Covid cases 'appear to have flattened', virus modeller tells LBC
22 December 2021, 16:28 | Updated: 22 December 2021, 17:36
This Professor and Covid modeller tells Tom Swarbrick that Covid-19 cases in England have 'probably plateaued', which is why government didn't bring in measures.
“Until yesterday [Monday 20] we thought we were looking at continued growth numbers” Professor Alastair Grant of the University of East Anglia told LBC, before noting that “the numbers appear to have flattened” in recent days.
Professor Grant said that the government may have refrained from bringing in new measures because “they were shown graphs that show the numbers have probably plateaued”.
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Tom questioned the Covid modeller: “Your assessment is that case numbers, infections have reached the peak or are starting to come down in England?”
“It looks as if cases have reached their peak and are starting to come down in England”, Professor Grant confirmed.
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Tom prodded the Professor of Ecology: “Could that be that there are so many people testing that testing capacity has just run out?
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Professor Grant confirmed that that was a concern, “but actually this seems to have happened before testing capacity reached its limit.”
“People have clearly been changing their behaviour in quite a radical way and that does seem to have translated through to at least infections.”
Based on the publicly available numbers on coronavirus cases in England, Professor Grant told Tom that he could “understand exactly why they felt they couldn’t put in any restrictions in at that point.”
