Meanwhile in Cornwall, the G7 summit is in danger of turning into a super spreader event, in an area that has had the lowest infection rates in England until now.
13 out of 17 staff at a hotel housing media and members of the German delegates' security team have caught covid.
Updated with another day of data. Wednesday 9th June is now up to 85 cases, and still incomplete.
It seems likely that once all the test results are in, Cornwall will have had more cases in one day at some point this week than it had in the whole of May.
This doesn't bode well.
It took a day longer than I predicted, but Monday saw 120 covid cases in Cornwall, pretty much matching the 121 cases they had in *the whole of May* in a single day!
Zooming in on the map, it certainly looks like the G7 summit caused the surge.
By far the highest case rates are in St Ives on the left (were the summit took place) and Falmouth and the surrounding area on the right (where the media centre was).
I wonder what @QMUL thinks of @profnfenton retweeting a post from an anti-vax conspiracy nut accusing colleague @dgurdasani1 of "misrepresenting the data" on covid deaths amongst vaccinated people?
Particularly ironic given Fenton's own record of mangling data...
Unsurprisingly, Dr Syed's claim that vaccination *increases* your risk of dying if you catch covid by 73% is utter nonsense.
A quick look at the ONS data shows the proportion of covid deaths in the oldest (most vaccinated) age groups has been falling. Exactly as you'd expect.
His whole argument rests on either ignoring the age of people who were vaccinated entirely or (in a later post) assuming that everyone who died was elderly.
Which, as I've just shown above, is far from true.
The latest nonsense from @hartgroup_org members @ClareCraigPath and @profnfenton is that there's no danger from rising cases because they're not real (they are), hospital admissions aren't rising (they are), and asymptomatic testing isn't showing any rise (it is).
Nice to see the government is back to leaking major decisions to the press before they're even supposed to have been made, and 3 days ahead of any official announcement. 🙄
Then they failed to take action in areas where the new variant was spreading and ignored calls to delay the last stage of reopening, letting Delta become dominant across the whole country and case numbers surge.
Other highlights include promoting his own Spectator article "The Hidden Cost Of Lockdown", which (whether intentionally misleading or just sloppily worded) initially implied that tens of thousands of covid deaths were somehow "lockdown deaths".
Conservative peer, friend of Cameron and Hancock, married to a Tory MP, worked for McKinsey, then hired them and 72 (!) other management consultancies to help run Test & Trace, at a cost of half a billion pounds...
She produces a good business plan, for example. Even if it bears little or no relation to reality. And even if what she's running is supposed to be a public service, not a business. 🙄