The real #testing story is Pillar 2 testing capacity appears to have been reached (i.e "on-line testing booking was periodically taken off line to 'throttle demand'") way back in late August - this by the DPH of Blackburn and Darwen themj.co.uk/We-must-rapidl…. Journalists: DMs open
It is not easy to see that testing capacity has been reached on the data dashboard. Here's what I see today at coronavirus.data.gov.uk/testing for Pillar 1 and 2 - so what's the problem? Lots of apparent headroom between demand and supply
To see what has (and is) going wrong, you have to look at the data download in the top right corner. You can extract a spreadsheet. I have only added one column - the percentage of Pillar 2 used each day
And there we have it, 23 August - Pillar 2 capacity was exceeded in England. Exactly 3 weeks ago. And it still hasn't been fixed
As I say, this is consistent with this first hand account from the Director of Public Health in Blackburn with Darwen
Here are the latest Pillar 2 capacity and tests. The capacity figures haven't been published since 10 August (two days after the Head of Testing and NHS Test and Trace made her statement). My question: what is the current capacity in Pillar 2, and how is this figure calculated?
My @bbc5live interview this morning with @rachelburden and @NickyAACampbell discussing the COVID testing capacity breach: "In order to do Whack-A-Mole, you need to know where the moles are"
"Inflation is currently 10%. If inflation halves, how much will a £1 pint of milk cost".
Sounds easy. It's not. It's ambiguous. It's not a good question. Unless it's designed to be a bad question. In which case it's a good question.
1. It talks about 'inflation'. But *what* inflation? At the moment, we have overall inflation at roughly 10% but inflation of food at roughly 20%. So is the overall inflation rate the same as the inflation rate for milk? It's not clear. Bad question.
First, the @ONS Covid Infection Survey is being paused, and @CovidGenomicsUK is being retired. This will have implications for data reliability and availability going forward.
OK, I'm going to write a response to this maths problem, published in @DailyMailUK, that has caused a lot of comment, some thinking the answer is 1 and some thinking the answer is 9.
Many of us would go straight to the answer 1. That's because we know (or our children know, and have taught us), that there is a 'rule' for how you deal with the order of doing the calculation - do you do + first or ÷, for example?
Enter BIDMAS (or BODMAS).
"It stands for Brackets, Indices [or Order], Division, Multiplication, Addition and Subtraction."
That's the conventional order. Forget about indices [or order] for now - that's not important for this one. bbc.co.uk/bitesize/topic…