Past The Peak...

Yesterday, in the daily briefing held by the Government, Boris Johnson claimed that we were past the peak of this incredibly damaging crisis. As well as releasing this revelation, many of you would have already heard of the Government's plan to release a lockdown exit plan next week. This 'comprehensive' plan will include methods for how everything from businesses to schools will attempt to go back to normal.

As I said last week, despite this piece of amazing news, we need to stay vigilant and careful as this virus is all but gone - we cannot go totally back to normal and risk a second peak, causing many, many more fatalities. As the PM said yesterday, we have managed to avoid a much worse situation, where the estimated death toll was 500,000. The death toll in the UK due to coronavirus, as of writing this post, is 26,771. This is still horrendous and is an incredibly high number of deaths, but we should also appreciate that there was potential for an especially atrocious condition and due to the incredible work of the health services and the public's co-operation, we avoided it.

But some of you may be asking, how do we know that we are past the peak; is it safe to go out? The way that the medical professionals know the peak of COVID-19 is behind us is by using something called the R0 of the disease. This is pronounced R-naught, and represents the transmission rates of the disease. Currently the R0 in the UK is under 1, which means that each infection leads to under one new infection, meaning that, slowly but surely, the virus will die off and we will be past this unprecedented disaster. Previously, the R0 was above 2, meaning that each new infection will lead to 2/3 more infections, leading to an exponential growth, which you can see in the graph below:

This graph here shows the exponential growth that I was talking about. The curve you see is due to the R0 being above 1. This means that as time goes by, the rate of infection goes up as each infected person infects more and the virus spreads through the population, therefore, people begin to die, as the graph shows.

But there is also a visible decline in daily deaths after April 19. This marks the peak of the curve and disease, and shows that the R0 is now under 1. You can expect this curve to continue downward until there are no more new deaths - this would imply that this epidemic is over and we have successfully beat it.

Hopefully, we can push past the end of this deadlock and within the next few weeks we might see a day with 0 new deaths. This situation has impacted us in more ways than not - we need to persevere and work to the end. We are so close to the end of this, but we cannot lose sight of the dangers of a second peak, just as I said in my post from last week. This crisis is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of event, and should be treated as such. It is incredibly important that we don't ignore the powerful menace that it presents. With time and effort, we can and will survive this, just like New Zealand, who loosened their lockdown earlier this week. What with other countries following in their footsteps soon, the risks that I mentioned previously are in danger of coming true - we need to work hard to keep them from being realised.

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See you next week!