Does anyone ask how many people are tested for covid

[marcus242628]

The figures have been "unavailable" for weeks. Why? All that is reported is a total including several per person and includes those posted. Surely someone would ask - are they being returned and are people able to test themselves or are the tests done by someone else giving far more positives.

Pisses me off that the daily number of tests includes those posted, and that they never tell us how many tests have actually been done.

Knowing how many people got a positive result means very little if you can't compare that to tests completed.

Eg

150,000 tests done or posted today

2000 positive results.

• 2000 is low if 140,000 were completed, 10,000 posted and 138,000 negative results.

• 2000 is high if 5,000 were completed, 135,000 posted and 3,000 negative.

Obviously made up numbers but shows the difference that context and detail can make.

Exactly Torys!!
Does anyone know if people are managing to test themselves accurately?

I do t know that but I do know that the test centre near me ran out of tests this week.

No because they’ve messed up on many levels. Posted tests sometimes aren’t sent with details to send back on time. Many people sent several tests that fail. Even with legit tests many are tested more than once. They’re covering their backs by only releasing the no of tests figure which is way higher than the number of people tested.

Our testing is falling.

Just look at Brazil. Similar number of deaths to us but three times more cases. And they’re far from a reliable country on this but even their testing is better!

How many cases is our testing missing!?

And conversely @onlinelinda - the test centres around me have about 500 free test slots a day at the moment. My friend works at one as a nurse & says they’ve all been pretty bored over the last couple weeks! And 90% of those tested in the last 3 weeks at her centre have been negative. Which is good news.

It’s much like those saying it’s taking 7 days to get results back. It might be in a few cases but mine came back in 12 hours. And so have several others on here & in my real life.

It’s not all doom & gloom.

No I dont care how many were tested. I just want to know how many positives. It's been about a thousand a day for weeks now and yesterday it was 1300 odd

My brother is working in one of the test centres in the NW and says that they are doing very few tests at the moment and have been standing around getting bored.

I’m not convinced how accurate they can be with people doing it themselves. I struggled with mine and I can’t imagine how I’d do any of the kids accurately.

It's because this Govt has outsourced a lot of the testing to private companies who won't give out specific data on how many people are tested.

I agree I would like to know too.

A lot of private firms have been given NHS contracts during this health crisis. This is Tory ideology.

They publish total tests (for the whole Period of the pandemic) regularly on worldometer. The figure changes daily so they’re getting figures from somewhere. It’d be easy enough to work out from past data if you were inclined. They do link their data sources too but I haven’t been moved to look through those tbh.

It's hard to know what is doom and gloom or otherwise as we are never told accurate numbers.

I have a nice view of our local testing centre out of my office window.

They all look bored witless and spend a lot of time on their phones. Car park assistant gets up with great excitement whenever anyone from my workplace pulls up and sits down disappointed when she realises it's us and not a potential test person.

Area I am in was a major COVID hotspot but now has hardly any cases so I'd imagine that they have few people reporting symptoms that require a test, and those that get a test are overwhelmingly negative.

That you, Dominic?

😄😄😄

@Cornettoninja

They publish total tests (for the whole Period of the pandemic) regularly on worldometer. The figure changes daily so they’re getting figures from somewhere. It’d be easy enough to work out from past data if you were inclined. They do link their data sources too but I haven’t been moved to look through those tbh.

?

The worldometer gets data from the Dept of Health, who publish number of tests not number of people tested- which is what the OP asked.

I think it would be a lot more useful if they said, 'yesterday they were 100,000 results. 98,000 were negative, 2,000 were positive.

Telling us how many they posted/did is useless data. We know just from threads on here that people are ordering them, then not doing them, ordering them but not receiving them, ordering them but not getting the results..... someone posted pictures of the 4 test kits they had received, all had missing items and each time they were told to dispose of the kit and wait for a new one. By they time they got a fully formed kit 10 days had passed.

Cornettoninja I dont think anything much can be worked out from figures published. It may be that all the positives are coming from tests done for you and none from the ones posted out as perhaps people cant test themselves properly. It may be that very few posted ones are ever returned. It may be that 4 tests are done on each person. Who knows. Total waste of time publishing the numbers posted out to people not those returned!! Almost like it is designed to mislead.

Ah I see what you mean, I misunderstood.

Tbh our figure keeping isn’t great, for one the NHS as an organisation isn’t brilliant at collecting real time figures. Mention RTT or 18 week pathway to anyone in the NHS and you’ll be met with a groan. There’s whole job roles dedicated to keeping those data points under control (and they still fuck up on a regular basis due to over complicated IT). I personally wouldn’t suspect anything past anything that couldn’t be put down to incompetent systems.

I agree with op. I’ve sent a question to my MP and question to the daily news conference but no luck in a response!
If you look at the daily data on the department for health site it breaks the tests down into the pillars and with pillar 1 testing they normally say how many people they tested as well as number of tests. For today it is as follows: number of tests= 40,640
number of people= 21,933
Positive. = 364
Generally for pillar 1 the number of people is around half the amount of tests, so if this was applied generally to all pillars (not very scientific but possibly a guide) the number of people tested could be half the number of tests a day. As a percentage of positive tests this would be around 1-2% a day. If this was the case the number of daily reported infections has definitely plateaued in the last week.

Have they now announced that half of tests posted out are not returned. Not sure if those that are returned have meaningful results or if people cant correctly swab. Does anyone know?