Sir Patrick Vallance yesterday said he believed the epidemic in the UK was doubling every seven days, which would lead to 200 deaths a day by mid-November. The chief scientific adviser stressed that there were a lot of unknowns behind those projections. He said: 'If, and that's quite a big if, but if that continues unabated, and this grows, doubling every seven days... if that continued you would end up with something like 50,000 cases in the middle of October per day.' Sir Patrick explained that the UK's rise in cases was closely following the trends in France and Spain and pointed to a graph to illustrate this. However, if the UK were to continue to follow the trends in these two countries, then cases would be at 10,000 a day by next month.