Covid infections showed a clear fall in England last week, according to gold-standard figures boosting confidence about the outlook for the rest of the summer.
The Office for National Statistics survey confirmed the first fall outside lockdown in the final week of July, when an estimated one in 75 had coronavirus, down from one in 65 the week before.
The fall means rates are back where they were in the middle of July and although they remain significantly higher than in the spring, it will add to confidence that the end of restrictions last month will not fuel a surge in cases large enough to threaten the NHS.
Cases are also falling in Scotland and Wales. Northern Ireland, where the Delta variant arrived later, is now the only part of the UK seeing rises.
The fall was seen in all age groups, with a strong decline in those aged 16-24, allaying suspicions that drops in daily case numbers in this age group were a result of less testing as schools and colleges broke up for the summer.
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Unlike the daily case figures, which depend on testing levels, the ONS tests a random sample of the population to obtain what is regarded as the most reliable estimate of current infection levels.
Younger children also appeared to see a decline, although the trend was less certain, as did older adults.
Sarah Crofts, of the ONS infection survey, said: “After rising for some weeks as a result of the Delta variant, it is encouraging that infections have now fallen across England, Wales and Scotland. They are still increasing in Northern Ireland, where Delta emerged slightly later.
“Infection rates remain high across the UK, however, and we’ll need to see more data before concluding whether we are over the peak of this current wave.”
The fall was most pronounced in the northwest, the Midlands, London and the southeast, with trends less clear in Yorkshire, the southwest and east of England.
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Professor Rowland Kao of the University of Edinburgh said the figures were a “more robust source of information than the case data, and so this decline in numbers, with appropriate statistical uncertainty, is reassuring”.
He pointed out that, as people could test positive for some time after first getting infected, the ONS figures picked up trends more slowly than other estimates.
Currently the fall in daily case numbers is slowing and Kao said that “school holidays, weather impacts, changes in restrictions, the end of the Euro 2020 tournament, the ‘pingdemic’ and possible shifts in human behaviour” would all affect where they went next.
“If those trends result in rising infections, we shall detect them first in the case data, but only after in ONS survey results as they come through in the coming weeks,” he said.
