Most of the time Covid bubbles away in the background not doing all that much, but occasionally there's an explosive outbreak. What causes these to start and stop so abruptly? Here's a possible answer.
The claim, repeated by Dominic Cummings to MPs yesterday, that without a lockdown in March 2020 "the NHS is going to be smashed in weeks" is demonstrably false. Infections were declining even as the words were spoken.
In denying that herd immunity was ever Government policy, ministers are drawing a distinction between something being policy and accepted as inevitable. If only this distinction had been applied throughout the year.
On 15 March last year, Matt Hancock said, "We have a plan ... Herd immunity is not part of it." Now Dominic Cummings claims that "herd immunity by Sep" was "literally the official plan in all docs/graphs/meetings".
We're publishing an original piece of data analysis today by a leading British scientists. He believes the data show that the population had surpassed the herd immunity threshold in December, before the vaccine roll-out.
According to a Telegraph exclusive, the number of people with protection either through vaccination or previous infection will hit 73.4% on April 12th – the herd immunity threshold.
A new study in Nature shows that not only do people infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop lasting T cell immunity, but so too do their close contacts who were never infected. This means herd immunity is closer than we think.
According to a new ONS survey published today, more than half of people in England now have Covid antibodies – and a new IpsosMORI poll reveals public concern about Covid is plummeting.
The conventional wisdom is that had Boris locked down a week earlier last March, fewer people would have died of COVID-19. But a Cambridge epidemiologist thinks the opposite is true: delaying the lockdown saved lives.
South Dakota has had among the fewest restrictions of any country in the Western world. Yet cases started falling rapidly after the November peak. Dr Noah Carl asks why?
