is going steadily down. At one point near the peak it was up to 20 percent, now just over 9.

Either fewer people with symptoms are getting tested or more likely, cases ar (or were) genuinely going down up to 1st August.

As people have suggested, it is expected that cases will go up as things open.

What will posters say when the ONS survey case count starts going down too -- that count is random sampling, not based on LFT screening or people avoiding tests because they want to go on hols.

I think the basic answer is 'nobody really knows for sure'.

The rapid drop was not modelled / predicted (though many post hoc explanations have since been provided, a combination of which are likely to have been the case as no single reason on its own quite accounts for it) whereas a rise after re-opening was.

Whether we have reached the point where the unexpected drop moves into the predicted rise is not yet quite clear.

@Sparklfairy

My friend has just told me she's tried to get a PCR test and she's 'not eligible'. She has a very sore throat and feels tired/run down but none of the 'big three' symptoms. She thought it best to be safe and get tested. My understanding of the Delta variant was that it can present differently. The booking site says she can do a LFT if she has 'no symptoms'... she has symptoms of 'something' so the result wouldn't even be reliable, and she still wouldn't be able to get a PCR based on the questions asked in order to book if the LFT was positive!

Anyone can still get a test. You just put "none of the symptoms" and you can still book..... I did!

@BigWoollyJumpers when did you do it? I've just gone on the site myself and can't book or even find out where the test centres are unless I say I have one of the big three.

DD lied about her symptoms and go test 60 minutes later -- well, she would say she told truth but I saw her as exaggerating.

she said "I feel hot!" = "new fever" even if our household thermometers couldn't confirm any fever

"I have a new cough!" = she had a wee cough about once every 2 hours

It's understandable that people are lying about/exaggerating symptoms to get a test, but it doesn't help with getting new symptoms recognised as requiring a test. Many other countries have had a much longer list of symptoms that require/can get a test.

Push for a test without lying where possible.

@FishfingerFlinger. Try ringing your GP tomorrow

Interesting stuff - @scaevola that’s such a helpful post thank you.

And the data about cases amongst young men around the Euros is very striking!