The percentage of patients who have recovered from the coronavirus in the UK currently stands at 2 per cent.

At the time of writing, the Public Health England (PHE) dashboard states just 135 people, out of over 6,600 confirmed cases, have recovered.

The figures appear worrying, especially when compared to China which has more than 73,000 recoveries out of 81,000 cases - an 89 per cent recovery rate. And Italy, which has more than 63,000 infections and 7,400 recoveries – a 12 per cent recovery rate.

In reality, these figures aren’t as alarming as they seem, here’s why.

Growth curve

The UK recorded its first coronavirus case around the same time as Italy on January 31 2020. It wouldn’t be unrealistic to assume then that our recovery rate should be the same.

But the reason Italy’s recovery rate is currently around four times higher than the UK is “almost entirely down to the fact that the exponential phase of the outbreak in Italy kicked off about a week or two earlier,” said Professor Paul Hunter, Professor in Medicine at UEA. As the chart below shows, the number of confirmed cases in Italy spiked far quicker than in the UK.

The growth curve of coronavirus infections only really began to rise exponentially in the last week in the UK. Early estimates suggest patients recover around 10 days after first falling ill, so it will still be another couple of weeks before our recovery rate begins to increase, as patients begin to improve.

The initial figures from China show a similar pattern. The country recorded its first case in November 2019, so there has been a significantly longer period for patients to recover, compared to the UK and Europe.