How contagious is the virus?

Watch last night's Horizon special via the i-Player and learn all about it.
It specifically addresses this and other issues.

how is your son in law doing i t?

The science says it is significantly more contagious than other versions of the coronavirus.

Virus	Cases	Deaths	Territories
SARS 2002/3	8,096	774	28
MERS 2012-20	1,360	527	26
COVID-19	1,607,595	95,785	210

And that is the issue with removing lockdown restrictions, this virus spreads incredibly quickly, big risk of a second wave.

He seems fine Jolly. Out of hospital in Spain but been told to isolate in a seperate part of his parents house for 20 days. Not allowed to see his wife and kids.

Doctors come everyday in hazmat suits to check on him and test him to see if he still has the virus.

Sounds like they do more testing and checks there than Boris had at No.11!

I'll publish some data later, but it does appear that Italy has gone past their peak infection period, as has Spain.
Not the case for the UK though.

can you give us a sneak preview please? i thought 17/4 was estimated as peak death day, you seem to be suggesting it will be a fair bit later. tia

as long as he kept 2 metres away and didnt have droplets coughed on them and then poke around his face,no reason they,d be infected, according to the scientists

Well, this is where we need to firm up on our definitions of "peak of the virus".

For me, this should focus on the leading indicators rather than the lagging indicators i.e. cases rather than deaths
I suspect that this is what the medical and scientific communities also look at.

i agree with that but the peak deaths day guides how much i worry about the death toll, if 17/4 were correct for peak deaths then we would need to be past peak infection day so that must be wrong . if we are still about two weeks behind spain and italy then there is still a while to go.

You really need to give Mexico a shout on this. He is the forums scientific and medical expert. He will know

It depends on how and when she was tested. E.g. the swab PCR tests (done from samples of the throat or nose) are known to cause false negatives after about a week or so when the virus has (mostly) left those areas and wandered off to the lungs. This is also when people themselves are said to have become a lot less contageous.

All the best to them!

As some "supposed" re-infections (i.e positive tests after having had been cleared) have shown in various countries, the virus might also re-activate in the the throat and nasal area after some time.

I've broken up the data in to ten or 11 day blocks, pre March has insignificant numbers.

Data not yet in for April 10, other than a partial report from Spain.

However, you can see that both Italy and Spain have recorded less new cases in the first ten days of April than were recorded in the last 11 of March, also works on a daily average.

This will also likely be the case for deaths in Italy, but not in Spain.

France has anomalies in their data as a result of how they reported their care home figures.

I guess another problem for a false negative could be improper sample taking, i.e not taking from the correct spot.

Here are the case numbers by block, total number for pre March and then a daily average for the subsequent blocks.

Country	Feb	Mar 1	Mar 2	Mar 3	Apr 1
Italy	1,128	902	3,687	5,343	3,783
Spain	58	164	1,988	6,759	6,110
France	100	168	1,083	3,592	6,562
UK	23	36	360	1,924	3,993
Germany	79	149	1,828	4,724	4,643