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The Office for National Statistics (ONS) have released the latest figures from their COVID-19 Infection Survey.
Dr Daniel Lawson, Lecturer in Statistical Science, University of Bristol said:
“These national, randomised trials are a critical part of the UK COVID-19 monitoring and represent the least biased data source available. The problem is that when prevalence is low, good information on trends requires very large samples that we don’t have – the last data had only eight households out of 25,662 testing positive. The corresponding estimate of 1,700 infections per day is plausible given the 642 daily positive tests reported (on 9th July).
“The data show that prevalence is low, and modelling recent weeks data implies that is now stable, though we must remain vigilant against a rise. As testing capacity grows, some of that capacity should be reserved for larger statistical samples, especially if we hope to reduce the prevalence further.”
All our previous output on this subject can be seen at this weblink:
www.sciencemediacentre.org/tag/covid-19
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