The 9am figures not disclosed yet?

That’s some jump

that’s some jump

Yes, it is quite an increase.

On one level, they appear to be targetting testing in known Covid hotspots, such as Middlesbrough, so you would expect to find more cases in areas where you know the disease is more prevalent. That said, the increase is just the latest in a several weeks long upward trend, which has been increasing at a steeper rate than the increase in testing, so there's a clear change from about 6-8 weeks ago.

I'd probably want to compare the rates with data within this coming week's ONS Infection Survey (which attempts to estimate overall levels of Covid within the general population) before drawing any firm conclusions.
 
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Today's headline analysis:

• 2,948 new cases reported in 24-hour period, slightly down from yesterday's 2,988
• 7-day average for new cases increases by 12.2% to 2,032 per day, following 11.2% increase yesterday (and 16th increase in the past 17 days)
• 7-day average for new cases is 53.7% higher than one week ago (from 45.7% higher yesterday) and 91.8% higher than two weeks ago (from 74.3% higher yesterday and 22.5% higher 7 days ago)
• 3 new deaths within 28 days of a positive test reported in 24-hour period, slightly up from 2 yesterday
• 7-day average for new deaths within 28 days of a positive test increases by 1.9% to 8 per day, following 2.0% increase yesterday
• 7-day average for new deaths within 28 days of a positive test is 22.1% lower than one week ago (from 25.7% lower yesterday) and 17.2% lower than two weeks ago (from 17.5% lower yesterday and 6.8% lower 7 days ago)
 
I give you eat out to help out and th re-opening of schools. We are still way below the infection rates of April, but it is starting to look very worrying again.
 
We need to not read too much into cases alone. Yes, they are a metric of interest but we are now doing much more testing and that testing is targeted at known contacts of those who test positive.

Other metrics such as calls to NHS 111 etc are just as important. Also crucial is the ONS estimate of cases across the whole of the population, not just a small section of the population which is almost certainly going to contain people who currently have the virus.

Where we head from now on will be mostly dependent on what proportion of the population is still susceptible to infection. Below is a link to the REACT2 study from Imperial.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.12.20173690v2

A quote from the pre-print....... "We estimate that 3.36 million (3.21, 3.51) people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 in England to end June 2020, with an overall infection fatality ratio of 0.90% (0.86, 0.94)."

This estimate was based on antibody response from tests of ~100,000 adults. If antibody response was the only indicator of infection this 3.36 million figure would not be good news. It would likely leave a large proportion of the population still susceptible. However, as many people suggested early on (but without evidence) there may be other immune responses at work (and there have been in vivo studies which do support this) which mean the susceptible population will be a lot lower than first thought. That is good news, but we don't know how much lower. We need to find out.

Rather than be solely worried about case numbers we (the country, government, scientists) need to be looking at those cases and asking questions such as:

1) How many people who test positive are symptomatic or asymptomatic?
2) How many of those who test positive develop antibody response?
3) How many who test positive don't develop an antibody response? (That would be a very interesting figure to have!).

While antibody testing can be complex and testing for the other forms of immunity even more so we have the capability within the UK to be figuring this out. Unfortunately, as Sir Paul Nurse pointed out a good few months back, the government hasn't utilised expertise in either the public or private sector to answer important questions.
 
And just to make a comment on this "the virus is being spread by the young" and "there has been a dramatic shift in cases to the young" garbage being spouted in the papers......

Utter utter horsesh*t.

Think.....

Who were we testing at the height of the epidemic in March/April? ..... The seriously ill, the hospitalised. Who were the seriously ill and the hospitalised? They young? Nope, generally the elderly, those with underlying conditions who may be middle aged. Yes, some younger frontline health workers were tested later on when capacity expanded.

If we had been testing in the community back in March/April we'd have seen huge numbers in the young!!! It hasn't just shifted to young people now. Geeeez, the stuff that gets written in the papers is staggering at times.
 
T_A_D you make some reasonable points, but the problem with placing more importance on metrics such as hospitalization and death metrics is that they lag, and waiting for these to rise may be too late to contain another peak.
 
T_A_D you make some reasonable points, but the problem with placing more importance on metrics such as hospitalization and death metrics is that they lag, and waiting for these to rise may be too late to contain another peak.
Some good points. But, also, the current rise is locally managed hotspots. At 3000 per day it will become more community endemic and becomes a countrywide issue. It's good that younger people are taking the trouble to get tested. The ONS survey results next week will be important to find out how widely it's spread.
 
You are right Bear, if increases are happening only in certain areas of the country it is easier to contain. If it is more wide spread, it is more difficult. There is also, of course, the tipping point you mentioned, when the infection rate gets to such a point that it starts to infect all the folks isolating or being particularly careful due to a higher risk.
 
Today's headline analysis:

• 2,460 new cases reported in 24-hour period, down from yesterday's 2,948
• 7-day average for new cases increases by 8.2% to 2,199 per day, following 12.2% increase yesterday (and 17th increase in the past 18 days)
• 7-day average for new cases is 64.3% higher than one week ago (from 53.7% higher yesterday) and 104.9% higher than two weeks ago (from 91.8% higher yesterday and 25.0% higher 7 days ago)
• 32 new deaths within 28 days of a positive test reported in 24-hour period, up from 3 yesterday
• 7-day average for new deaths within 28 days of a positive test increases by 54.7% to 12 per day, following 1.9% increase yesterday (and 5th increase in the past 6 days)
• 7-day average for new deaths within 28 days of a positive test is 49.1% higher than one week ago (from 22.1% lower yesterday) and 20.6% higher than two weeks ago (from 17.2% lower yesterday and 23.6% lower 7 days ago)
 
The new death reporting has changed slightly and there has been adjustments to death figures. Some of the 32 died a while back. England was 10 deaths in the last 24 hours.

hospital admissions slowly increasing and deaths slowly increasing. Needs nipping in the bud sharpish.

The death reporting has changed, as they've amended the definition to death within 28 days. However, when they did this they also issued historical data based on the amended definition, so the figure from 29th July is comparable.

It's true that not all of those 32 deaths will have occurred in the last 24 hours (12 did so far according to the data). However, it's always the case that there is some form of time lag between deaths occurring and them being reported so, again, it's reasonable to compare the number of deaths announced on different dates.

If you were only going to compare deaths by looking at the dates on which they actually occurred, you'd probably have to ignore the latest 4/5 days completely, as those figures are always subject to upwards revision for the reason given above.
 
T_A_D you make some reasonable points, but the problem with placing more importance on metrics such as hospitalization and death metrics is that they lag, and waiting for these to rise may be too late to contain another peak.

Not more important, "just as important". Also, I didn't mentioned death metrics.

Cases alone are simply not useful. They must be viewed within a wider context.

Bear, yes, the ONS survey will be very interesting.
 
And if we wanted to go down the cases alone avenue what about Italy's and Germany's?

The newspapers were full of "spike in cases", "exponential rise in cases", "highest cases for months" when discussing those countries. Has it happened? No. Do we see much in the news about this? No.

Lets see what happens with case numbers in France and Spain over the next few days.
 
And if we wanted to go down the cases alone avenue what about Italy's and Germany's?

The newspapers were full of "spike in cases", "exponential rise in cases", "highest cases for months" when discussing those countries. Has it happened? No. Do we see much in the news about this? No.

Lets see what happens with case numbers in France and Spain over the next few days.

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