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12 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
There was a massive leap in positive tests on Monday. It is odd. I’ve checked and it is not linked to the Liverpool mass testing exercise. Image
To be clear, the Monday figure I’ve highlighted is categorised by date of specimen, NOT date of result. To day we had huge leap to 33,470 in positives declared, but that is distorted by the variable lags between a test being done and the result being known. The reason I cited...
the Monday jump is because it should represent an accurate figure of new detected infections on that day, and it is significantly higher than recent daily figures. And it is especially odd because the rate of infections among students has been coming down. It is a one-off...
so far. Not yet a trend. But it is worth highlighting precisely because it bucks the recent flattening trend.

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More from @Peston

Robert Peston Profile picture
11 Nov
Here is the Shakespearean yarn of how Lee Cain was forced out as director of communications. He and Dominic Cummings wanted to introduce American-style televised press briefings. But the candidate @BorisJohnson wanted as on screen press secretary @HMTAllegra - my former...
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9 Nov
I was puzzled by Jonathan Van Tan’s comment that we don’t know whether the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine will prevent transmission of Covid-19 even if - as claimed - it has 90% efficacy in preventing us becoming ill. So I asked @michaelgove’s favourite people, the experts. What they...
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5 Nov
Another striking characteristic of today’s @bankofengland projections is that UK GDP, or national income, is set to shrink by 11% for the whole of 2020, a record. We are losing more than one in every ten pounds of our income, one of the worst performances in the world: the...
fall in US GDP is forecast at “just” 3.75%, the euro-area shrinkage is 6.75% and the global decline is projected at 5.25%. Given that the virus is the same virus everywhere, it is difficult to argue that the UK’s policy response to it has been...
economically optimal, even adjusting for the UK’s disproportionate reliance on services that thrive on the kind of human contact that the virus has made dangerous. It is not over till it is over, but the combination of excess deaths and excessive economic loss in...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
31 Oct
These are the measures to be announced by the PM at 5, as I understand it. They will last 2 December. And they are, In effect, a new “Tier 4” that will be imposed for a month initially to the whole of England. 1) All pubs and restaurants to close, though takeaways...
and deliveries will be permitted. 2) All non-essential retail to close, though supermarkets won't have to follow the Welsh example of fencing off non-essential goods. 3) There will be no mixing of people inside homes, except for childcare and other forms of support...
3) Manufacturing and construction will be encouraged to keep going. 4) Outbound international travel will be banned, except for work. 5) Travel within the UK will be discouraged, except for work. 6) Overnight stays away from home will be allowed only for work purposes...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
28 Oct
The chancellor @RishiSunak insists he is not blocking the provision of free school meals over the holidays including Christmas. What is striking is that his billionaire father-in-law NR Narayan Murthy has spoken of “our responsibility to ensure every kid is fed properly”...
And more than that, Murthy is a supporter of an important Indian charity Akshaya Patra, which works to “end classroom poverty in India” - as is his wife Sudha, Sunak’s mother-in-law, who “actively facilitates the mid-day meal programme” (see attached). The reason I...
mention this is that the impressive Indian charity has just opened a kitchen in Watford and has just started delivering free meals to a school in North London (see @guardian theguardian.com/education/2020…). In other words a charity backed by Sunak’s family is helping...
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Robert Peston Profile picture
25 Oct
I have been banging on about how the number of people dying right now of #COVID19 is much higher than it should be, if @CMO_England and @uksciencechief are right that the infection fatality rate (IFR) has fallen significantly because of improvements in care and treatment...
The attached chart show shows this worrying rise in the mortality rate very clearly. It plots reported daily coronavirus deaths in England as a proportion of daily infections 23 days earlier, as per the @ONS survey. And as you can see, a significant fall in the infection...
fatality rate from July to September has since gone into serious reverse. The irony here is that when Vallance warned about the second wave all those weeks ago, he seems to have overstated the likely growth in infections while being right about deaths - though...
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