Covid-19: football, summer and precautions, the keys to the British “miracle”?

This is something that Covid-19 has not accustomed us to: a pleasant surprise. At least, the sudden, rapid and unexpected drop in the number of new infections in the UK over the past two weeks bears a strong resemblance to it.

“Official data show that the number of new confirmed cases has been halved over the past two weeks: we went from 54,674 on July 17 to 22,287 on August 2,” emphasizes the scientific journal Nature.

Surprise and disbelief

This is not the scenario that the British government and part of the scientists expected. Between the presence of the Delta variant, much more contagious than the previous strains, and the end of social distancing measures decided on July 19, specialists were rather anticipating an explosion of new cases.

Some particularly bleak scenarios predicted the UK would experience up to 100,000 new cases a day by the end of the summer. This figure had even been officially taken over at the beginning of July by Sajid Javid, the Minister of Health, to urge the British not to let their guard down after the famous “freedom day” of July 19th.

>> Read also: Covid-19: from “freedom day” to “worry day” in England

So when the first indicators suggested, as early as the week of July 20, that the number of new cases was in free fall, “we were all surprised, and frankly I didn’t believe it at first,” Kevin recalls. McConway, professor emeritus of applied statistics at the Open university and former vice-president of the Royal Statistical Society, interviewed by France 24.

One of the first reflexes of observers was to put this little epidemiological miracle on the account of a drop in the number of PCR tests, notes the daily The Guardian. With the arrival of summer, part of the British would not have wanted to be tested and take the risk of a positive result synonymous with forced quarantine and wasted holidays.

But “for scientists the drop in the number of new positive cases is too great to be explained solely by this reluctance to be tested”, underlines the Financial Times. Importantly, “indicators show that hospital admissions of Covid-19 patients have stagnated and are also starting to decline, which is encouraging and tends to confirm the hypothesis that there is indeed a significant decline in new cases “, explains Thomas Wingfield, specialist in infectious diseases at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, interviewed by France 24.

So it’s a “longer-term downtrend that we’re seeing here,” confirms Kevin McConway. And she is difficult to understand. “We knew that there would be a slowdown in new cases after the explosion in early July, but not so quickly, and so strong,” admits this statistician specializing in health issues.

“Stroke of luck”

The best explanation at the moment is “that luck has been on the government’s side after its decision to suspend social distancing measures,” continues Kevin McConway. There was then a succession of circumstances favorable to a slowing down of the propagation of the Delta variant.

“The reasons are probably multifactorial: a hot summer which pushed people to go out more, and to open the doors and windows thus allowing a better ventilation of the confined spaces, associated with the end of the courses”, summarizes Thomas Wingfield. In other words, the British found themselves outside, where the virus circulates less easily and transmissions from schools to family circles have disappeared. “This proves how the spread of the virus by younger people can be an important factor in the dynamics of the epidemic,” said Nature.

That’s not all. There is also a Euro-2021 football effect “which had not at all been taken into account by the projection models of the number of contaminations,” notes Kevin McConway. During the competition, the British authorities had seen a surge in new infections among men in their thirties, those who have frequented pubs and stadiums the most to support the England team.

After the Euro football, there were many more young people under 35 naturally protected against Covid-19 because they had just been infected. In other words, the hunting ground for SARS-COV-2 has shrunk considerably: the over 40s are overwhelmingly vaccinated in the UK, and some of the unvaccinated young adults come all the way. just being exposed to the virus.

The Euro-2021 effect on the spread of Covid-19 is all the more real as “the decline in the number of new cases started a little earlier in Scotland, a country from which the national team was eliminated earlier” , recalls Kevin McConway.

Finally, it would appear that the British have been much more cautious than forecasters had feared in July. “In their models, one of the main question marks concerned the behavior of people after the lifting of social distancing measures,” notes Kevin McConway. The most pessimistic projections all assumed that the population would throw all the rules of health care in the trash after July 19. “I think that the fact that people often continue to wear the mask when shopping and keep their distance in closed places makes a big difference”, judges this expert of the Open University.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson would have been right to end the restrictions on July 19 against the advice of some scientists? “It’s still a little early to say,” says Kevin McConway. The government itself is moreover little said on the drop in the number of new cases. “The risk is that if we rejoice too much, people could relax their vigilance which would probably result in a rise in the number of contaminations, because the virus remains on the lookout,” notes Kevin McConway.

His fear is that this slowdown in the spread of Covid-19 will only shift the problem into the fall. If the epidemic starts again with a vengeance at the start of the school year, “we would have won nothing at all, on the contrary. Because hospitals are traditionally busier from the fall due to seasonal illnesses and an influx of patients with Covid -19 would risk overwhelming the health system, ”he concludes.

This is why he insists on the need to continue to encourage those who have not yet been vaccinated, because “the data clearly show that even against the Delta variant, vaccines protect very well against severe forms of the disease. “.