Friday May 1st






  • The UK Government continue to regard themselves as having led a successful campaign against the virus
  • This despite all the evidence suggesting otherwise
  • The death rate continues to rise, whilst the PM tells us that the peak has been reached
  • Meanwhile, there are now over 3 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 worldwide
  • In the UK there are 171,253 confirmed cases
  • But, this excludes all the people who have not been tested and have the virus
  • In particular this means that older people in care homes, those most at risk of dying, are not being counted
  • And, in case we forget (the media have moved on) despite the claps and the charity singles health workers continue to work without adequate PPE
  • And the result of this is that more and more of them are contracting the virus and a small but significant number of them are dying






The UK government, under some pressure, has finally agreed to include all deaths in the daily totals. UK total yesterday was 26,771, an increase of 692.




Although the FT is still estimating the figure as being much higher, the key statistic may well be the fact that the UK has 14.7% of al the deaths worldwide, a figure which is still moving upwards and which has now reached 235,187.

And, what of testing?


Tests carried out UK
Total tests carried out    901,905 
  in last 24 hours83,366
How many less than Governments target16,634
People tested687,369
Negative (n/%)75
Positive (n/%)25
  average per day since first death12,274
Percent population UK tested1.04%

So it seems that the Government has reached its target of 100,000 although that figure was not reflected in yesterday's figures. Does it matter?

It only matters if you think that a certain number of tests is significant. The fact is that the more people tested the better idea we have epidemiologically in the way the virus is moving through the population. 

Given that only just over 1% of the population have been tested, and that we have no data on reinfection of those who had previously tested negative, there is a big black hole in our knowledge.

And, why does this matter? Because any eventual easing of the lockdown is reliant upon the R figure being below 1. But, without extensive testing that figure is purely speculative. Although the Government are claiming that it is now below 1, they actually have no way of knowing. Any more than they could be certain that it was 2.6 (the UCL estimate) previously.

There's a lot of analysis out there, but this article by David Adam in Nature magazine does a good job of explaining the way in which modelling has been used to drive Government policy.



That's it for me for this week. Have a good weekend. Stay safe and keep your distance.








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