Professor Philip Nolan:

No, as Dr. Glynn said, it would not be appropriate to comment. However, I am surprised by the line of narrative. One must compare like with like. We had huge outbreaks in nursing homes in April and May, and we do not have those now, so let us take those deaths out. The case fatality rate for those aged over 75 was 20% back then. We know we were detecting one in three cases of the virus. The mortality rate for those aged over 75 since August is 5%. Let us be clear that we are seeing very few cases in older people yet, but the risk of those people dying when they catch the virus remains very high. It was artificially high back in April and May, because we were not detecting mild or moderate disease in those older people. Now that we are detecting the vast majority of cases, we are seeing something close to the true infection fatality ratio of approximately 5%. It would be very dangerous, therefore, to underestimate the capacity of this virus to kill people when it infects them.

We have seen 269 hospitalisations since the beginning of August. Of those, 153 patients are aged under 65, and 56 are under 40. The virus is as virulent as it always was, but the difference now is that we are detecting more mild and moderate disease, which we were missing in April and May. When severe disease occurs, it is as dangerous as it always was.