LONDON (Reuters) – England’s third national COVID-19 lockdown helps reduce infections, a study found Thursday found, but the prevalence of cases remains high as Prime Minister Boris Johnson sees a cautious route to the economy. reopen.
Johnson will set a roadmap for the lockdown, which began on Monday January 5, and has said it will be a cautious and cautious approach.
The study, known as REACT-1 and led by researchers at Imperial College London, found that the national prevalence between February 4 and 13 was two-thirds lower than in the previous January 6-22 survey.
It’s really encouraging news. We think lockdown has an effect. We’ve now seen this fairly rapid decline between January and this month, ”Paul Elliott, program director at Imperial, told reporters.
“But… the actual prevalence is still very high. We only got back where we were in September. “
The latest figures showed that 51 per 10,000 people were infected, up from 157 per 10,000 in the January survey, and it takes 15 days for the infections to halve.
Prevalence declined across all age groups, falling from 0.93% to 0.30% among the over-65s, although the researchers said they had no evidence that this was caused by the vaccine rollout, which targets older groups.
REACT-1 is one of the largest and best-viewed prevalence studies in England and the researchers published the interim results in a preprint that has not been peer-reviewed.
Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the findings were an encouraging sign that lockdown was working.
“While the trends we have seen are good news, we all need to work to contain infections by sticking to measures,” he said.
Reporting by Alistair Smout; Editing by Kirsten Donovan