The latest Covid surveillance report has been published by Public Health England. Here is my commentary. The main point is that Covid is now widely established, not only in the north and the midlands but also north London and for the first time in Cornwall
The data is for week 39 (between 21 September and 27 September. First, positivity. This is the number of positive cases divided by the number of tests. It's now around 7%. THIS MEANS THAT NOT ENOUGH TESTS ARE BEING PERFORMED (@WHO recommend this does not exceed 5%)
Age pyramid of cases in the last two weeks. Mostly capturing younger people.
This shows high prevalance across the country. Note London.
Note that the local restrictions do not cover all of these areas.
Still large numbers of Covid incidents/outbreaks in educational settings / workplaces. Fewer in care homes than last week (which is very good news)
Clusters/outbreaks in educational settings in this report (remember this data is over a week old):
12 nursery
82 primary school
96 secondary school
12 SEN schools
22 college/university
Admissions to hospital rapidly increasing. ICU/HDU admissions increasing but lagged (as expected)
Since last week, much more widely dispersed hospital admissions
Covid deaths in the 'second wave' scale with age, but are not just for the old - some 30-something-year-olds. Note a significant number die after 28 days from a test, which is the number reported at coronavirus.data.gov.uk
Commentary:
- Test availability is limited meaning that the number of cases reported is a *minimum*
- Test trace and isolate all not working well
- R remains above 1
Question - why is the Joint Biosecurity Centre logo no longer on the watchlist?
And here's another thing. Last week, CONTAIN framework maps were published for local authorities (LSOAs) on the watchlist. They don't appear to be published anymore.
Please can you direct me to where I can find these @PHE_uk / @DHSCgovuk ?
Thanks
Here is the heatmap of cases per 100,000 in each age group:
* Highest rises in 10-19 year olds
* High relative rise in 60-69 year olds
* Decrease in under-10s.
Note these are *minimum* figures due to:
(a) capacity for tests being exceeded by demand
(b) data lag for latest week
These have now been published. Thanks.
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The UK Covid Public Inquiry has published its first Report, on Resilience and Preparedness. It is the most urgent report, as we are still ill-prepared for the next pandemic.
🧵
This is the first of many reports, each reviewing a specific area, including healthcare systems; test, trace, and isolate; and the economic response to the pandemic.
The Module 1 Report sets out nine significant flaws from the Covid-19 pandemic:
"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…