A mix of data and general musings about new cases.
If it's too long to read, main points are that London likely to have fewer than 10 new infection per day, compared to other regions which have thousands of new infections per day.
Current Government testing may now be finding 40%+ of all new infections.
Estimates show there will still be thousands of new infections daily at the end of May after 8 weeks of lockdown - so we may simply have to live with Covid-19 until a vaccine is discovered. Inevitably, the easing of restrictions will mean the spread of the virus will be higher than it was in the lockdown period.
First off, here's a link to the Cambridge study estimating new cases by region (apparently based on all data from Public Health England plus some modelling assumptions). If you scroll down the graph and look at the regional cases, there's clearly a big regional discrepancy.
https://www.mrc-bsu.cam.ac.uk/now-casting/Cambridge's estimated new infections by region for May 21st :-
London - 3 (Yes, three!)
East - 524
Midlands 641
North-East & Yorks 2,560 (a whopping 42% of all new infections in England)
North-West 1,180
South-East 594
South-West 399
England 5,960 (this total doesn't quite match the total of the regions because they're based on modelling).
(Cambridge estimate for England new infections on May 28th = 3,960 which would be a 33% reduction).
If these figures are anywhere near correct (and they are probably likely to be roughly correct) then London could already eradicate Covid-19 by closing its borders with the rest of the country. (Of course, it can't realistically do that, but it's certainly at a completely different stage to all other regions).
More generally, given we've had 8 weeks of lockdown and still there are thousands of new cases every day, Covid-19 definitely looks to be here to stay, because it's very unlikely the government will be able to track, test and isolate in sufficient numbers to keep up with the spread of the virus.
Why are we still getting thousands of cases per day? Pure speculation, but if there's a significant percentage of people who ignore the rules, that''ll be enough to keep the virus alive and kicking in the UK.
2nd data source is government's daily figures where testing has found 2,472 positive tests yesterday. Assuming Cambridge estimate of 5,960 new infections in England is correct, UK testing programme is detecting 42% of all new infections. That's pretty good if it proves to be the case.
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus ... and-deathsGovt figures are separated by Pillar 1 (Clinical need cases, NHS and care workers) and Pillar 2 (Other key workers and their families). I'm ignoring Pillar 4 (sampling cases) because positive results aren't provided on those).
Yesterday's cases
Pillar 1
16,287 people tested
35,196 tests carried out
1,048 positive tests (6.4% of people tested were positive, 3% of tests carried out were positive)
Average tests per person = 2.2
Pillar 2
44,457 people tested
118,419 tests carried out
1,424 positive tests (4% of people tested were positive, 2.7% of tests carried out were positive)
Average tests per person = 2.7
Not everyone will be tested more than once, and we would expect a lot of people to be taking their first test. I'm making some assumptions below, because we don't know the breakdown of tests.
Assuming 10,000 pillar 1 tests are having their first ever test (and only tested once), the remaining 6,287 are tested 4 times per day.
Assuming 20,000 pillar 2 tests are having their first ever test (and only tested once), the remaining 24,457 are tested 4 times per day.
For comparison, on 12th April, there were 14,506 tests carried out, with 4,342 positive results (30% of tests were positive).
Cambridge estimate for new infections on 12th April is 65,000 which implies only 7% of new infections were being tested on 12th April.