Coronavirus: Sky's EdConwaySky looks at the numbers to see what we can expect over the coming weeks
If things continue as they are now it looks quite plausible that there could be 10,000 dead of COVID-19 in this country by next week, that Britain could even be faced with a more intense COVID-19 outbreak and higher numbers of dead than Italy.
The problem is that there are all sorts of issues with the data. If every country knew immediately how many people had come down with COVID-19 that would make tracking its spread far easier, but the UK is doing very little testing compared with other countries, so we have no clear idea how many people in this country have the disease.
The problem is the levels - the number of people dying - is the wrong thing to focus on when cases are growing at a compound rate. What you need to focus on is the growth rate.Within a week or so of the first death, the number of deaths was doubling every two days. For the past week or so it's been doubling every three days.
The chart in logarithmic form has the same data. Same annotations. But the steepness of the line is a reflection not of the absolute levels of people dying but the rateSo actually Britain's death numbers increased most sharply at the beginning but they are a bit flatter now. And you can see that if the numbers double each week, the curve flattens massively.
And while the US death numbers are climbing, they are well below Spanish and Italian levels. But now let's take the same data, those same lines, and change the vertical axis so we're depicting growth rates rather than levels., are heading in precisely the same direction. But each day the death number has been depressingly predictable. Britain is simply following Italy's path, but we are about 15 days behind them.The good news is that there are some signs that lockdown measures make a difference. Perhaps you can see on this final chart that both Italy and Spain's growth rates have flattened out in the past week or so.
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