Living in West London in the course of the lockdown imposed as a consequence of the Coronavirus outbreak is a surreal experience. Normal existence, resembling we oknew less than two months ago, appears to have happenred in another lifetime. A few of us older ones lived by way of the nervous uncertainties of the Cold War and we all look with some trepidation at the imminent challenges posed by local weather change. However this is something altogether different.

As a fifty eight-year-old diabetic male my vulnerability in the face of this virus is heightened. As is that of my son, who is asthmatic. Neither of us is listed among the 1.5 million most vulnerable as recognized by the UK authorities, however we are open enough to issues for us to have gone voluntarily into more or less full isolation, together with the rest of the household who're supporting us. Numerous in-laws and outlaws seem to be attempting their stage finest to tempt us out into the perilous yonder, however up to now we are holding firm.

Readily available data

I am neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist. I'm not even a statistician. But I've an O-stage in Mathematics. And modest although this achievement could also be within the wider scheme of academia it's enough to enable me to establish traits and to draw conclusions from data that is readily available to anybody with a connection to the Internet and a working information of Google. Which is why I shudder at the evident bemusement of many of those commentators who pass for experts.

Throughout its dealing with of the disaster, my authorities has been eager to stress that it is "following the science". Political spokespersons are invariably accompanied during briefings by medical advisers and scientists aplenty of order and esteem. And but what passes as the best of scientific advice at some point appears so typically to fall by the wayside the next. Thus our preliminary reluctance to suspend large sporting events was primarily based on "scientific advice" which said there was no proof that large crowds of individuals packed intently together presented an ideal atmosphere in which a virus might spread, only for opposite advice to be issued barely a day or later. Likewise pubs and restaurants. "Following the science" has even been offered as an evidence for deficiencies in the provision of protective equipment to frontline workers and in testing capacity. One might be forgiven for wondering whether political policy was being informed by the science, or vice versa.

Long plateau

That was then. In the present day we are in lockdown, and the dialogue has moved on to how we are going to get out of it. Much flustered navel gazing inevitably ensues as it dawns upon the nice and the good, political and scientific, that a dynamic market economy can't be held in suspended animation forever. So where does it all go from right here?

If one needs to know what is likely to occur in the future, the past and indeed the current often function useful guides. And there's enough data to be discovered within the statistical data that we have collated since the initial outbreak in Wuhan, by means of the exponential pre-lockdown increases in the number of infections and deaths and on to the more welcome signs which have more recently begun to emerge from Italy and Spain, to present us some idea of where we are headed.

To begin with, the lengthy plateau adopted by a gradual decline within the numbers displays the less drastic approach taken by the European democracies than was adopted by China. When crisis comes there generally is a worth to pay for having fun with the benefits of a free and open society. In southern Europe the descent from the "peak" of the outbreak is noticeably slower than was the original climb. With the United Kingdom's shutdown being less severe even than Spain's or Italy's, the unlucky reality is that we can expect our recovery from this first peak, when it comes, to be an even more laboured one.

The reproduction number

The basic reproduction number is the mathematical time period utilized by epidemiologists to quantify the rate of infection of any virus or illness. Specialists have calculated that, when left unchallenged, the reproduction number (or R0) of Covid-19 is round 2.5. This means that each contaminated person will, on common, pass the virus to 2.5 other individuals, leading to exponential spread.

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