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The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) announced on 10th April that the daily figures for number of cases in the UK for COVID-19 will from now on include positive swab tests from key workers, as part of the UK government’s ‘Five Pillars’ testing strategy.
Prof Sheila Bird, Formerly Programme Leader, MRC Biostatistics Unit, said:
“The UK government’s new format for the reporting of its PCR (have-you-got-it) testing results is a big improvement but needs to go a little further in order for us to make proper comparisons about the rate of cases of COVID-19 in Pillar 1 (swab testing of hospitalized persons) and Pillar 2 (swab testing for key workers and their households) over the full time period they have been recorded.
“Pillar 2 became operational from around 24th March 2020. Hence, I’d like to see PCR test results (tests performed, persons tested, persons who tested positive), separately for Pillar 1 and Pillar 2, for the same-report-period: 24th March to 9th April 2020 (as well as for the last day in the period).
“In order to calculate the percentage of positive cases from the number of people tested, we need absolute clarity about whether the number of test-positives is the number of people who tested positive or the number of tests that came back positive. The number of swab tests per person is likely to differ between Pillars and was high at 1.41 for both Pillars combined on 9th April, meaning that, on average, 41% of people are tested more than once.
“Currently none of the available positive-rates between Pillars is directly comparable, which is why more complete reporting is required to gain a proper understanding of the progress of infection rates within these two groups of people.”
www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information-for-the-public#number-of-cases-and-deaths
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink: www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
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