Abstract
The Facts COVID-19 is the disease associated with the 2019 novel
coronavirus Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2
(SARS-CoV-2). The pandemic related to this virus has transformed life
for billions of people across the globe. Using population based data
from England, we recently showed a strong independent relation over time
between our calculated R value for COVID-19 transmission and the number
of cases identified as definitely positive in the population. We
determined that 26.8% of the population of the United Kingdom (UK)
possibly had been infected by late April 2020 approximating to 18.2
million people. Reflection Different modelling approaches give different
answers to the question of how many people in the UK and elsewhere have
actually been infected by COVID-19, which all would agree in
epidemiological terms is behaving very differently from other
Coronaviruses that we have seen in the past. We are learning more and
more about this virus. National policy is changing rapidly and COIVD-19
antibody testing is increasingly being applied. This will facilitate
better datasets from population based studies. The picture will become
clearer as more data accrues over time.