Ive got no issue with
@Megatron on a personal level, I like the boy, I do question the way he presents the figures a little from time to time.
Its a forum mate, I'm allowed to question what is presented.
I don't follow the numbers religiously as I did and his is probably my only source regarding them now, so I was curious as to why we saw such a big increase, he replied and that was that.
If
@Megatron feels as I'm stalking him or being an arse, I'm sorry, it was not my intention.
Fair enough.
For what it is worth I agree with you that the death figures are coming down slower than i would like. But they are reducing nonetheless. The number of hospital deaths will pretty much end soon, but I still think there's a problem with care homes, albeit a much smaller one than earlier in the year.
The figures you should be focusing on, in my opinion, are the new infections. They'll be the first to tell us if there is an upsurge in cases following the various actions in unlocking the economy, or the numerous, shall we say misdemeanours, of certain members of our community.
Up until now, that doesn't appear to be the case, amazing as it may seem. We probably won't start to see the effects of pubs and restaurants opening until next week at the earliest, but overall infection rates seem to have been falling steadily, albeit the curve may be flattening out over the last few weeks.
Over the last 7 days, the numbers testing positive have increased slightly which is a bit concerning, but the amount of testing has gone up a bit too. Something that has gone completely unnoticed is that we have now carried out more tests per head of population than any other country, and by a considerable margin. Much of the tier 1 testing is repetitive testing on our health and care staff. But most of our tests are now tier 2 community tests carried out as part of our test and trace. If you look at the latest figures from the ONS survey, they estimate that 1700 a day are currently being infected in the UK. Well approximately 600 of these are being picked up from testing, which is about 35%. About a month ago that figure was less than 20%. So although those testing positive are increasing, it doesn't automatically follow that the level of infection is increasing, just that we're catching more of them through test and trace.
For instance they are going door to door around parts of Leicester at the moment carrying out tests, and that's going to pick up a lot of people who are asymptomatic. Same with mini outbreaks such as the Herefordshire farm and the Welsh food processing plant.
Anyway fingers crossed the infection levels don't spike over the next few weeks. I think we can expect lots of localised outbreaks but I also think we have the testing capacity now to cope with that. The important thing is to keep the R at or around 1 or lower. There was an Oxford University survey that caught the headlines recently that said that we could expect a further 100,000 covid deaths over the next 12 months. That was based on a worse case scenario of R reaching 1.7. What the headlines didn't say was if the R reached 1.1 the expected death rate would drop to 3500 over the same period, which is a lot lower than our current daily death rate.
