Professor David Livermore: 4,000 Deaths a Day Implausible David Livermore, Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia, has told Lockdown Sceptics he cannot see how Covid deaths could possibly reach 4,000 a day, the number Sir Patrick Vallance flagged up on Saturday. In an email exchange with me and Jon Dobinson, the head of Recovery, he made a number of good points. 4,000/day is three times higher than the peak rate for Brazil, which has a population three times greater than the UK’s and a pretty laissez faire attitude to the spread of COVID-194,000/day is three times the peak for India, which relaxed a (failing) lockdown in the teeth of a rising infection rate back in May or June. Admittedly, India has a younger population and one with (likely) a lot more non-specific immunity, but it also has a population that's 20 times larger than the UK's.SAGE, in the document leaked to the Spectator (estimating 85,000 deaths through the winter) is working on an infection fatality rate of 0.7%. So, 4,000/day translates to ~570,000 infections per day (4,000/0.007) some three to four weeks earlier, or around four million per week. If you use the Stanford IFR of 0.25, it’d equate to 1,600,000 infections per day or 11.2 million per week Given that the SAGE document also (rightly ...