Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate he has made of when the rate of covid-19 infection levels per 100,000 people in a rolling 7-day period will fall below (a) 400 and (b) 300 cases .

Neither the Department nor the United Kingdom Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has made such an estimate. As part of the Government’s planning for Autumn and Winter, the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Modelling (SPI-M-O; an operational subgroup of SAGE) considered potential epidemic trajectories over the next few months. This paper is available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/spi-m-o-summary-of-modelling-for-scenarios-for-covid-19-autumn-and-winter-2021-to-2022-13-october-2021

These are not projections or forecasts, but consider a range of potential scenarios that focus on outputs for hospital admissions in England during Autumn and Winter under different assumptions for potential behaviour in the population, uptake of booster vaccinations and waning of immunity. The timing and scale of any future peaks and forecasts in the epidemic remains uncertain due to the uncertainty around these factors.