Where are the statisticians?

[CKBJ]

It’s great to see the variety graphs coming down daily and hopefully things are moving in the right direction. I don’t want to sound negative but.... something that keeps niggling away at me is each day with the daily number of hospital admissions and the comparison to a previous day showing a decrease. Is it really true?

For example at today’s news conference the daily hospital admissions for 8th June was 462.:The slide shows a comparison to 1st June where admissions were 658. So a large decrease in a week. Great! But a quick look on the government webpage and the YouTube videos of the news conferences can easily be found. I found the news conference for 3rd June as this shows hospital admissions for the 1st and it shows 431 admissions! Not the 658 stated today!!! Maybe they meant the news conference on 1st June, so I checked that hospital admissions were 479. Still not 658. Any ideas for the discrepancy?

And on another point. Why do we hear about the number of tests completed each day rather than the number of people actually tested? A very different statistic. Again a quick look on the government site pillar 1 testing is the only one which shows the number of people tested (sometimes). On occasions the actual number of people tested is half of the actual number of tests completed! If the number of people tested was shared this would provide a quick and straight forward percentage of how many are infected each day (number of tests / number of people) and easy to compare to previous days. Or am I missing something?

in terms of hospital admissions - apparently -"England data were revised on 8 June to reflect a methodology change in calculating estimated admissions and has resulted in historical revisions of the full time series."

The number of people being tested is not available because it comes from a number of different sources and they appear to be having a hard time (!) collating it and figuring out how to remove the double counting....

The cynical side of me would be saying this all seems very convenient!

You should listen to More or Less. It does a fantastic job of explaining things like this, and it's just been announced today that the current series is being extended to carry on doing it...

The data issues you are mentioning are really showing up how fragmented the NHS is: every day they are collating information from hundreds of organisations. Each of those organisations runs different laboratory systems, some ancient some modern. They have different patient management systems which may or may not interact with the laboratory system.

Almost all of them have seen underinvestment in IT for at least a decade.

Hospitals used to run on a payment by results basis, which was meant to encourage competition within the NHS. That means hospitals are very good at knowing what things happened to a patient, but it's often manually completed so there's a big time delay. Often live patient data is patchy (though will be available for e.g. tests).

All that stuff means the first cut of the data is likely to be quite poor and you can expect significant revisions after the fact. I don't think this is acceptable, but it is a product of an NHS that has seen under-investment and a slant that disapproves of non-clinical staff and spending money on them.

LordsEmsworth thank you I’ll take a look.

Nacreous just shows how under-funded our country is.

Does anyone know where the data on hospital admissions is available online?

@weepingwillow22

the decks from the daily briefings are here -

www.gov.uk/government/collections/slides-and-datasets-to-accompany-coronavirus-press-conferences

which have lots of data over time.

We're here www.mumsnet.com/Talk/coronavirus/3932888-daily-numbers-graphs-analysis-thread-10

Many thanks that is really helpful.