New infections of Covid-19 in the UK are not increasing fast enough to match the Government’s worst-case scenario, latest figures suggest.

Chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty and chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance last week published a projection that showed the number of new cases could reach 50,000 per day by mid-October, if cases doubled every seven days.

If such a projection was coming true, the UK would now be seeing around 12,000 new cases reported each day.

Instead the latest daily total is 7,143, according to data published on Tuesday.

The number of reported cases in the UK is increasing, but the upward trend does not appear to be steep enough to follow a path similar to that outlined in the Government’s scenario.

If the country was on course to reach 50,000 cases per day by mid-October, the daily total would be likely to hit 25,000 in a week’s time, around October 6 or 7.

Due to the time it takes for new cases to be detected and recorded, it is too soon to say whether any of the restrictions and local lockdowns introduced in parts of the UK in the last couple of weeks have had a significant impact on the spread of coronavirus.