Ben Lowry: Lockdowns are essential for now but there are glimmers of hope and we should relax them as soon as safe to do so

America now has the most cases in the world at almost 100,000 infections.

Italy, where deaths seemed to have peaked last Saturday at 800 deaths, after which death tolls were lower for each of the following five days, then surged past 900 new deaths yesterday.

In the UK the death toll is heading upwards in leaps towards 1,000. In Northern Ireland the toll is 13.

There are ongoing grim images from hospitals in Spain and Italy, and intensive care units in London are approaching their limit.

The horrifying reports of Covid-19 sweeping through care homes in Italy and Spain are now happening in parts of the UK.

In China, it is reported that 14% of patients who recovered from coronavirus in one province tested positive again, which suggests they are still carrying the virus.

In Africa, which seemed at first to have few cases well after much of the rest of the world, Covid-19 is now appearing across the continent. As anyone who has been to sub Saharan Africa will know, the health systems cannot cope with disease and poverty in normal times, and certainly won’t be able to do so if the pandemic takes hold.

But amidst all the gloom it is good to retain perspective and to be aware of glimmers of hope.

The death toll in the UK as a whole will probably rise by a magnitude of hundreds more fatalities each day in the coming week.

When that happens the clamour for further factory closures and restrictions will grow ever louder.

But some statistics suggest the present trajectory of ultimate deaths might lead to the UK outcome being at the lower end of projections, which range from 20,000 deaths to 500,000. Some models even have the UK coming in well under 20,000 deaths and closer to annual seasonal flu deaths.

The NHS, while under immense pressure, particularly in the capital, is not yet as hard hit as some experts had feared at this stage.

Coronavirus has clearly penetrated Europe and America to a large extent. This might sound like further bad news but might not be if it is evidence that a much larger number of people than we realise are already infected, with perhaps a lower percentage death toll than the 1% that had been expected.

The former health secretary Jeremy Hunt recently suggested there might be 1,000 infections for each reported death (this suggests a death rate of 0.1% but could in fact be possible even at a rate of 1%, due to the time lag of weeks between cases and death, and because some deaths might only be found to be related to coronavirus after autopsy).

Using this rule of thumb, the UK is already approaching a million infections. It might even have several million cases. Anecdotal evidence for widespread infection is strong.

Consider the famous people known to have it. There are not that many famous people —look up at the top of the opposite page: every day newspapers run such daily lists of famous people’s birthdays.

Most of us have become familiar with the famous people who share our own birthday. Some are names we know well, but often there are names on the list we do not know.

Most people will know on average at most seven or eight names a day, which suggests that we all have in our head perhaps 2,500 famous names (7 x 365 days per year).

Yet already a notable number of that small pool of people is infected.

Even before Boris Johnson and Prince Charles got Covid-19, the list of famous names who have it was getting ever bigger and included Prince Albert II of Monaco, the EU leader Michel Barnier, the actors Tom Hanks, Idris Elba, Arsenal coach Mikel Arteta, model Linda Lusardi, GMTV star Fiona Phillips, among others.

Celebrities such as this are a random group of people: there is no obvious reason why they would be more likely to get it than others.

Similarly most of us know, personally, a relatively small number of people, probably measured in the hundreds rather than thousands (relatives, ex school contemporaries, former and past work colleagues, etc), yet more and more of us know someone who has it.

I know of five such people (including my sister, a doctor in London who, mercifully, seems to have had it mildly and who did not know until her loss of smell became recognised as a symptom and she was tested).

In addition to people we know who have it, there will be others we know who do but of whose infection we have not yet learned of, and others still we know who are symptomless and do not know themselves.

So it is not at all hard to believe that at least 1% of the population on these islands already has it (700,000 in the UK and 18,000 in Northern Ireland) and perhaps many times that number.

That the NHS is coping at this stage is an encouraging indicator of outcomes (even though the health service will not only soon be badly hit but likely stay so for weeks).

Last night for an update I talked to a local expert, Dr Alan Stout, chair of the GP Committee of BMA for NI, who wrote for us recently on the importance of not moving too early on things such as school closures.

He said: “The projection is that every hospital and ICU bed in two weeks time will be full.

“The speed of the spread is slower than we initially feared, which we think is due to the restrictions that have been introduced, so there is no room whatsoever for complacency.

“What people do know will dictate where we are one or two weeks from now.”

So lockdowns remain essential. But they are causing vast economic damage that will ruin lives around the world and while we must guard against complacency in this crisis, we must also be ready to begin to relax restrictions at the first moment data suggests it is safe to do so.

• Ben Lowry (@BenLowry2) is News Letter deputy editor