'Delta cases in England doubling every 11 days', says new study

Analysis by Imperial College London team shows link between the variant and rising Covid-19 infections

The number of people infected with the coronavirus is increasing rapidly in England, doubling every 11 days, which coincides with the Delta variant of Covid-19 becoming dominant in the country, a new study showed on Thursday.

The study found the link between infections, hospitalisations and deaths had been weakening since February, REUTERS/Hannah McKay/File Photo (REUTERS)

The Imperial College London led Real-time Assessment of Community Transmission (REACT-1) analysis, based on over 100,000 home swab tests taken between May 20 and June 7, estimates that 0.15% of people have the deadly virus, or roughly 1-in-670.

It found the link between infections, hospitalisations and deaths had been weakening since February, but since late April, the trend has been reversing for hospitalisations.

“We found strong evidence for exponential growth in infection from late May to early June in the REACT-1 study, with a doubling time of 11 days on average for England,” said Paul Elliott, director of the REACT programme from Imperial’s School of Public Health.

A top UK government health official, meanwhile, has said the world will be free from Covid-19 only after the entire global population has been vaccinated against the deadly disease.

Variants will continue to emerge and “we will not be through this pandemic until the whole world has the ability to get vaccinated”, Susan Hopkins, deputy director of Public Health England’s (PHE) national infection service, said at a House of Commons science committee meeting. “And that, realistically, is two years away.”

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Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has said that America - and not - US should be the priority in the next phase of investigations into the origin of Covid-19 after a US study showed that the disease could have been circulating in the US as early as in December 2019