Coronavirus 36

Today's UK Covid deaths reported by the government is 186, the highest for 10 days, bringing the last 7 day average to 121 per day.

We are still uncertain about the infection fatality rate (IFR) but it seems likely to be between 0.5 and 1%.

At 1% a daily death count around 120 implies that three or so weeks ago the number of new infections must have been running at around 12000. Double that for an IFR of 0.5%.

The number of new cases being reported by the government around early June was between 1500 and 2000, perhaps an order of magnitude lower that the figure implied by the recent death rate.

Now we've known all along that the reported case numbers are too low - not all get tested, many are asymptomatic, but an order of magnitude too low? That's quite some under-reporting.

Earlier this week the government reported that 5.4% of the population were found to be with antibodies, the implication being that these people had had the disease.

Reported cases stand at just over 300,000.

5.4% of the population is about 3.5 million. So that's an order of magnitude greater than the reported number of cases.

That really is quite some under-reporting.

Meanwhile the number of daily COVID deaths in New Zealand continues to average zero. But they did things differently there, The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, followed the advice of Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago, Wellington.

Jacinda Ardern thought taking his advice was worth a punt as it avoided people dying, in stark contrast to the UK's Prime Minister's idea of 'taking it on the chin', which has cost over 65,000 lives so far and a likelihood that the pandemic will be with us for many months to come with the inevitable daily death toll.