.@NAOorguk@CommonsSTC - can you investigate the delays in today's Covid reporting? If it's just a delay in reporting, that's one thing, but if these are delays into NHS Test and Trace system, that's another thing entirely. Would be good to see age/source of delayed cases
It is important to understand the reason for the delay. If this is a reporting delay, that is bad enough, but if there have been delays in putting these cases into the NHS Test and Trace database, that can have serious implications for spreading the disease
We also need to know if there is commonality in the source of these cases. We have seen that private testing and university testing has been carried out, and it is still not clear how these results (both positive and negative) are being routed into the DHSC system.
Will be discussing the testing issue on Sky News tomorrow at around 6:10am. Which is very early. Best get some sleep.
Delays in reporting can also pose problems for modelling of R as well as well as the dynamics across the population (age groups), hospitalisations, ICU capacity etc.
This chart shows the delays for the cases reported yesterday (source: PHE). Note there is a legal requirement under the Health Protection (Notification) Regulations 2010 for these cases to be notified within a time limit. Not sure whether this is 3 or 7 days.
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…