And Europe has an even more daunting task

The CloseAssociate modeller is showing that across Europe there is very little evidence that the spread of COVID-19 is being mitigated in this second wave. Back on 25 August we surveyed European countries here and talked about a chance of a second wave. We have continued to keep an eye on it in regular blog posts.

Daily cases were relatively low back then, perhaps breeding complacency among populations and policymakers, but the pattern was clear and that was reproduction rates were being sustained above the 1.0 redline. Today, the case tally stands at around 200,000 per day across Scandinavia, Benelux, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the UK.

Below, we highlight Germany's Reff which has had an Reff greater than 1.0 since early July, is enduring an acceleration that started in late September. It is now reflected in daily case increases.

Our modeller's daily calculations has Norway at Reff=2.3 (0.65K daily cases), Sweden 1.7 (4K), Belgium 2.0 (11.1K), Netherlands 1.1 (6.9K), Germany 1.9 (22K), France 1.5 (57K), Switzerland 2.5 (10K), Italy 2.0 (34K), Spain 1.8 (22.9K), Portugal 1.8 (4.4K) and the UK 1.2 (24K).

In the modeller only the UK and the Netherlands have Reff rates that are trending down to 1.0 which means in a week or two their daily case numbers may reduce. All other European States are either increasing or plateaued. Nevertheless, with all of these European States with Reff>1.0 we can expect daily case numbers to continue to climb over the next two weeks.