Key points
- lots of changes to LFD use, with differences across the country
- despite falling cases, end-to-end journey time from symptoms to reaching contacts increasing
After a dip over the Easter bank holiday w/e, number of people tested increased by 15% to 4.4m
although this is still some way off the peak of 6.2m four weeks earlier
The changes have been mainly due to variations in use of rapid lateral flow devices (LFDs).
These have been rolled out by the government for people without symptoms over recent months and are now available to everyone in England.
The drop in LFD use in the last week of March/first week of April (down from 7.1m tests a week to just 4.0m) was mainly from fewer tests from secondary schools and colleges.
The fall coincided with the shift to testing at home, and start of the Easter hols.
In the most recent week, LFD use was up by 750k.
Only around a fifth of this rise is explained by school testing, with the rest coming other government testing schemes – in particular LFDs being made available to everyone from 9 April 2021.
There are still important differences by region.
The highest LFD use is in the East of England with 12,500 tests per 100,000, compared to just 5,200 per 100,000 in London.
This will partly be explained by the different dates that schools returned across the country, but also due to differences in factors such as employment, access, and willingness to engage with the scheme.
Important to monitor moving forward now everyone has access to LFDs.
Despite the 15% increase in the number of people being tested, case numbers still fell by 9%.
Whilst overall T&T performance remains broadly unchanged, there is an increasing trend in the time taken to reach contacts from when a case is first passed to the system.
Perhaps surprisingly, week on week fall in the percentage of cases providing details of contacts, but overall contacts per case rising.
Now 4.2 contacts per case, up from just 2 in mid-Jan.
Big drops in the percentage of contacts from the same households.
The fall would be expected, but the extend of the drop is perhaps a little surprising.
It's this drop in % of contacts from the same household that explains the slight fall in success rates of reaching contacts overall.
In fact, success rates of reaching HH contacts is the same as previous wks (97%), and slightly improving for non HH contacts (now 78%).
As more contacts are identified per case, and more of these are from outside of the case’s household, the median time for contacts to be reached from when a case first developed symptoms is now 97 hours.
Up from just 79 hours two weeks previously.
Part of the issue seems to be with it taking longer to reach cases.
The % cases reached within 24hrs has dropped, whereas test turnaround time is generally unchanged, as has % of contacts reached within 24hrs of contacts identified.
As society continues to open up, any additional time gives more opportunity for the virus to spread, so it’s crucial this trend doesn’t continue.
And as ever, these numbers don’t tell us about who doesn’t get tested and who struggles to adhere to isolation.
As the number of cases in the community falls and social mixing increases, it becomes ever more important that any cases that do occur are identified and managed as quickly as possible before the virus has the chance to spread.
Gov data shows how price promos are more likely to be applied to unhealthy junk food rather than healthier foods.
And rather than saving people ££, they can lead to around 22% *more* purchases than would otherwise happen, with *more* money spent and *more* consumption.
That's why companies use these promotions.
That's also why the policy was in the obesity strategy in the first place. The irony being that it is more likely to help than hinder the impact of the cost of living crisis on individuals and families.
In today's @Telegraph, Sally O'Brien & I discuss @HealthFdn / @IpsosUK polling results on public attitudes to gov policy on alcohol, tobacco, & unhealthy food (no £-wall🔓)
🧵Tl,dr: While gov has a preference for individual responsibility, the public still think gov should act.
Gains in healthy life-expectancy have stalled, childhood obesity continues to rise, alcohol-related hospital admissions are up, and tobacco still causes over 500,000 admissions a year.
And there are huge inequalities with more deprived areas disproportionately impacted.
Yet the recent trend of unwinding public health policy continues.
The tobacco control plan is unpublished, junk food ad bans have been delayed, plans for a national approach to health inequalities have gone & there's been nothing on alcohol since 2012.
First the good news. COVID cases in hospital clearly falling, in all ages, regions (except perhaps still plateauing in Yorkshire and Humber).
There's still a lag on cases in intensive care and on deaths, but they'll drop soon as well.
Flu, however, seems to be on the rise.
Overall case & admission rates are relatively low, but trending up.
And with a higher % of lab respiratory samples (sent in by dr from people with chest symptoms) testing for flu than at the same time in the past 5 yrs. i.e., it's early
This is a really helpful and timely piece of work by @davidfinchthf.
Along with last week's @TheIFS report on how government ££ are spent, it's clear that we need to do more to align public health funding with local needs. 🧵
Over the last decade, gains in life expectancy in England have stalled.
And it will be no surprise that the impact has not been felt evenly by everyone.
While life expectancy continues to increase for people living in the least deprived parts of the country, people from the most deprived communities are dying earlier.
This type of shortsighted policy review has reared its head again.
Health is an *asset* & the types of obesity policies being looked at here are exactly the ones that are both most effective AND most likely to narrow inequalities. 🧵