Oh, and the figures are probably around 13000 higher than the 40000 who have officially died from COVID.* *To 1st May.
And the Brexit Party Chairman and another Tory MP (and a few right-wing journalists too) been breaking the rules
Most deaths reported on. Friday since bank holiday. R number creeping back above 1. Death total as per FT analysis creeping towards 70k. Not sure there is much good news.
**** the second spike, the first one hasn't finished yet. 357 more deaths registered in the last 24 hours. I think your brain is in lockdown.
If daily new infections are down what is the r number based on? Its impossible to know WHO passed on the virus to each person so it can't be calculated via that. Surely it must only be calculated via the number of new infections which a mathematical formula is used to compare to the previous day's infections and create a reproduction number.
Deaths are treated to new infections though. We could have had zero new infections in the last 3 weeks and still be seeing hundreds a day die.would that justify a lockdown?
We are not testing enough people and getting the results back quickly enough. China tested the entire population of Wuhan in 19 days (and found no significant cases) - that is 11million people in 19 days or nearly 3 times the number of *tests* the UK are claiming to perform.
Which begs the question even more of what is the r number actually based on? Or more to the point how wildly inaccurate is it?
This is my *guess*. It uses sampling techniques to estimate - same as political polling - so if you test 100000 people and 2000 are positive, you can scale it up to 66m and 132000 positive, but with some funky maths to make it more accurate. But it is still a model.
The R number is purely a estimate as far as I know. It would also stand to reason that if fewer people are actually testing positive the R number would fluctuate more on a smaller sample size.
I worry that we will limp through the summer with restrictions then the we may have a increase in cases through the winter months and lockdown again. Disaster.