@MRex
I don't understand those charts; why are they adding together counties like Dorset and Somerset and "West Midlands" (which is a huge region; presumably Birmingham plus Worcestershire? Shropshire? Herefordshire? Stafford? Warwickshire?)?
@MRex working the, admittedly incorrect, numbers back the "West Midlands" would look to be just the authorities covered by the Mayoral Combined Authority. That website's case number and cases per 100,000 figure for the "west midlands" is however spectacularly wrong.
They have used 1458 cases. Based on the most recent dashboard data the west mids combined mayoral group had 487 cases. Assuming that website took the data a day or so earlier then 458 cases for those 7 days is not implausible. but 1458 is, which as I suggested upthread may come down to a simple data error alongside a lack of any understanding of the most rudimentary basics of data quaility
The bigger risk though is publishing abject nonsense and passing it off as reality could have more far reaching consequences. Hopefully an unlikely scenario:
That west mids area has a higher degree of skilled and relatively well paid manufacturing jobs than many areas
Many of the businesses will be linked into european / global supply chains in terms of component supply
The pan european ones will be constantly making investment decisions / decisions to delay investment, and balancing the trade offs between investing in their West Mids plant as opposed to Western somewhere else in Europe. Someone sees the case rate in West Mids on that site.......
Likewise for SME who are competing with European and wider suppliers a sourcing decision could be influenced by those numbers.
I would add that these are less than likely single scenarios, but in terms of sowing a seed of doubt to business confidence in investment and sourcing decisions then that headline case rate of almost 50 will not go into the positive reasons to invest column