England’s third Covid-19 national lock is helping reduce disease, a study found Thursday, but the incidence of cases remains high as Prime Minister Boris Johnson looks at a cautious path to reopening the economy.
Johnson plans to release a roadmap, which began on January 5, on Monday, and has said it will be a prudent and prudent approach.
The study, called REACT-1 and led by researchers at Imperial College London, found that national frequency was two-thirds lower between February 4 and 13 than in the previous study covering Jan 6- 22.
“It’s encouraging news. We believe lock-in is having an effect. We’ve seen this very rapid decline now between January and this month,” said Paul Elliott, program director at Imperial. , to reporters.
“But … the actual frequency is still very high. We’re just back to where we were in September.”
The latest figures show that 51 per 10,000 people are infected, down from 157 per 10,000 in the January survey, and that it takes 15 days for infections to go down.
The frequency fell across all age groups, falling from 0.93% to 0.30% among people over 65, although the researchers said they had no evidence that this was driven by the spread of the vaccine, which target older groups.
REACT-1 is one of the largest and most dense frequency studies in England, and the researchers released the interim results in a pre-printed that was not peer-reviewed.
Health minister Matt Hancock said the findings were an encouraging sign that locking was working.
“While the trends we have seen are good news, we must all work to keep diseases down by following the measures,” he said.
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This story was published from a wire group group with no text changes.