Professors and officials have said that Coronavirus hospital admissions in the UK are “slowing”, suggesting social distancing is working.
The acceleration of hospital admissions seems to be slowing down.
A Coronavirus antibody test, which will test to see if you’ve had the virus and recovered, will be available “hopefully days rather than weeks” and will be primarily used in London, for now.
Professor Ferguson, a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, and has estimated that if social distancing is effective, which at the moment it seems to be working, the deaths in the UK will hopefully remain below 20,000, with most of the fatalities being people who would have passed away in the next year or so had they not caught the virus.
He told Today on BBC Radio 4: “In the UK we can see some early signs of slowing in some indicators — less so deaths, because deaths are lagged by a long time from when measures come in force. But if we look at the numbers of new hospital admissions, that does appear to be slowing down a little bit now. It has not yet plateaued, so still the numbers can be increasing each day, but the rate of that increase has slowed.”
And, in regards to the antibody tests, he said:
“In central London it could be as many as 3 per cent to 5 per cent of the population has been infected, maybe more in individual hotspots. In the country as a whole in the UK, maybe 2 per cent or 3 per cent.”
He also described how around 30% of people affected may display NO symptoms at all, continuing he said: “so these antibody tests, which look at whether somebody has had past infection, which are being rolled out now, will be critical to answering that question.”
It’s good to hear some positive news when it comes to Coronavirus, and remember these developments are happening all the time, despite how bad things are currently.
