You are most welcome @Madhairday and @Monkeytennis97
And yes, we had fewer councils with cases rising week-over-week a few days ago.
There was always going to be a bit of "noise" - some councils bumping along, flipping between green and red and back again as (hopefully) isolated outbreaks skew the results.
So I don't think we need to panic yet.
The only concern I have is that we are at very high levels to begin with, so the clearer that downward trend the better.
Let's just keep an eye on it for a few days. I think we will be able to make better assessments then.
One thing (very difficult topic, I feel) that might be contributing to rising cases in some councils is that of hospital outbreaks. I say might as I truly have NO evidence to support this.
I know I mentioned this here a few days ago. And it is a very hard subject, I feel.
But I do think hospital outbreaks are probably inevitable. Just look at what the hospitals are dealing with:
www.covidmessenger.com/hospital-cases/
How can hospital outbreaks not occur? Especially with this new variant.
Let me be 100% clear - I am entirely speculating - I have no data to quantify this.
The hospital data the govt issues includes patients which test positive in hospital (as well as those arriving as a positive covid case), but the data doesn't enable us to easily "see" or deduce cases that were potentially acquired in hospital. For example if they published the admission date you could potentially spot outbreaks analysing the data (if you have a cluster of cases and a significant lag between the positive case and the admission date you could make a fairly reasonable estimation that the case was hospital-acquired).
I just wonder if some of the issues in "red" councils is that there are hospital outbreaks? Given we are in lockdown, the number of other scenarios where significant local outbreaks may occur are fairly limited.
But again, I caveat, I have no evidence to support or quantify this. It's merely a thought I have been having while looking at the hospitals data.
I saw a thread on MN a few hours ago detailing a heartbreaking story of an elderly couple who separately went to hospital for non-covid issues and both, separately, contracted the virus while there and sadly passed away.
Seeing the thread made we worry about hospital outbreaks. I think it is pretty real but for a whole host of reasons we probably won't ever know the full scale of it.