Coronavirus: Do two-thirds of us already have it?

Do two-thirds of Brits already have Covid-19?

Sky News reported on a highly questionable report which has surfaced from Oxford University.

The report is not peer reviewed, and experts are very cautious about the assumptions upon which it is based.

A report from Oxford University suggests two-thirds of us may have already been infected by the coronavirus without realising it.

But experts are treating the report with caution.

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Experts have noted that this report is not peer reviewed, which means other scientists in the field have not confirmed the scientific basis for its findings.

The report is based on an assumption which seems at odds with real-world evidence gathered in countries such as China and South Korea, where widespread testing and contact tracing has been performed.

This report is based on the assumption that the rate of hospitalization and death for Covid-19 is very low – and uses this number to work out the number of people who are therefore infected. However, data from South Korea and China suggests a far higher hospitalization rate than that used for this report.

The evidence does not align with the assumption underscoring this report.

The report assumes that one person in 1,000 is at risk of severe disease. As of today, there have been 7,503 deaths from Covid-19 in Italy. 1 in 1000 would mean at least 7.5 million Italians had been infected with Covid-19 before March 23 2020. There is a strong reliance on one town in Italy in the report, which found positive results in people who were asymptomatic at the time – but this is to be expected, as people don’t develop symptoms for up to 14 days after contracting the virus, and can take a further 10-16 days before they reach a stage which requires hospital treatment.

It is too early to say definitively, in other words.

It would therefore be dangerous to base any policy on this paper. A 21 year old British woman, with no underlying health conditions, died of novel coronavirus earlier this week. More have died in the UK of “suspected coronavirus” – suspected because they died before they were tested, in self isolation or in hospital.

It remains to be seen who commissioned this research, and what benefit or outcome was hoped for when it was released via a DropBox link, which was then widely reported on in the British media.

The UK’s chief scientific advisor reported that “we just don’t know” about the general infection rate. An antibody test, which will show if someone is immune – and therefore has had the virus – will be the only definitive answer.

We await such a test. It is believed to be several weeks away.

In the meantime, the advice is to stay home, in order to reduce exposure to the virus at this time, and reduce the rate of infection. Italy and Spain are around two weeks and ten days respectively ahead of the UK, based on the curving rate of infection, and their increasing death rates provide a sound reason why social distancing is so important, whatever specific maths and modelling might say later.

Right now, staying home will save lives in Britain and any other country where the novel coronavirus is at large.

The UK is preparing for huge numbers of Covid-19 deaths, similar to those which are currently being experienced in Italy and Spain on a daily basis, and is in the process of converting the ExCeL centre in London into a 4,000 bed makeshift field hospital called NHS Nightingale.