Mike Tildesley, professor of infectious disease modelling at the University of Warwick, said the recent falls in Covid-19 case numbers could have occurred because people are less willing to get a test ahead of summer holidays.
Asked about the decline, the member of the scientific modelling group Spi-M told Times Radio: “Because schools in England closed last week, we haven’t got secondary school pupils doing regular lateral flow testing and so we’re not necessarily detecting as many cases in younger people.
“It’s also been suggested by some that, possibly, because of a high number of cases, because of the summer holidays approaching, people might be less willing to ‘step up’ to testing when they have symptoms.
“What we really need to do is monitor hospital admissions, because at the moment of course they’re still going up – now, of course there is a lag when cases go down, it always takes a couple of weeks before hospital admissions turn around – but if we start to see as we get into August, if we start to see hospital admissions going down as well then I think we would have much stronger evidence to suggest that this third wave is starting to turn around.”
Originally Appeared On: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/travel-restrictions-news-review-us-america-eu-europe-vaccinated/