Patrick Vallance previous said he thought the UK would need around 60% infection rates in order for a country to develop natural immunity. As discussed in today’s government press briefing, he’s also quoted as saying 1 death represents 1,000 cases, confirmed or not. This is just a rule of thumb as we do not have enough data to know for sure.
Based on those numbers, we would be looking at around 36,000 deaths in Italy, 28,000 in Spain and 41,000 in the UK. It should be noted that, as previously discussed on the blog, we don’t really know what the death rates are, but some people have placed it higher. Anyway, that disclaimer over…
If we assume the midpoint will line up with the peak (and I don’t know if that is the case), there is some good news on the horizon. Based on current death rates, both Italy and Spain would reach their peak in 5 days (which is from yesterday, because it’s yesterday’s WHO data, so 7 April).
The UK is more difficult to predict. Based on the current death rates, we wouldn’t hit the peak for another 40 days. But, that death rate is likely to continue to increase further as it has been doing all week. If it doubled, that would half the time to 20 days (still a pretty grim prospect).
There is a bunch of stuff that could throw this off. Valance’s numbers could be incorrect. The peak may not lead up with the midpoint. And the social distancing may slow down the whole process, or even move us back to a containment phase if things went spectacularly well.
Don't have time to check my blog? Get a weekly email with all the new posts. This is my personal blog, so obviously it is 100% spam free.
Tags: covid-19, global health, health, pandemic
This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2020 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Health & Wellbeing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.