Number of Brits getting ill with Covid every day falls below 1,000 for FIRST time since the symptom study started a year ago
- Covid Symptom Study estimates fewer people are getting sick with the virus than at any time in the past year
- Adds to growing evidence that the coronavirus has been all but stamped out across the UK
- Study estimates 971 people are developing symptoms each day, down from December peak of 61,000
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Fewer people in the UK are getting Covid each day than at any point since last August with just 971 new daily cases, according to the Covid Symptom Study.
Published figures are now lower even than in July and August last year when lockdown rules were almost completely lifted even without a vaccine rollout.
Using around a million volunteers’ reports through a mobile app, the study suggested the number of new cases per day had dropped another seven per cent in a week.
It has been tumbling for six straight weeks after a minor hiccup in March and adds to overwhelming evidence that coronavirus has all but disappeared in Britain.
‘Data continues to suggest Covid has stabilised at very low levels, similar to rates seen last summer,’ said Professor Tim Spector, the King’s College epidemiologist who runs the study.
In England the number of people developing symptoms each day remained the same as last week’s estimate at 756, but NHS Test & Trace data showed it coming down again, dropping by eight per cent in the most recent week.
The official testing programme saw 15,593 positive results between April 22 and 28, down from 17,033 the week before and from a high of 390,000 people in the first week of January.
And an Office for National Statistics report yesterday showed that flu and pneumonia have become a more common cause of death than Covid for the first time in a year, with coronavirus now accounting for one in 38.
The numbers add to growing evidence that coronavirus is under control and vaccines have started to keep down infections, hospital admissions and deaths after they were slashed by January’s drastic lockdown.
MPs, businesses and pubs and restaurants have called for lockdown to end sooner and even ‘Professor Lockdown’ Neil Ferguson is now optimistic that vaccines will squash the UK’s third wave of coronavirus and life in Britain will ‘feel a lot more normal by the summer’.
Professor Ferguson, the SAGE adviser and Imperial College London epidemiologist whose grim death toll predictions led Britain into its first lockdown last year, said this week that he expects jabs to help keep the UK out of lockdown for good.
He said on BBC Radio 4 this week: ‘Data on the vaccines is getting ever more encouraging, particularly when you get new data that was released just over a week ago which showed even if you do get infected [after having a vaccine] you are less infectious.
‘So that’s pushed our estimates of the scale of any autumn wave down.’