I am confused by Pillar 1/2 testing vs ONS.
For ease I’m going to choose just England because I am not sure if ONS do UK overall. I imagine this logic can be extrapolated to the UK.
ONS: 1 in 80 in England tested positive in week to Feb 6th. This equates to 694500 people.
Pillar 1 and 2: in England, same period week to Feb 6 = 120300 cases.
So ONS is almost 6 times higher. (5.77x).
Here’s my question. Can you simply say, that almost 80% of people with covid either didn’t get tested even though they had symptoms, or they were symptomless?
If so, if 3.5m people in England have had covid since the start of the pandemic, does that mean (discounting re-infection) that roughly 17.5m have had it? Aka 32% of the population?
But this also disregards wave 1 when the testing was hugely underestimating. I don’t want to pin a number on how many cases were missed but let’s be conservative and say 1,000,000. So 5m more to the total. So 22.5m out of 55m.
So 50% of England’s population have had covid?
Or have I just taken a weird week for ONS vs Pillar 1/2, and this is isn’t normal?