After last week’s spike in new cases, this week’s coronavirus update was always going to be crucial. The number of new cases has increased again — but this week it hasn’t doubled.
The RIVM reports that 1,329 people have tested positive for coronavirus this week. That’s 342 more than last week, so while we’re seeing an increase, it’s not an exponential one (last week the number of new cases jumped from 534 to 987, almost doubling). Hospitalisations increased slightly from last week: this week 23 people were hospitalised as a result of coronavirus, four more than the week before.
Deaths have also remained low and steady, with nine people sadly passing away from coronavirus this week, an increase of one, compared to last week.
Although this week’s figures are not nearly as bad as some of us might have been dreading, they are still bad news. The R number (the reproductive rate) is still above 1, which means that each person who gets coronavirus infects more than one other person. For the number of new infections to decrease, the R number needs to be below 1. This week’s R number is 1.4.
This week, 23,000 coronavirus tests were carried out, with about 1% of them returning a positive result, a similar figure to what we saw last week. The RIVM also reports that the number of infection-clusters is increasing, from 96 active clusters last week to 133 this week.
Finally, the number of infected young people is relatively high. One in five of the new cases this week is a person between 20 and 29 years of age. This is partly down to testing being available to everyone with symptoms, but also because of the higher amount of social contact young people tend to have.
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