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John Bye Profile picture
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13 Oct, 6 tweets, 2 min read
One of these women is a BBC journalist.

The other is the Chairman of the Conservative Party.

Spot the difference:
Tom Newton Dunn of Times Radio (and formerly the Sun) seems to have edged the field, managing to copy and paste the latest message from Dominic Cummings (sorry, Sr Guv Source) at 19:46.

Conservative Chair Amanda Milling came in second at 19:57.

Closely followed by the BBC's Laura Kuennsberg at 20:02.

Sky's Beth Rigby trailed in at 20:07.

With The Sun's Harry Cole finishing a length behind at 20:11.

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More from @_johnbye

John Bye Profile picture
13 Oct
Yesterday's announcement of new regional restrictions to slow the spread of coronavirus went well...

First they did their usual trick of briefing the press before the MPs, councils and public health officials whose areas are affected.

Then they seem to have forgotten to invite some of the MPs representing those areas to the briefing.

Then local leaders said they hadn't actually agreed with all of the new measures.

Central government told them what the new restrictions would be, didn't show them the data behind it, and then there was an argument about financial support.

Read 5 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
10 Oct
Some people still seem convinced the recent surge in covid-19 cases is caused by "false positives" (people who don't have the virus but still test positive due to various issues), often claiming 90% of reported cases aren't real.

This argument doesn't hold water.

Here's why...
A lot of this goes back to a quote from Matt Hancock that the false positive rate was "under 1%".

Some assumed the rate was close to 1%, which would mean if you test 200,000 people a day who (mostly) don't have the virus, you'd get 2,000 false positives.

The first problem with this argument is the number of cases went up faster than the number of tests done.

That means the % of tests coming back positive went up.

But the % of tests giving a false positive shouldn't have changed.

So the % of true positives MUST have gone up.
Read 12 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
10 Oct
The Lighthouse Lab in Newport, originally promised to come online by the end of August, finally opened this week.

It's the first new Pillar 2 lab to open in FOUR months.

And the next lab that was due to open is delayed too!

bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-…
As I pointed out last month, the government utterly failed to increase lab capacity over the summer, despite rising demand (much of it driven by their own policies).

Pillar 1 capacity has barely changed since July 7.
Pillar 2 capacity stalled on June 14!

As Lighthouse Labs handling Pillar 2 (community) testing hit capacity in late August, the government started paying private labs (most in the EU) to handle excess tests.

This accounted for ALL of the increase in Pillar 2 capacity over the next two weeks.

Read 9 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
8 Oct
This week's Test & Trace report is out, showing the impact of the 16,000 test results that were mislaid in the last week of September.

As if that wasn't bad enough, a HUGE number of tests hadn't given a result by the end of the week, and last week's backlog has been abandoned.
The number of people testing positive continues to rise sharply, but the number of cases referred to Test & Trace didn't.

There's a shortfall of 16,981 cases - far more than usual.

Only two thirds of people who tested positive that week were referred to Test & Trace!
This seems to be largely due to 16,000 cases that were missed because the old version of Excel that PHE use to import data from Pillar 2 labs ran out of rows!

The extra cases were finally referred to T&T last weekend and should be in next week's report.

Read 14 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
8 Oct
PHE seems to have changed the way it calculates positivity rates, 4 weeks after I pointed out they appeared to be using the same incomplete count of the number of people tested that's given in the Test & Trace report.

This massively and increasingly overstated positivity rates.
The problem is they divided the number of people testing positive by the number of people tested for the first time.

Anyone who had ever been tested before was left out of the figure they were dividing by (unless they were positive for the first time).

Satellite centre tests (mostly repeat testing of care home staff and residents who have been tested before, and therefore don't count as new people tested) now make up almost half of all Pillar 2 tests.

You can see the impact this has by comparing tests done to "people tested" -
Read 5 tweets
John Bye Profile picture
20 Sep
Another interesting story from inside the testing system in @thesundaytimes today, this time reporting on issues at Randox, who seem to provide a quarter of current Pillar 2 capacity.

Tests are often delayed or voided, with other contracts taking priority over national testing!
As well as the UK government, Randox also has testing contracts with Premiership Rugby and Dubai.

Their tests are apparently given VIP treatment, while Pillar 2 tests from across the UK can wait days to be processed.

Insiders say Randox has taken on too much and can't keep up.
Underpaid staff are being asked to work 12 hour shifts to keep the lab running 24/7.

Randox admits its lab is running "at and beyond capacity" and receiving more tests from the UK government than its stated capacity.

This is clearly not sustainable.
Read 9 tweets

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