A frontline doctor in the United Kingdom said fears over a second wave of the coronavirus in Europe are unfounded as the virus is “getting less angry.”
“The talk of a second wave happening now in Europe is hype,” Dr. Ron Daniels, an intensive care consultant at Good Hope Hospital in Birmingham, said. “We are seeing, as we see here, and we look at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in Oxford and [Professor] Carl Heneghan’s work, that all of the perceived increase in cases are explained by increased testing.”
“I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump — but if you test more people, you will find more cases,” he added.
Daniels said that officials in Spain and France are also reporting an increase in cases, which he attributes to increased testing.
“What we have seen in France and Spain, and they saw an uptick in cases two weeks before the U.K. did because they were testing earlier, is there’s not been any increase in hospital admissions.”
“There’s not been an increase in deaths — this is not a second wave, it is just we are testing more people and finding more cases,” he said.
He added that the virus appears to be “less angry” in recent weeks, which is “natural” in a virus’s progression.
“There is a degree of suggestion and some evidence the virus might just be getting a little bit less angry,” he said. “That would be the natural behaviour of viruses. Coronaviruses that now cause the common cold were probably quite good at causing death several thousand years ago.”
He added, “It confers no evolutionary advantage to a virus to kill its host and it confers every evolutionary advantage to sit in the host, not make them very ill but make them walk around infecting lots of other people.”
The U.K. has reported just over 41,500 deaths due to the coronavirus and 326,595 cases as of Sunday.
Fear of a second wave of the coronavirus has loomed over the United States in recent weeks. President Trump has repeatedly said that the increase in cases is due to an increase in testing.
“Remember this: When you have more tests, you have more cases. I say to my people: Every time we test, you find cases because we do more testing. So if we have more cases — if we wanted to do testing in China or in India or other places, I promise you, there’d be more cases,” Trump said this summer.
