One in Five in England Have Had Covid-19, Report Suggests

According to results from a new modeling, about one out of five people in England may have had the disease with the numbers even rising to one in two in some areas.

The repercussions of this new finding is that the true number of infected people to date may be up to five times higher than the total number of reported cases.

The True Numbers

The report concludes that there may be a massive difference between recorded numbers and actual figures and that the disparity may be significant. Areas in London and the south are estimated to have more than eight times the number of detected cases.

Conducted by Edge Health, the analysis reveals that the real number may be closer to 12.4 million, which is about 22% of the population. This is against the 2.4 million cases detected by the government.

The model’s estimation is done by comparing an area’s number of deaths against an estimated infection fatality rate. There’s a three-week hiatus between recorded cases and any associated deaths. After the analysis, it was revealed that more than 10% of residents in 138 of England’s 149 upper-tier local authorities have contracted the disease.

Far Higher Than the Stated Numbers

This report has reinforced the knowledge that the actual number of infections is likely to be much higher than stated numbers. This knowledge is based on the prevalence of asymptomatic cases and the inability of testing to nail every case.

According to George Batchelor, the co-founder and director of Edge Health, “Reported tests are only a fraction of the picture of total infections, which show how badly hit London and the north-west have been during the pandemic. It is incredible that the level of understanding of where and how infections are occurring is not greater at this stage, since it would allow control measures to be more targeted.”