Since tracking Oxfordshire virus cases, I wondered what the numbers from the Leicester outbreak looked like. As before, these numbers are all from the government coronavirus dashboard, and it’s all properly covered for re-use by the Open Government License.
Here’s a very general overview of Leicester going back to March.
Daily cases in the city increased slowly from March through May, accelerating in early June.
Compare this with the numbers for Oxford city, where you see an initial surge in late March followed by a long bumpy decline.
This is pretty much the pattern across the country as a whole. Possibly including a very recent small uptick in cases following the easing of confinement measures.
The timeline of events in Leicester went like this:
- 18th June, outbreak mentioned in the daily briefing.
- 20th June, mobile testing centres set up in parks.
- 29th June, confinement measures announced.
- 4th July, confinement measures come into force.
- 18th July, confinement measures revised.
In the worst period of the outbreak, there were over 90 cases per day in the city, and now it’s down to around 30 cases per day.
The measures will be revised again next week, and I might return to Leicester, if it’s alright to do that. Any kind of normal university life is gone, so if I go back it would be more for a change of scenery than anything. I keep getting hung up on seeing billboards for films which came out in March, it compounds a latent sense of anachronism, like I’ve slipped out of time.
I haven’t tried to do any kind of prediction of future trends with these graphs. The government is understandably reluctant to state ‘things will return to normal by September’, although it’s difficult to plan life around this kind of permanent stasis.