Data presented by the UK government as lockdown was eased shows the transmission of COVID-19 had already increased

  1. Mike Lonergan

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Abstract

Background

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is an international emergency that has been addressed in many countries by changes in and restrictions on behaviour. These are often collectively labelled social distancing and lockdown. On the 23 rd June 2020, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom announced substantial easings of restrictions. This paper examines some of the data he presented.

Methods

Generalised additive models, with negative binomial errors and cyclic term representing day-of-week effects, were fitted to data on the daily numbers of new confirmed cases of COVID-19. Exponential rates for the epidemic were estimated for different periods, and then used to calculate R, the reproduction number, for the disease in different periods.

Results

After an initial stabilisation, the lockdown reduced R to around 0.81 (95% CI: 0.79, 0.82). This value increased to around 0.94 (95% CI 0.89, 0.996) for the fortnight from the 9 th June 2020.

Conclusions

Official UK data, presented as the easing of the lockdown was announced, shows that R was already more than half way back to 1 at that point. That suggests there was little scope for the announced changes to be implemented without restarting the spread of the disease.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2020.06.28.20141960: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

    Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.

    Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:
    Limitations of this study: Confirmed cases are only people who have been tested for SARS-CoV-2. Only a small proportion of people get tested and this proportion changed dramatically, especially during the early stages of the epidemic. Data for hospitalisations and mortality has fewer problems but are lagged relative to information on cases. This pattern is not yet visible in them. The study contains no information on the relative importance of the various changes that were announced. While it shows that most of the restrictions that affected disease transmission were necessary, it cannot determine which of them actually had any real the consequence. Estimates of the the implications of the easing of the 2m rule, in particular, depend on whether the risk of disease transmission is different at 1 and 2m, a matter that currently depends on the interpretation of the available evidence [3, 4]. These analyses also cannot determine whether the particular circumstances in mid-June can be expected to continue.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2020.06.28.20141960v1 on medRxiv