A video shared on Facebook and Instagram claims that official statistics show a fivefold rise in people catching Covid-19 in the past week, meaning the disease “is back” in the UK.
None of this is true.
The man in the video says: “UK breaking news. Covid-19 is officially back and there might be another lockdown. In the past week alone the amount of people that have caught Covid has risen from 1% to 5%.”
But the government’s official Covid data dashboard shows no such thing.
The video was posted on 24 August 2026, and includes screenshots showing a rise of 25 cases in the previous seven days, amounting to 10.8% more. This is consistent with the data in the week to 12 August 2026, which brought the total number of Covid cases in England in that week to 256.
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There has been a small rise in cases over the last month, but these figures are still very low compared with the thousands that were recorded every day at the height of the pandemic. Weekly deaths in England involving Covid-19 are also at a very low level, at nine in the week to 7 August, which is the latest data available at the time of writing.
On the specific point that “the amount of people that have caught Covid has risen from 1% to 5%”, we’re not sure exactly what the man means. It’s certainly not true that 5% of the UK population returned a positive Covid test in the past week—or that 1% did the week before.
So far in August, fewer than one in every 100,000 people in England has tested positive for Covid in any given seven-day period.
It’s likely that other people will have caught Covid and not been tested, but there’s nothing in the official data to say it amounts to a fivefold increase in the last week as the post appears to claim. Hospital admissions in England have been roughly flat at around 10-20 per day in July.
Test positivity rates have risen from under 1% in early July to nearly 3% in mid August. This is similar to the level in February and March, and well below the positivity rate in August last year.
Unsurprisingly, we can find no recent media reports suggesting there might soon be a lockdown to tackle the spread of Covid.
We have attempted to contact the account behind this video, but we have not received a response so far.
When you see surprising news on social media, it’s important to check whether it’s reliable before sharing it with others. Our Misinformation Toolkit can help you do this.
