Britain’s Covid numbers show we need to move immediately to ‘plan B’ | Kit Yates

Our comparatively good position has been eroded and now, heading into the winter, the data looks truly alarming

• Kit Yates is director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath

All the Covid indicators in the UK are going in the wrong direction. They have been for a while now. Cases are surging upwards; hospitals are feeling the strain of increasing numbers of Covid patients, and daily death tolls are rising. At the same time, vaccination delivery is slowing down.

On Monday we saw almost 50,000 cases reported. Only on 16 days throughout the whole pandemic have we seen higher numbers. On Wednesday we saw similar numbers. Our seven-day average is more than 45,000 cases a day, and the ONS estimates that one in 60 people are infected - the highest level since January. For comparison, Germany is seeing 165 daily cases per million of its population. In France, the figure is just 71, and in Spain 35. The corresponding rate for the UK is more than 650 per million.

Kit Yates is director of the Centre for Mathematical Biology at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death