What is already known about this topic
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 an independent association over time between our calculated R-value for COVID-19 transmission and the number of cases identified as definitely positive in the population. We estimated based on that methodology that around 26.8% of the population of the UK may have been infected by late April 2020 approximating to 18.2 million people.