Ross Clark Ross Clark

Did Wales’s ‘circuit-breaker’ work?

(Photo: Getty)

On Monday morning Wales emerges from its 17 day ‘circuit-breaker’. Did it work? Not according to the rate of new infections.

During the first 12 days – when Wales was in lockdown but England wasn’t – the epidemic seems to have grown far more quickly in Wales than it did in England. When Wales went into lockdown on 23 October, the seven-day average for new infections leading up to that date was 893. By 5 November, the seven-day average had grown to 1,299, a 45 per cent increase. In England, by contrast, the seven day average leading up to 23 October was 17,085, growing to 19,497 by 5 November – a 14 per cent increase.



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Over the two weeks leading up to the Welsh lockdown, the number of daily cases (again using a seven-day average) increased by 49 per cent. The ‘circuit-breaker’, in other words, seems to have made zero difference to the progression of the epidemic in Wales – while simultaneously the epidemic in England seems to have started to level off without a national lockdown. You might expect a lag of a few days as cases were revealed in people who had been infected right before the lockdown began, but given that Covid-19 seems to have an incubation period of up to two weeks, Wales ought to have been seeing a dramatic decrease in new cases by the end of the circuit breaker – if, that is, the lockdown was going to work at all. As well, the increase in cases in Wales cannot be explained by a sudden increase in testing, as the number of tests performed over the past month has been fairly flat.


Why, then, has a two week ‘circuit breaker’ in Wales failed to break the circuit? There is no obvious explanation, and epidemiologists will no doubt argue over it in days to come.




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