July 14, 2021

expert reaction to latest COVID-19 case numbers as reported on the gov.uk dashboard

A comment from Professor James Naismith on the latest figures on the DHSC COVID-19 Dashboard.

Prof James Naismith, Director of the Rosalind Franklin Institute, and University of Oxford, said:

“Although the full analysis has been delayed, the Government website reports just over 42,000 positive covid19 tests (14th July). It is extremely unlikely that this is all the result of Sunday. More likely we have a significant and continuing increase in the number of cases; the third wave.

“It would suggest that ZOE  is not providing a reliable guide to this wave since it had noted a peak of 33,000 cases. Of course, no measure is perfect and ZOE has proven informative in the past, it may be changes in symptoms and / or behaviour are confounding it.

“I have a wider concern that the daily test numbers are proving an unhelpful guide. The last useful data point prior to the end of lockdown will be ONS survey on Friday (covering the previous week). Should this show that the virus continued to accelerate, then official test data are not capturing the wave properly (since last week the numbers were relatively flat). Scenario planning based on such data is likely to be overly optimistic relative to reality.”

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/cases

All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:

www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19

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