Number crunching - is this true?

[Jocasta2018]

According to www.coronavirus.data.gov.uk these figures are for the 7 days leading up to 19th July 2021.

Tests - both LFT & PCR - 7,196,324

Positive cases - 322,170 (4.47%)

Hospital admissions - 4,317 (0.06%)

Deaths - 296 (0.004%)

This is a government website - does anyone know if these figures are correct or am I just clutching at straws..?

If these figures are true then no wonder we have 'a lot of cases' - you do 7 million tests, you'll find a lot of positives!

This is mind-blowing stuff. Fingers crossed these are correct & I'm not just imagining things after a shitty heatwave night sleep...

Yes it’s true, we’ve been testing at that rate for a while now. We test a lot more than most other countries. We also test asymptomatic people so find a lot of asymptomatic cases that other countries wouldn’t.

Positive cases exist regardless of whether or not you test for them. And I would imagine there are many more positive cases that are undetected.

Also, your % are based on number of tests carried out and not number of people who actually have CV?

The number of tests will be a lot higher as people won't always register negative results.

Yes we do test more than other countries. It would only be possible to do like for like comparison re: “finding more” if you had stats on asymptomatic V symptomatic testing for both the UK and other countries.

Remember though that the death rate doesn’t correlate as a % of tests that week, but more like as a % of tests taken 2-4 weeks prior (which will come out as a much higher % and more worrying % considering the way rates have grown).

If we didn't test and isolate close contacts, there would be even more infections though as people would just carry on with their normal activities and spread the virus more.

Remember though cases goind with LFT will be confirmed by PCR do shouldn't count LFTS.

Found.

We have never registers our LFT’s so I’d imagine it’s a lot higher

Casedemic! For at least 4 weeks now the doom reporting has been ramping up again about delta cases and yet where are the rising hospitalisations and deaths? Daily cases are less than half of the 100,000 per day peddled by Sage and the “lag” has passed. Cases don’t matter, further vaccine push isn’t required and every restriction can go!

You need to work out yours percentages from the positive cases. Those you don't have covid currently could still catch it and need hospital care. So:

Hospitalisations: 1.34%
Deaths: 0.09%

Which shows vaccines are having an impact, as these figures were much higher earlier in the pandemic. Unfortunately 1.34% of a big number is still a big number so we do need to be a bit careful not to end up overwhelming hospitals, if you can't treat people then more people die.

Yes, number of tests doesn't mean much, some people will be testing and not reporting results, some will be doing LFTs every other day as a matter of course, some will have done an LFT and a PCR and reported both. An accurate figure for the number of people tested would be more helpful. Less impressive though, and the percentages of hospitalisation and death will be higher.

Never fear - I'm not going to be running around screaming 'Freedom! F**k masks & social distancing!' & snogging/rubbing myself up against all & sundry.

I've followed the rules all along even though I've been through the lockdowns alone.
I'm still wearing a mask & social distancing.
I've been double-vaccinated & I don't intend to stop taking precautions especially after Boris & co have insinuated that it's up to us now...

I'm might be incredibly naive so please don't shoot me down for this especially as I've not had to do it yet (famous last words...).
I don't think we should stop self-isolating even if for the majority of people it's a balls-achingly negative experience & is causing chaos across the country - it just needs fine-tuning although don't ask me how to do this
I believe it does help stop the spread & is still a necessary weapon in our anti-Covid arsenal.

I'm fully aware the LFTs give around 50% false negatives so there will be more cases that we don't know about.
At least the positive LFTs get more asymptomatic people having PCRs & gives us more of an idea of the number of cases.

I'm just trying to grasp at some vaguely positive news when according to the media, we're all going to hell in a handcart.

Take care of yourselves everyone during this heatwave especially those in areas that have been given the amber warning.

The number of tests is roughly level while case numberscare shooting up. The current positivity rate is 9.7% and rising. It should be below 5% and in many places will be much lower than that. We’re doing a lot of tests, but that because we’ve got lots of Covid and we currently aren’t testing enough.

Somewhere that has covid under control will need to do a lot fewer tests than we currently need in the U.K.

The WHO’s recommended target for positivity is 5% - if it’s higher than that then you’re probably not doing enough testing and the epidemic is out of control. So at 4.47% we’re only just below that - suggesting that seven million tests a week, although objectively enormous, is probably about right. However once you add in negative LFT tests not reported I suspect that our test numbers are far above that and hence our positivity rate is lower.

The bad news is that the death and hospitalisation rates you’ve calculated are not appropriate, because they need to be compared with the case numbers from a couple of weeks before, which would make them a lot higher. They are however far better than they would have been without the heroic efforts of everyone involved in the vaccine programme, and the world-leading vaccine-positive attitude of the UK public.

Yeah I tend yo use COVID dashboard as a rough guide and yes number of tests is stable but every other figure is rising which means it is definitely becoming more of an issue sadly.

If you want really positive news based on numbers, have a look at this:

www.google.com/search?q=delhi+latest+covid+figures&oq=delhi+covid+figures&aqs=chrome.2.69i57j0i457j0i22i30j0i390l2.9992j0j4&client=ms-android-samsung&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8

coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/testing?areaType=nation%26areaName=England

This is the page with the positivity rates. You can see that about a month ago it was around 3% which was fine. In the last month the positivity rate has shot up.

Which is why all the fuss about too many people isolating is missing the point slightly.

Yes that trend on the positivity rate is scary. Scotland was running at 10% a couple of weeks ago and now England has caught up. A lot of people say “of course you’ll get a lot of cases if you do a million tests” to minimise the situation but the positivity rate trend tells you instantly that this is bollocks.

However I do think it’s not quite as bad as it looks because so many negative LFTs are not recorded and so many PCRs are taken specifically to confirm a positive LFT. Obviously far worse than it was a fortnight ago, but not as bad as a 10% rate would have indicated on a PCR only basis.

The problem with that good news is that Delhi, like all of the Indian states with high levels of Covid put strict restrictions in place to control the outbreak. We are doing the opposite.

I don’t think the government is ready to shut all shops, restaurants nd market places and ban travel across the country, yet.

The 9.7% is PCR only.

Bugger, so it is, sorry. I do think the “confirm a positive LFT” cohort will skew it up a bit though - they’re going to test positive far more often (and a lot of their PCR negatives will be false, but that’s a whole other issue).

That’s possibly true. But then I guess we have no way of knowing how many of those people stayed asymptonatic after they got their LFT result. They may well have ended up getting a PCR at some point anyway.

True. I think/hope with the wide range of Delta symptoms and the lower severity in vaccinated people the LFTs will be catching a lot of people who wouldn’t have had a PCR, but it’s almost impossible to prove.

I do worry about the false negatives though. There was a poster the other day who’d had one or possibly two positive LFTs, and increasingly characteristic Covid symptoms but the PCR came back negative so her work’s policy was that she should be in and posters were queuing up to say “your PCR test is negative so you don’t have Covid, get back to work you lazy cow”.

Positive cases exist regardless of whether or not you test for them.

True, but it explains why our situation looks so much worse than other countries.

I reckon I probably get round to reporting 1 in 3 of my LFTs.