Coronavirus cases in England ‘doubling every nine days’
- Scientists warn there could be 25,000 patients in hospital by end of November
- Britain the hardest hit country in Europe, with more than 45,000 fatalities
The British government was under pressure to develop a national strategy to combat a surge of Covid-19 cases and “rescue Christmas’’ as scientists warn that the number of people hospitalised with the disease in the UK could almost triple by the end of next month unless something more was done now.
Mark Walport, a former chief scientific officer, said Britain only needs to look across the English Channel to see what’s coming. Britain’s current measures are similar to those in France and Spain, where authorities are struggling to control the virus and daily cases have already far outstripped those in the UK.
“With our current measures … there’s little evidence that there is as much social distancing as there was when we clamped down on the first wave and so we know that the risk is significant that cases will continue to grow,” Walport told the BBC.
It is “not unrealistic’’ that 25,000 people in the UK could be hospitalised by the end of November – up from about 9,000 now, he said.
According to results from a large, ongoing study into the Covid-19 epidemic in England, scientists estimated that there are about 96,000 new cases every day and that the outbreak is doubling in size every nine days.
“The rate of growth we’re seeing is really quite rapid,” said Steven Riley, a professor of infectious disease dynamics at Imperial College London, one of the leaders of the study funded by the Department of Health.
Riley and colleagues took samples from more than 85,000 people randomly selected across England in late October and found that about one in every 128 people in England was infected with the coronavirus.
