First decent fall in number of people being tested this week (not including Christmas/NY).
Down 14% to 2.6m.
Lateral flow device (LFD) use for people w/o symptoms has fallen for the first time as well as PCR.
Part this will be because this week covers the first few days of the school half term (15-19 Feb) and much of LFD use is in schools.
Would expect this to bounce up again next wk
Some variation in use by region.
This will change as asymptomatic testing is rolled out and more people are back at school/college/work.
Current LFD use rates lowest in London and highest in SW. Will be following this closely over coming weeks to check for any emerging inequals
PCR test turnaround time is good, with 87% of in person PCR test results received within 24hrs of taking the test.
For home/satellite tests, it's 83% within 48hrs
Case numbers down 21% this week on the week before, with 83k cases handled by T&T
Of these, 73,976 (88%) were reached. This percentage has been steadily around 86-89% since Nov last year.
On cases reached, 75% - 54,331 cases - provided details of close contacts.
Between them, identifying 146,757 contacts, or 2 contacts per case.
3,377 cases and 2,715 contacts were managed by local PHE health protection teams. These are more complex or high risk cases with a median 15 contacts per case.
The remaining 69,599 cases and 144,042 contacts were managed by T&T along with local authority contact tracing systems that take on cases the national team can't reach within 24hrs (mean 2.1 contacts per case, median 2).
The proportion of contacts reached by the national team has been pretty constant at around 93% since start of Dec.
85% of contacts at the moment are from the same household as the case.
So the overall figure of 93% is made up of 97% reached for household contacts (generally told by the case to isolate rather than phoned by T&T), and 71% for non household contacts.
Although, there is variation by local authority in the percentage of cases and contacts reached.
I know others will have found these things before me but I've been home-schooling all day so only getting round to reading the roadmap now.
A few things stick out on first pass
(tl,dr: inequalities, testing, isolation support, social care, and inequalities).
There's a section on 'Test, Trace and Isolate' (who says NHS Test and Trace has a branding problem).
As expected, big focus on testing plus a further £400m for local gov through the contain outbreak mgmt fund - details tbc but likely much is for local testing/variant mgmt.
As have said, there remains a big challenge of people not getting tested in the first place (fear of being unable to isolate, job insecurity, caring responsibilities etc). Surveys suggest just 1/3 get tested regularly if symptomatic.
Case rates and positivity falling relatively fast. And across all ages.
Percentage of tests positive also falling, but this pillar 2 (community testing) graph has also been causing people some concern re young school children and returning to school - despite reported case rates being the lowest of all age gps.
The number of people being tested each week remains high at around 3m, but this is due to increasing use of rapid lateral flow devices as PCR test use falls.
The number of LFDs used has increased five-fold since the start of Jan, and 35% in the past two weeks (although noticeable slowdown this most recent week).
By contrast, PCR test use for people with symptoms fallen week on week for the past month (PHE positivity data due later).
Relative drop in prevalence between round 8 (6th-22nd Jan) and 9a (4th-13th Feb) is far greater in the S than the N and may be plateauing at around 1% in the NE.
It's helpful to know that trends in REACT generally follow trends in national PCR positivity data (in red). 2/5
Differences by deprivation group exposed yet again, plus if living in large households. Less stark differences by ethnicity (although v wide confidence intervals).
And this is AFTER adjustment for things like age, region, key work status, HH size, deprivation, ethnicity. 3/5