Plenty of people are looking at estimating coronavirus trends in the UK, but what's the maximum and minium number of cases so far?
The number of people tested in the UK has approximately doubled every week - an impressive achievement!
The figures for 8 April are: 230,000 tests, of which 60,000 tested positive.
If the testing picked up all the cases, then the UK has 60,000 cases. This is the minimum number of cases.
The maximum is harder to estimate. In the worst case, the testing might be equivalent to testing completely at random. If true, the 25% positive rate seen in the tests (60,000 cases / 230,000 test) would be representative of the entire UK population. This would suggest 17,000,000 cases, which is the maximum number of cases.
So the number of people who have (or have had) coronavirus in the UK is between 60 thousand and 17 million.
I am very confident that the number of cases lies somewhere between these two lines, even if they are three orders of magnitude apart!
In more good news, the number of cases for this week appears to be flattening somewhat, and is no longer increasing exponentially. Hooray for progress!