Notifiable Disease stats

[Schoolchoicesucks]

I have a facebook acquaintance who is a covid denier (and general conspiracy theorist). He has shared a post today which seems to show that there have only been 50 cases of covid 19 reported in the last week using the UK gov notifiable disease report. It seems that covid was added to list of notifiable diseases back in March/April and so should be reported by area each week. Clearly there have been many (many) more cases of covid in the past week than 50, but why are the notifiable disease stats so flawed? I would love to be able to explain this to him.

covid isn't as serious as they want you to believe

Ok. And you are working frontline healthcare to know this?
Or ....

That’s right of course the hospitals are just overwhelmed for no reason whatsoever🙄

From what I can gather from the gov website these reports only include manually provided reports from health services who have completed diagnostic tests outside of a laboratory setting and have then completed and submitted a form to public health england to make them aware of the findings.

The reports your friend is quoting are not the official Covid testing results

www.gov.uk/guidance/covid-19-and-influenza-point-of-care-testing-results-how-to-report

www.gov.uk/government/publications/notifiable-diseases-form-for-registered-medical-practitioners

www.gov.uk/government/publications/notifiable-diseases-weekly-reports-for-2020

Here you go, this is a decent explanation of the requirement

"COVID-19 became a notifiable disease in March this year. Since then there has been a statutory requirement that any Registered Medical Practitioner having “reasonable grounds for suspecting” that their patient has COVID-19, has to notify their local council or Health Protection Team. The legal requirement is to notify prior to any confirmatory analysis (e.g. PCR testing). PHE collects and aggregates this data, publishing it in the notifiable disease weekly reports."

Bearing in mind the majority self book tests or do them as part of workplace/care home testing the numbers will be vastly different.

If you woke up with a cough, temperature, loss of taste/smell or pretty much any cold/virus symptom would you call your GP saying you weren't feeling well and were unsure what was wrong or would you book a Covid test yourself? You would only end up on NOIDS report if you called the GP, they suspected Covid and they went to the trouble of filling out a form and submitting it after telling you to book a covid test.

Thanks fatgirl, so there's no link between the number of positive tests and the number of positive cases reported separately by healthcare providers.

It does seem odd to have these 2 separate reports of cases, the notifiable disease numbers can't be useful for anything covid related.

I've been trying to report/post links to correct info in response to my fb "friend" 's posts as I really hate the way he is spreading misinformation.